one's principles can be questioned. If they may and ought to be
examined and tried, I desire to know how first and innate principles
can be tried; or at least it is reasonable to demand the MARKS and
CHARACTERS whereby the genuine innate principles may be distinguished
from others: that so, amidst the great variety of pretenders, I may be
kept from mistakes in so material a point as this. When this is done, I
shall be ready to embrace such welcome and useful propositions; and till
then I may with modesty doubt; since I fear universal consent, which is
the only one produced, will scarcely prove a sufficient mark to direct
my choice, and assure me of any innate principles.

From what has been said, I think it past doubt, that there are no
practical principles wherein all men agree; and therefore none innate.

CHAPTER III.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING INNATE PRINCIPLES, BOTH SPECULATIVE AND
PRACTICAL.

1. Principles not innate, unless their Ideas be innate

Had those who would persuade us that there are innate principles not
taken them together in gross, but considered separately the parts out of
which those propositions are made, they would not, perhaps, have been so
forward to believe they were innate. Since, if the IDEAS which made up
those truths were not, it was impossible that the PROPOSITIONS made up
of them should be innate, or our knowledge of them be born with us. For,
if the ideas be not innate, there was a time when the mind was without
those principles; and then they will not be innate, but be derived from
some other original. For, where the ideas themselves are not, there can
be no knowledge, no assent, no mental or verbal propositions about them.

2. Ideas, especially those belonging to Principles, not born with
children

If we will attentively consider new-born children, we shall have little
reason to think that they bring many ideas into the world with them.
For, bating perhaps some faint ideas of hunger, and thirst, and warmth,
and some pains, which they may have felt in the womb, there is not the
least appearance of any settled ideas at all in them; especially of
IDEAS ANSWERING THE TERMS WHICH MAKE UP THOSE UNIVERSAL PROPOSITIONS
THAT ARE ESTEEMED INNATE PRINCIPLES. One may perceive how, by degrees,
afterwards, ideas come into their minds; and that they get no more, nor
other, than what experience, and the observation of things that come in
their way, furnish them with; which might