though it were
so, yet, for reasons I there give, men, in that way of denominating
their actions, did not for the most part much stray from the Law of
Nature; which is that standing and unalterable rule by which they ought
to judge of the moral rectitude and gravity of their actions, and
accordingly denominate them virtues or vices. Had Mr. Lowde considered
this, he would have found it little to his purpose to have quoted this
passage in a sense I used it not; and would I imagine have spared the
application he subjoins to it, as not very necessary. But I hope this
Second Edition will give him satisfaction on the point, and that this
matter is now so expressed as to show him there was no cause for
scruple.

Though I am forced to differ from him in these apprehensions he has
expressed, in the latter end of his preface, concerning what I had said
about virtue and vice, yet we are better agreed than he thinks in what
he says in his third chapter (p. 78) concerning "natural inscription and
innate notions." I shall not deny him the privilege he claims (p. 52),
to state the question as he pleases, especially when he states it so as
to leave nothing in it contrary to what I have said. For, according
to him, "innate notions, being conditional things, depending upon the
concurrence of several other circumstances in order to the soul's
exerting them," all that he says for "innate, imprinted, impressed
notions" (for of innate IDEAS he says nothing at all), amounts at last
only to this--that there are certain propositions which, though the
soul from the beginning, or when a man is born, does not know, yet
"by assistance from the outward senses, and the help of some previous
cultivation," it may AFTERWARDS come certainly to know the truth of;
which is no more than what I have affirmed in my First Book. For I
suppose by the "soul's exerting them," he means its beginning to know
them; or else the soul's 'exerting of notions' will be to me a very
unintelligible expression; and I think at best is a very unfit one
in this, it misleading men's thoughts by an insinuation, as if these
notions were in the mind before the 'soul exerts them,' i. e. before
they are known;--whereas truly before they are known, there is nothing
of them in the mind but a capacity to know them, when the 'concurrence
of those circumstances,' which this ingenious author thinks necessary
'in order to the soul's exerting them,' brings them into our knowledge.

P. 52