) is nothing else but the faculty of deducing unknown truths from
principles or propositions that are already known? That certainly can
never be thought innate which we have need of reason to discover;
unless, as I have said, we will have all the certain truths that reason
ever teaches us, to be innate. We may as well think the use of reason
necessary to make our eyes discover visible objects, as that there
should be need of reason, or the exercise thereof, to make the
understanding see what is originally engraven on it, and cannot be in
the understanding before it be perceived by it. So that to make reason
discover those truths thus imprinted, is to say, that the use of reason
discovers to a man what he knew before: and if men have those innate
impressed truths originally, and before the use of reason, and yet are
always ignorant of them till they come to the use of reason, it is in
effect to say, that men know and know them not at the same time.

10. No use made of reasoning in the discovery of these two maxims.

It will here perhaps be said that mathematical demonstrations, and other
truths that are not innate, are not assented to as soon as proposed,
wherein they are distinguished from these maxims and other innate
truths. I shall have occasion to speak of assent upon the first
proposing, more particularly by and by. I shall here only, and that very
readily, allow, that these maxims and mathematical demonstrations are in
this different: that the one have need of reason, using of proofs,
to make them out and to gain our assent; but the other, as soon as
understood, are, without any the least reasoning, embraced and assented
to. But I withal beg leave to observe, that it lays open the weakness of
this subterfuge, which requires the use of reason for the discovery of
these general truths: since it must be confessed that in their discovery
there is no use made of reasoning at all. And I think those who give
this answer will not be forward to affirm that the knowledge of this
maxim, "That it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be,"
is a deduction of our reason. For this would be to destroy that bounty
of nature they seem so fond of, whilst they make the knowledge of those
principles to depend on the labour of our thoughts. For all reasoning is
search, and casting about, and requires pains and application. And how
can it with any tolerable sense be supposed, that what was imprinted by
nature, as the founda