ill, having for a good while
exercised their reason about familiar and more particular ideas, they
are, by their ordinary discourse and actions with others, acknowledged
to be capable of rational conversation. If assenting to these maxims,
when men come to the use of reason, can be true in any other sense, I
desire it may be shown; or at least, how in this, or any other sense,
it proves them innate.

15. The Steps by which the Mind attains several Truths.

The senses at first let in PARTICULAR ideas, and furnish the yet empty
cabinet, and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them,
they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards, the
mind proceeding further, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use
of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with
ideas and language, the MATERIALS about which to exercise its discursive
faculty. And the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these
materials that give it employment increase. But though the having of
general ideas and the use of general words and reason usually grow
together, yet I see not how this any way proves them innate. The
knowledge of some truths, I confess, is very early in the mind; but in a
way that shows them not to be innate. For, if we will observe, we shall
find it still to be about ideas, not innate, but acquired; it being
about those first which are imprinted by external things, with which
infants have earliest to do, which make the most frequent impressions on
their senses. In ideas thus got, the mind discovers that some agree and
others differ, probably as soon as it has any use of memory; as soon as
it is able to retain and perceive distinct ideas. But whether it be then
or no, this is certain, it does so long before it has the use of words;
or comes to that which we commonly call "the use of reason." For a child
knows as certainly before it can speak the difference between the
ideas of sweet and bitter (i.e. that sweet is not bitter), as it knows
afterwards (when it comes to speak) that wormwood and sugarplums are not
the same thing.

16. Assent to supposed innate truths depends on having clear and
distinct ideas of what their terms mean, and not on their innateness.

A child knows not that three and four are equal to seven, till he comes
to be able to count seven, and has got the name and idea of equality;
and then, upon explaining those words, he presently assents to, or
rather percei