ds, light at first on these
observations, and reduce them into general propositions: not innate but
collected from a preceding acquaintance and reflection on particular
instances. These, when observing men have made them, unobserving men,
when they are proposed to them cannot refuse their assent to.

22. Implicitly known before proposing, signifies that the Mind is
capable of understanding them, or else signifies nothing.

If it be said, the understanding hath an IMPLICIT knowledge of these
principles, but not an EXPLICIT, before this first hearing (as they
must who will say "that they are in the understanding before they are
known,") it will be hard to conceive what is meant by a principle
imprinted on the understanding implicitly, unless it be this,--that
the mind is capable of understanding and assenting firmly to such
propositions. And thus all mathematical demonstrations, as well as first
principles, must be received as native impressions on the mind; which
I fear they will scarce allow them to be, who find it harder to
demonstrate a proposition than assent to it when demonstrated. And few
mathematicians will be forward to believe, that all the diagrams they
have drawn were but copies of those innate characters which nature had
engraven upon their minds.

23. The Argument of assenting on first hearing, is upon a false
supposition of no precedent teaching.

There is, I fear, this further weakness in the foregoing argument, which
would persuade us that therefore those maxims are to be thought innate,
which men admit at first hearing; because they assent to propositions
which they are not taught, nor do receive from the force of any argument
or demonstration, but a bare explication or understanding of the terms.
Under which there seems to me to lie this fallacy, that men are supposed
not to be taught nor to learn anything DE NOVO; when, in truth, they are
taught, and do learn something they were ignorant of before. For, first,
it is evident that they have learned the terms, and their signification;
neither of which was born with them. But this is not all the acquired
knowledge in the case: the ideas themselves, about which the proposition
is, are not born with them, no more than their names, but got
afterwards. So that in all propositions that are assented to at first
hearing, the terms of the proposition, their standing for such ideas,
and the ideas themselves that they stand for, being neither of them
innate