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As a last example, it may be said that the mind's certain conviction of the innateness of some of its ideas resembles those illusions of memory which arise through an inability to think ourselves back into a remote past having a type of consciousness widely unlike that of the present. But now, mark the difference.
The unconscious or minute ideas, which in noëtics had served to break the force of Locke's objections against the innateness of the principles of reason, are in ethics brought into the field against indeterminism. They are involved whenever we believe ourselves to act without cause, from pure choice, or contrary to the motives present.
But the innateness of all truly moral qualities, of the good as of the bad, is a doctrine that consorts better with the metempsychosis of the Brahmins and Buddhists, according to which a man's good and bad deeds follow him from one existence to another like his shadow, than with Judaism.
Whence, then, comes this persistent and in some respects seductive idea that creation is an instinctive result? Because a happy invention has characteristics that evidently relate it to instinctive activity in the strict sense of the word. First, precocity, of which we shall later give numerous examples, and which resembles the innateness of instinct.
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 perceives the truth of that proposition.
Not only so, but this purer kind of innateness must often be helped out to some extent in some children by stimulating reflexes; a rich and wide repertory of sensation must be made familiar; more or less and very guarded, watched and limited experiences of hunger, thirst, cold, heat, tastes, sounds, smells, colors, brightnesses, tactile irritations, and perhaps even occasional tickling and pain to play off the vastly complex function of laughing, crying, etc., may in some cases be judicious.
To deny the innateness of ideas was roundly asserted to be materialism and atheism. As he was known to be a friend of Diderot, and was suspected of being the writer of articles on theology in the Encyclopædia, the design of the Jesuit cabal in ruining De Prades was to discredit the new undertaking, and to induce the government to prohibit it.
The same credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood, of gold, of filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the name... why, in the name of the very same shams that Aristophanes jeered at two thousand years ago, the same coarse snares in which the many-headed beast, the multitude, is caught so easily, the same workings of power, the same traditions of slavishness, the same innateness of falsehood in a word, the same busy squirrel's turning in the same old unchanged wheel.... Again Shakespeare would set Lear repeating his cruel: 'None doth offend, which in other words means: 'None is without offence. and he too would say 'enough! he too would turn away.
"Hence it is less difficult than is generally supposed, to conceive how intelligence may become instinct; we might even say that, leaving out of consideration the character of innateness, to which we will return, we have seen the metamorphosis take place.
Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read between their lines long enough, I now say to myself that the greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the instinctive functions, and it is so even in the case of philosophical thinking; one has here to learn anew, as one learned anew about heredity and "innateness."
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