9. It is false that reason discovers them.
But how can these men think the use of reason necessary to discover
principles that are supposed innate, when reason (if we may believe them) 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.
