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.
