14. Those who maintain innate practical principles tell us not what they are.
The difference there is amongst men
in their practical principles is so evident that I think I need say no more to evince, that it will be impossible to find
any innate moral rules by this mark of general assent; and it is enough to make one suspect that the supposition of
such innate principles is but an opinion taken up at pleasure; since those who talk so confidently of them are so
sparing to tell us which they are. This might with justice be expected from those men who lay stress upon this
opinion; and it gives occasion to distrust either their knowledge or charity, who, declaring that God has imprinted
on the minds of men the foundations of knowledge and the rules of living, are yet so little favourable to the
information of their neighbours, or the quiet of mankind, as not to point out to them which they are, in the variety
men are distracted with. But, in truth, were there any such innate principles there would be no need to teach them.
Did men find such innate propositions stamped on their minds, they would easily be able to distinguish them from
other truths that they afterwards learned and deduced from them; and there would be nothing more easy than to
know what, and how many, they were. There could be no more doubt about their number than there is about the
number of our fingers; and it is like then every system would be ready to give them us by tale. But since nobody,
that I know, has ventured yet to give a catalogue of them, they cannot blame those who doubt of these innate
principles; since even they who require men to believe that there are such innate propositions, do not tell us what
they are. It is easy to foresee, that if different men of different sects should go about to give us a list of those
innate practical principles, they would set down only such as suited their distinct hypotheses, and were fit to
support the doctrines of their particular schools or churches; a plain evidence that there are no such innate truths.
Nay, a great part of men are so far from finding any such innate moral principles in themselves, that, by denying
freedom to mankind, and thereby making men no other than bare machines, they take away not only innate, but all
moral rules whatsoever, and leave not a possibility to believe any such, to those who cannot conceive how
anything can be capable of a law that is not a free agent. And upon that ground they must necessarily reject all
principles of virtue, who cannot put morality and mechanism together, which are not very easy to be reconciled or
made consistent.
