2. Ideas, especially those belonging to principles, not born with children.
If we will attentively consider new-born
children, we shall have little reason to think that they bring many ideas into the world with them. For, bating
perhaps some faint ideas of hunger, and thirst, and warmth, and some pains, which they may have felt in the
womb, there is not the least appearance of any settled ideas at all in them; especially of ideas answering the terms
which make up those universal propositions that are esteemed innate principles. One may perceive how, by
degrees, afterwards, ideas come into their minds; and that they get no more, nor other, than what experience, and
the observation of things that come in their way, furnish them with; which might be enough to satisfy us that they
are not original characters stamped on the mind.
