23. The argument of assenting on first hearing, is upon a false supposition of no precedent teaching.
There is, I
fear, this further weakness in the foregoing argument, which would persuade us that therefore those maxims are to
be thought innate, which men admit at first hearing; because they assent to propositions which they are not taught,
nor do receive from the force of any argument or demonstration, but a bare explication or understanding of the
terms. Under which there seems to me to lie this fallacy, that men are supposed not to be taught nor to learn
anything de novo; when, in truth, they are taught, and do learn something they were ignorant of before. For, first,
it is evident that they have learned the terms, and their signification; neither of which was born with them. But this
is not all the acquired knowledge in the case: the ideas themselves, about which the proposition is, are not born
with them, no more than their names, but got afterwards. So that in all propositions that are assented to at first
hearing, the terms of the proposition, their standing for such ideas, and the ideas themselves that they stand for,
being neither of them innate, I would fain know what there is remaining in such propositions that is innate. For I
would gladly have any one name that proposition whose terms or ideas were either of them innate. We by degrees
get ideas and names, and learn their appropriated connexion one with another; and then to propositions made in
such terms, whose signification we have learnt, and wherein the agreement or disagreement we can perceive in
our ideas when put together is expressed, we at first hearing assent; though to other propositions, in themselves as
certain and evident, but which are concerning ideas not so soon or so easily got, we are at the same time no way
capable of assenting. For, though a child quickly assents to this proposition, "That an apple is not fire," when by
familiar acquaintance he has got the ideas of those two different things distinctly imprinted on his mind, and has
learnt that the names apple and fire stand for them; yet it will be some years after, perhaps, before the same child
will assent to this proposition, "That it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be"; because that, though
perhaps the words are as easy to be learnt, yet the signification of them being more large, comprehensive, and
abstract than of the names annexed to those sensible things the child hath to do with, it is longer before he learns
their precise meaning, and it requires more time plainly to form in his mind those general ideas they stand for. Till
that be done, you will in vain endeavour to make any child assent to a proposition made up of such general terms;
but as soon as ever he has got those ideas, and learned their names, he forwardly closes with the one as well as the
other of the forementioned propositions: and with both for the same reason; viz., because he finds the ideas he has
in his mind to agree or disagree, according as the words standing for them are affirmed or denied one of another in
the proposition. But if propositions be brought to him in words which stand for ideas he has not yet in his mind, to
such propositions, however evidently true or false in themselves, he affords neither assent nor dissent, but is
ignorant. For words being but empty sounds, any further than they are signs of our ideas, we cannot but assent to
them as they correspond to those ideas we have, but no further than that. But the showing by what steps and ways
knowledge comes into our minds; and the grounds of several degrees of assent, being the business of the
following Discourse, it may suffice to have only touched on it here, as one reason that made me doubt of those
innate principles.
