Now in this sense I should desire to know what
can be meant by asserting that self-love, or resentment of
injuries, or the passion between the sexes is not innate?
"But admitting these terms, _impressions_ and _ideas_, in the
sense above explained, and understanding by _innate_ what is
original or copied from no precedent perception, then we may assert
that all our impressions are innate, and our ideas not innate."
It would seem that Hume did not think it worth while to acquire a
comprehension of the real points at issue in the controversy which he
thus carelessly dismisses.
Yet Descartes has defined what he means by innate ideas with so much
precision, that misconception ought to have been impossible. He says
that, when he speaks of an idea being "innate," he means that it exists
potentially in the mind, before it is actually called into existence by
whatever is its appropriate exciting cause.
"I have never either thought or said," he writes, "that the mind
has any need of innate ideas [_idees naturelles_] which are
anything distinct from its faculty of thinking. But it is true that
observing that there are certain thoughts which arise neither from
external objects nor from the determination of my will, but only
from my faculty of thinking; in order to mark the difference
between the ideas or the notions which are the forms of these
thoughts, and to distinguish them from the others, which may be
called extraneous or voluntary, I have called them innate.
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