But I
have used this term in the same sense as when we say that
generosity is innate in certain families; or that certain maladies,
such as gout or gravel, are innate in others; not that children
born in these families are troubled with such diseases in their
mother's womb; but because they are born with the disposition or
the faculty of contracting them."[22]
His troublesome disciple, Regius, having asserted that all our ideas
come from observation or tradition, Descartes remarks:--
"So thoroughly erroneous is this assertion, that whoever has a
proper comprehension of the action of our senses, and understands
precisely the nature of that which is transmitted by them to our
thinking faculty, will rather affirm that no ideas of things, such
as are formed in thought, are brought to us by the senses, so that
there is nothing in our ideas which is other than innate in the
mind (_naturel a l'esprit_), or in the faculty of thinking, if only
certain circumstances are excepted, which belong only to
experience. For example, it is experience alone which causes us to
judge that such and such ideas, now present in our minds, are
related to certain things which are external to us; not in truth,
that they have been sent into our mind by these things, such as
they are, by the organs of the senses; but because these organs
have transmitted something which has occasioned the mind, in virtue
of its innate power, to form them at this time rather than at
another.
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