28.  Recapitulation.

I know not how absurd this may seem to the masters of demonstration.  And probably it will hardly go down with anybody at first hearing.  I must therefore beg a little truce with prejudice, and the forbearance of censure, till I have been heard out in the sequel of this Discourse, being very willing to submit to better judgments.  And since I impartially search after truth, I shall not be sorry to be convinced, that I have been too fond of my own notions; which I confess we are all apt to be, when application and study have warmed our heads with them.

Upon the whole matter, I cannot see any ground to think these two speculative Maxims innate:  since they are not universally assented to; and the assent they so generally find is no other than what several propositions, not allowed to be innate, equally partake in with them:  and since the assent that is given them is produced another way, and comes not from natural inscription, as I doubt not but to make appear in the following Discourse.  And if these “first principles” of knowledge and science are found not to be innate, no other speculative maxims can (I suppose), with better right pretend to be so.

CHAPTER II.

NO INNATE PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES

1.  No moral Principles so clear and so generally received as the forementioned speculative Maxims.

If those speculative Maxims, whereof we discoursed in the foregoing chapter, have not an actual universal assent from all mankind, as we there proved, it is much more visible concerning practical Principles, that they come short of an universal reception:  and I think it will be hard to instance any one moral rule which can pretend to so general and ready an assent as, “What is, is”; or to be so manifest a truth as this, that “It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be.”  Whereby it is evident that they are further removed from a title to be innate; and the doubt of their being native impressions on the mind is stronger against those moral principles than the other.  Not that it brings their truth at all in question.  They are equally true, though not equally evident.  Those speculative maxims carry their own evidence with them:  but moral principles require reasoning and discourse, and some exercise of the mind, to discover the certainty of their truth.  They lie not open as natural characters engraved on the mind; which, if any such were, they must needs be visible by themselves, and by their own light be certain and known to everybody.  But this is no derogation to their truth and certainty; no more than it is to the truth or certainty of the three angles of a triangle being equal to two right ones because it is not so evident as “the whole is bigger than a part,” nor so apt to be assented to at first hearing.  It may suffice that these moral rules are capable of demonstration:  and therefore it is our own faults if we come not to a certain knowledge of them.  But the ignorance wherein many men are of them, and the slowness of assent wherewith others receive them, are manifest proofs that they are not innate, and such as offer themselves to their view without searching.