8.  Conscience no Proof of any innate Moral Rule.

To which I answer, that I doubt not but, without being written on their hearts, many men may, by the same way that they come to the knowledge of other things, come to assent to several moral rules, and be convinced of their obligation.  Others also may come to be of the same mind, from their education, company, and customs of their country; which persuasion, however got, will serve to set conscience on work; which is nothing else but our own opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude or gravity of our own actions; and if conscience be a proof of innate principles, contraries may be innate principles; since some men with the same bent of conscience prosecute what others avoid.

9.  Instances of Enormities practised without Remorse.

But I cannot see how any men should ever transgress those moral rules, with confidence and serenity, were they innate, and stamped upon their minds.  View but an army at the sacking of a town, and see what observation or sense of moral principles, or what touch of conscience for all the outrages they do.  Robberies, murders, rapes, are the sports of men set at liberty from punishment and censure.  Have there not been whole nations, and those of the most civilized people, amongst whom the exposing their children, and leaving them in the fields to perish by want or wild beasts has been the practice; as little condemned or scrupled as the begetting them?  Do they not still, in some countries, put them into the same graves with their mothers, if they die in childbirth; or despatch them, if a pretended astrologer declares them to have unhappy stars?  And are there not places where, at a certain age, they kill or expose their parents, without any remorse at all?  In a part of Asia, the sick, when their case comes to be thought desperate, are carried out and laid on the earth before they are dead; and left there, exposed to wind and weather, to perish without assistance or pity.  It is familiar among the Mingrelians, a people professing Christianity, to bury their children alive without scruple.  There are places where they eat their own children.  The Caribbees were wont to geld their children, on purpose to fat and eat them.  And Garcilasso de la Vega tells us of a people in Peru which were wont to fat and eat the children they got on their female captives, whom they kept as concubines for that purpose, and when they were past breeding, the mothers themselves were killed too and eaten.  The virtues whereby the Tououpinambos believed they merited paradise, were revenge, and eating abundance of their enemies.  They have not so much as a name for God, and have no religion, no worship.  The saints who are canonized amongst the Turks, lead lives which one cannot with modesty relate.  A remarkable passage to this purpose, out of the voyage of Baumgarten, which is a book not every day to be met with, I shall set down at large, in the language it is published in.