them clearest in children and in persons wholly illiterate.  He grants that there are many opinions, received by men of different countries, educations, and tempers, and held as unquestionable first principles; but then the absurdity of some, and the mutual contradiction of others, make it impossible that they should be all true.  Yet it will often happen that these men will sooner part with their lives, than suffer the truth of their opinions to be questioned.

We can see from our experience how the belief in principles grows up.  Doctrines, with no better original than the superstition of a nurse, or the authority of an old woman, may in course of time, and by the concurrence of neighbours, grow up to the dignity of first truths in Religion and in Morality.  Persons matured under those influences, and, looking into their own minds, find nothing anterior to the opinions taught them before they kept a record of themselves; they, therefore, without scruple, conclude that those propositions whose origin they cannot trace are the impress of God and nature upon their minds.  Such a result is unavoidable in the circumstances of the bulk of mankind, who require some foundation of principles to rest upon, and have no means of obtaining them but on trust from others. Custom is it greater power than Nature, and, while we are yet young, seldom fails to make us worship as divine what she has inured us to; nor is it to be wondered at, that, when we come to mature life, and are engrossed with quite different matters, we are indisposed to sit down and examine all our received tenets, to find ourselves in the wrong, to run counter to the opinions of our country or party, and to be branded with such epithets as whimsical, sceptical, Atheist.  It is inevitable that we should take up at first borrowed principles; and unless we have all the faculties and the means of searching into their foundations, we naturally go on to the end as we have begun.

In the following chapter (IV.), he argues the general question of Innate Ideas in the case of the Idea of God.

In Book II., Chap.  XXI., Locke discusses the freedom of the will, with some allusions to the nature of happiness and the causes of wrong conduct.  Happiness is the utmost pleasure we are capable of, misery the utmost pain; pleasure and pain define Good and Evil.  In practice, we are chiefly occupied in getting rid of troubles; absent good does not much move us.  All uneasiness being removed, a moderate portion of good contents us; and some few degrees of pleasure in a succession of ordinary enjoyments are enough to make happiness. [Epicurus, and others among the ancients, said as much.]

Men have wrong desires, and do wrong acts, but it is from wrong judgments.  They never mistake a present pleasure or pain; they always act correctly upon that.  They are the victims of deceitful appearances; they make wrong judgments in comparing present with future pains, such is the weakness of the mind’s constitution in this department.  Our wrong judgments proceed partly from ignorance and partly from inadvertence, and our preference of vice to virtue is accounted for by these wrong judgments.