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. 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 min