By innate idea, Descartes meant merely a mental modification which, existing in the mind antecedently to all experience, possesses, however, only a potential existence, until, on occasion of experience, it is called forth into actual consciousness.
It is worthy of remark, in connection with the question of innate ideas, that the chief ground on which Descartes holds that certain of our judgments are prior to experience and native to the mind, is the impossibility of deriving them as universal from individual corporeal movements, which, if efficient, could give rise to modifications merely individual.
It will be seen, however, from the passages quoted below, and from a comparison of them with the passage quoted at pp. 198, 199, of these notes, that Descartes held a much wider doctrine of innate ideas than the modern, and one the principle of which could not fail sooner or later to result in the doctrine of Occasional Causes, to explain the connection between the corporeal antecedent, which had no causal power, and the rise of the mental modification into actual consciousness.
The following is the article (XII) in the Programme of Regius which gave occasion to Descartes to make an explicit statement of his doctrine of innate ideas.
“Mens,” says Regius, “non indiget ideis, vel notionibus, vel axiomatibus innatis: sed sola ejus facultas cogitandi, ipsi, ad actiones suas peragendas, sufficit.” On this Descartes remarks: “In this article he (Regius) appears to differ from me merely in words; for when he says that the mind has no need of ideas, or notions, or axioms that are innate [or naturally impressed upon it], and meanwhile concedes to it a faculty of thinking (that is, a faculty natural to it or innate), he affirms my doctrine in effect, though denying it in word. For I have never either said or thought that the mind has need of innate (natural) ideas, which are anything different from its faculty of thinking; but when I remarked that there were in me certain thoughts which did not proceed from external objects, nor from the determination of my will, but from the faculty of thinking alone which is in me, that I might distinguish the notions or ideas, which are the forms of these thoughts, from others adventitious or factitious, I called them innate in the same sense In which we say that generosity is innate in certain families, in others certain diseases, as gout or gravel, not that, therefore, the infants of those families labour under those diseases in the womb of the mother, but because they are born with a certain disposition or faculty of contracting them.”
Again, on art. XIII, he says—“What supposition is more absurd than that all the common notions which are in the mind arise from these corporeal motions, and cannot exist without them? I should wish our author to show me what that corporeal movement is which can form any common notion in our mind; for example—that the things which are the same with a third are the same with each other, or the like. For all those motions are particular; but these notions are universal, and possess no affinity with motions, nor any relation to them.”
“He (Regius) proceeds, in article XIV, to affirm that the very idea of God which is in us arises not from our faculty of thinking, in which it is innate, but from divine revelation, or tradition, or the observation of things. We shall easily discover the error of this assertion, if we consider that a thing can be said to be from another, either because that other is its proximate and primary cause, or because it is simply the remote and accidental, which, in truth, gives occasion to the primary to produce its own effect at one time rather than at another. Thus, all workmen are the primary and proximate causes of their own works; but they who commission them, or offer payment for the execution of the works, are the accidental and remote causes, because the works would not perhaps have been done without the order. It cannot be doubted but that tradition or the observation of things is the remote cause, inviting us to attend to the idea of God which we possess, and to exhibit it in presence to our thought. But that it is the proximate cause (effectrix) of that idea can be alleged only by one who holds that we can know nothing of God beyond the word God, or the corporeal figure exhibited to us by painters in their representations of God. Inasmuch as observation, if it be of sight, presents nothing of its own proper power to the mind except pictures, and pictures whose whole variety is determined solely by that of certain corporeal movements, as our author himself teaches; if it be of hearing, observation presents nothing but words and sounds; if of the other senses, it presents nothing that can be related to God. And, indeed, it is manifest to every one that sight properly and by itself presents nothing except pictures, and hearing nothing but words or sounds; so that all which we think beyond these words or pictures, as the significates of them, are represented to us by ideas coming from no other source than our faculty of thinking, and therefore natural to it; that is, always existing in us in power. For to be in any faculty is not to be in act but in power only, because the very word faculty designates nothing but power.”—Lett. XXXVIII, Garnier’s ed. tom. IV. Not. in Prog. Latin (1670), p. 175.
“On the celebrated question (says De la Forge) as to whether the ideas of the mind are
