[An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. by John Locke]@TWC D-Link bookAn Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. CHAPTER IX 3/11
So that wherever there is sense of perception, there some idea is actually produced, and present in the understanding. 5.
Children, though they may have Ideas in the Womb, have none innate. Therefore I doubt not but children, by the exercise of their senses about objects that affect them in the womb receive some few ideas before they are born, as the unavoidable effects, either of the bodies that environ them, or else of those wants or diseases they suffer; amongst which (if one may conjecture concerning things not very capable of examination) I think the ideas of hunger and warmth are two: which probably are some of the first that children have, and which they scarce ever part with again. 6.
The effects of Sensation in the womb. But though it be reasonable to imagine that children receive some ideas before they come into the world, yet these simple ideas are far from those INNATE PRINCIPLES which some contend for, and we, above, have rejected.
These here mentioned, being the effects of sensation, are only from some affections of the body, which happen to them there, and so depend on something exterior to the mind; no otherwise differing in their manner of production from other ideas derived from sense, but only in the precedency of time.
Whereas those innate principles are supposed to be quite of another nature; not coming into the mind by any accidental alterations in, or operations on the body; but, as it were, original characters impressed upon it, in the very first moment of its being and constitution. 7.
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