[An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. by John Locke]@TWC D-Link bookAn Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. CHAPTER III 5/30
I am sure it has as good a title as any to be thought so; which yet nobody can think it to be, when he considers the ideas it comprehends in it, WHOLE and PART, are perfectly relative; but the positive ideas to which they properly and immediately belong are extension and number, of which alone whole and part are relations.
So that if whole and part are innate ideas, extension and number must be so too; it being impossible to have an idea of a relation, without having any at all of the thing to which it belongs, and in which it is founded. Now, whether the minds of men have naturally imprinted on them the ideas of extension and number, I leave to be considered by those who are the patrons of innate principles. 7.
Idea of Worship not innate. That GOD IS TO BE WORSHIPPED, is, without doubt, as great a truth as any that can enter into the mind of man, and deserves the first place amongst all practical principles.
But yet it can by no means be thought innate, unless the ideas of GOD and WORSHIP are innate.
That the idea the term worship stands for is not in the understanding of children, and a character stamped on the mind in its first original, I think will be easily granted, by any one that considers how few there be amongst grown men who have a clear and distinct notion of it.
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