Stony Brook University

arguments on innateness, we discover the two main divisions of Leibniz’s practical
philosophy and place them in proper relation to each other. I also suggest a way for
Leibniz to combine principles of sense and reason in an account of virtue. To understand
these positions, it is best to understand them as responses to Locke; therefore, we will
begin with a brief exposition of Locke’s rejection of innate practical principles in his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Section 2: Locke on innate speculative and practical principles
Locke’s Essay begins with a host of arguments against both innate speculative
principles and innate practical principles. I focus mostly on his arguments against innate
practical principles, but a few points on innate speculative principles should be
mentioned. Locke primarily understands an innate speculative principle to be something
like the mathematician’s koinai ennoiai, or “characters stamped on the mind of man;
which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it” (E
1.1.1). 4 These characters are assumed to form propositions, specifically, indemonstrable
“principles of demonstration” such as the principles of identity and contradiction. 5 Locke
does not deny the truth of these speculative principles, but claims their universality (both
their validity and their being universally assented to as true) derives from their selfevidence,
not from their innateness. 6 Locke also asserts that any knowledge said to
depend necessarily on speculative principles can be attained by the exercise of our
“natural faculties”; and that natural faculties do not require innate propositions, ideas, or
characters, any more than the eye requires ideas of color in order to see (E 1.1.1). The
point is that just as we do not require ideas of colors in order to see, neither do we require
innate ideas in order to recognize that the principle of identity is true.
Locke rejects innate speculative principles also on the ground that most of us have
no conscious knowledge (conscious awareness) of them. If they were innate, then we
would expect them to be among the first items of explicit, conscious, knowledge. But
since they are not known initially, they must be learned, and thus are not innate—indeed;
they are learned by abstraction through experience. 7 But Locke’s most frequent objection,
one which Leibniz will just as often deny, is this: it is “hardly intelligible” to suppose that
innate principles are imprinted on the mind, without the mind or soul consciously
perceiving them. That is, there are no unlearned propositions. “No proposition can be said
to be in the mind which it never yet knew, which it was never yet conscious of” (E 1.1.5).
4
I cite Locke directly from his English text, rather than translate Leibniz’s (or Coste’s) French version of
Locke back into English. Discrepancies will be noted.
5
Respectively, “‘[W]hatsoever is, is,’ and ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’” (E
1.1.4).
6
Locke distinguishes among three kinds of knowledge: intuitive or self-evident knowledge, demonstrative
knowledge, and sensitive knowledge. Self-evidence replaces the role of innate knowledge, for Locke. (See
Essay Book 4 Chapter 1 and Woolhouse (1994). Locke commentators (e.g., Fraser) often remark that
Locke does not sufficiently explain how such self-evident speculative principles are grasped by the mind,
nor how the mind’s “operations” said to grasp them are able to perceive their self-evidence. Also see John
Harris (1977).
7
Locke provides some explanation of how this abstraction works: “The senses at first let in particular
ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet, and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they
are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards, the mind proceeding further abstracts them,
and by degrees learns the use of general names” (E 1.1.15).
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