The philosophy against which Locke argues is, that there exist “certain innate principles, primary notions, κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι, characters, as it were, stamped on the mind, which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it”--(i. 2.) And the assertion of the belief in these innate ideas, he afterwards indicates to have approved itself “a {275} short and easy way for lazy people, and of no small advantage for those who affect to be masters and teachers. Nor is it a small power it gives one man over another to have the authority to be the dictator of principles, and teacher of unquestionable truth, and to make men swallow that for an innate principle which may serve his purpose who teacheth them”--(i. 4. 24.) From these words it is plain that Locke protested against the doctrine of innate ideas, in the same spirit, and with the same object, that Luther did against the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope; his mission, he considered, was to rouse reason from its lethargy, and to teach men to think with open eyes, not blindly to believe; and, in so far as he meant this, the mission of the philosophical, as of the religious reformer, was unquestionably right. But, as above remarked, in making this protest, he was fighting against the language of Plato without knowing, or, so far as we can see, ever attempting to know the ideas of Plato. This will be more manifest from the arguments which he uses. “If there be such innate principles,” says he, “it is strange that children and idiots have no apprehension of them; children do not join general abstract speculations with their sucking bottles and rattles”--(i. 2.) “If we attentively consider young children, we shall have little reason to think that they bring many ideas into the world with them”--(i. 4. 2.) These are Mr. Locke’s words, and they certainly indicate a conception of the doctrine of innate ideas the most crass and crude that could well be conceived. Assuredly neither the Athenian, nor the Alexandrian, nor the Florentine Platonists, ever dreamt of anything so absurd. Surely Plato knew that children {276} did not march into the world with Euclid’s axioms in their mouth, nor did he believe that even a miraculous baby, like himself, came out of his mother’s womb armed cap-à-pie with all the principles of the ideal philosophy, like Pallas Athena out of the head of Jove. What Plato actually said was, that everything was what it grew to be by virtue of a divine type, which lay in the germ, and which type was the expression of an energizing thought in the Divine mind; and this type, form, or idea (εἶδος), he called innate, because it was possessed originally as part of the internal constitution of the thing, not acquired from without. Who the men were who in Locke’s day or before him, maintained the existence of ready-made, panoplied, and full-grown ideas in the minds of idiots and babies, I do not know; but, so far as