the Platonists were concerned, the Englishman was fighting with a shadow. Idiots, in any case, as imperfect and abnormal specimens of their kind, have nothing to do with the argument; and as to children, the things that sleep within them cannot, in the nature of things, be known till they grow up into full leafage and burst in perfect blossom. Inborn ideas are not the less inborn because they do not exist full-grown at the moment of birth. They did exist for ever in the original self-existent Divine mind; they do exist in the derived existence of the human mind the moment it awakens into consciousness of its individualism. In either case they are not acquired; they are possessed. Plato’s doctrine, therefore, was, that the germ of all human ideas lies in the human mind, and is developed from within, not derived from anything external. In this, there cannot be the slightest doubt that he spoke wisely; {277} as little that Mr. Locke wrote most unwisely, when, in accounting for the origin of our ideas, he said, “the senses at first let in particular ideas and furnish _the empty cabinet_.” Here we fall in with one of Mr. Locke’s short similes, which have proved more effective in spreading his doctrine than his diffuse and somewhat wearisome chapter. “One of the most common forms of fallacious reasoning,” says Mr. Mill, “is that of arguing from a metaphysical expression as if it were literal.”[277.1] This is precisely the error which seems to have run away with the wits of the sensation-philosophers, when they read Mr. Locke’s chapter on the Origin of Ideas. The mind was “an empty cabinet,”--if empty, it had merely a holding or containing power, before it was filled and furnished altogether and absolutely from without. But a single word will show the inadequacy and the utter falsity of this style of talking. The senses (as Plato long ago showed in the _Theætetus_) let in no _ideas_, they let in _impressions_, which the plastic power of mind elaborates into ideas; and again, the mind is in nowise like an empty cabinet, in which the senses hang up ready-painted pictures; but the mind, in so far as it creates ideas, and not merely experiences sensations, both paints the pictures and hangs them up, and this it does by an inherent divine power and divine right, of which no mere sensation can give any account. In fact there is nothing more hopeless than an attempt to explain the genesis of ideas, connected as it is with the miraculous fact of consciousness, by any sensuous process. It were much nearer the truth to adopt the strong language of a distinguished Scotch metaphysician, and say that {278} “man becomes an I or a conscious being, not in consequence of or even on occasion of his sensations, but actually in spite of them.”[278.1] The real fact of the matter is, as any one may observe in the reasonings of young persons, that in the formation of ideas the mind is active, not passive; and this distinction is strongly expressed in the very