To call these ideas innate is to contradict experience, and even to ignore their nature. These acts cannot be performed if the object, which is the sensible representation be wanting; and this does not exist without an impression of the corporeal organs. To call these ideas innate, has then, either no meaning at all, or can mean nothing else than the pre-existence of the intellectual activity, subsequently developed in the presence of sensible intuitions. 202. Neither can those intuitive ideas, not referable to sensibility, such as are those we have when reflecting upon the acts of understanding and will, be innate. What in this case serves as the idea, is the very same act of the understanding or of the will which is presented to our perception in consciousness: to say, then, that these ideas are innate is equivalent to saying that these acts exist before they exist. Even when the perception does not refer to present acts, but to past acts now recollected, the argument retains the same force: for it can have no recollection of them if they have not previously existed, since our acts cannot exist before we have performed them. 203. Hence it may be inferred that no intuitive idea is innate, since intuition supposes an object presented to the faculty of perception. 204. General determinate ideas are those which refer to an intuition: they cannot, therefore, exist before it: and since, on the other hand, intuition is impossible without an act, it follows that these ideas cannot be innate. 205. Last of all remain general indeterminate ideas, that is to say, those which of themselves alone offer to the mind, nothing either existing or possible.[17] If we observe carefully the nature of these ideas, we shall see that they are nothing else than perceptions of one aspect of an object considered under a general reason. It cannot be doubted, that one of the characteristics of intelligence is the perception of these aspects; and it is no less indubitable, that it does not thence follow, that we must imagine these ideas to a kind of forms pre-existing in our mind, and distinct from the acts by which it exercises its perceptive faculty. We do not see what ground there can be for affirming these ideas to be innate, and to have lain hidden in our mind previously to the development of all activity, just like things stowed away in the corners of a museum, closed however to the curiosity of spectators. [17] See Ch. XXI.