I do not know that Mr. Locke has sufficiently distinguished between two things which I cannot very well express otherwise than by a turn of words, namely, an innate knowledge of principles, and innate principles of knowledge. His arguments seem to me conclusive against the one, but not against the other, for I think that there are certain general principles or forms of thinking, something like the moulds in which any thing is cast, according to which our ideas follow one another in a certain order, though the knowledge, _i.e._, perception of what these principles are, and the forming them into distinct propositions is the result of experience. It is true, the child distinguishes between its nurse and the blackamoor, between bitter and sweet: what hinders it from confounding them? The ideas of _same_ and _different_ are not included in these ideas themselves, nor are they peculiar to any of them, but general terms. What then determines the child to annex them uniformly to certain things and not to others? It is plain then, that our ideas are not at liberty to run into clusters as they please or as it happens, but are regulated by certain laws, to which they must conform; or that the manner in which we conceive of things does not depend simply on the particular nature of the things, but on the general nature of the understanding. Mr. Locke is clear for certain innate practical principles or general tendencies regulating all our actions, namely, the love of pleasure, and aversion to pain. He does not however admit, as I can find, of any thing similar to the operations of the understanding. The analogy, notwithstanding, holds exactly the same in both cases. For the child is no more conscious of any such general practical principle regulating all his desires, than of any speculative principle regulating his notion of things: he gets the idea of both from experience of their effects; but I think that if there were no such principles in the mind itself, previous to the actual impression of objects, and merely developed or called into action by them, we must be perfectly indifferent both to the reception of pleasure and pain, as we should feel no more repugnance to admit one conclusion than another, however absurd or contradictory. The necessity we are under of perceiving certain agreements or disagreements between our ideas is as much, and in the same sense, the foundation of judgment and reasoning, as the general desire of happiness and aversion to misery is the foundation of morality.