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why does we believe in innate ideas?

           I always did and still do accept the innate idea ofGod,which Descartes upheld, and thus accept other innate ideas that couldn’t come to us from the senses. Now the new system takes me even further. As you’ll see later on, I think that all the thoughts and actions of our soul come from its own depths and couldn’t be given to it by the senses! But in the meantime I’ll set that aside and conform to accepted ways of speaking which purport to distinguish mental content that does come through the senses from mental content that doesn’t·. These ways of speaking are sound and justifiable:the outer senses can be said to be, in a certain sense, partial causes of our thoughts. So I’ll work within the common framework, speaking of "how the body acts on the soul", in the spirit in which Copernicans quite justifiably join other men in talking about ‘how the sun moves’; and I shall look into why, even within this framework , one should say that there are some ideas and principles that we find ourselves to have though we didn’t form them, and that didn’t reach us through the senses though the senses bring them to our awareness. I suppose that Locke has been made hostile to the doctrine of innate principles because he has noticed that people often use the label ‘innate principles’ as a cover for their prejudices, wanting to save themselves the trouble of discussing them. He will have wanted to fight the laziness and shallowness of those who use the pretext of‘innate ideas and truths, naturally engraved on the mind and easily agreed to to avoid serious inquiry into where our items of knowledge come from, how they are connected, and what certainty they have. I’m entirely on his side about that, and I would go even further. I would like no limits to be set to our analysis, definitions to be given of all terms that are capable of being defined, and demonstrations—or the means for them—to be provided for all non-basic axioms, without reference to men’s opinions about them and without caring whether men agree to them or not.This would be more useful than might be thought. But it seems that Locke’s praiseworthy zeal has carried him too far in another direction. I don’t think he has adequately distinguished the origin of necessary truths from that of truths of fact; the source of the former is in the understanding, whereas the latter are drawn from sense-experience and even from confused perceptions within us. So you see that I don’t accept what you lay down as a fact, namely that we could acquire all our knowledge without the need of innate impressions. We shall see which of us is right.

Leibniz, New essay concerning human understanding (1704)

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