HKB
and as becomes his calling, to be watchful in such points, and to take the alarm even at expressions, which, standing alone by themselves, might sound ill and be suspected.
‘Tis to this zeal, allowable in his function, that I forgive his citing as he does these words of mine (ch. xxviii. sect. II): “Even the exhortations of inspired teachers have not feared to appeal to common repute, Philip, iv. 8;” without taking notice of those immediately preceding, which introduce them, and run thus: “Whereby even in the corruption of manners, the true boundaries of the law of nature, which ought to be the rule of virtue and vice, were pretty well preserved. So that even the exhortations of inspired teachers,” &c. By which words, and the rest of that section, it is plain that I brought that passage of St. Paul, not to prove that the general measure of what men called virtue and vice throughout the world was the reputation and fashion of each particular society within itself; but to show that, though it were so, yet, for reasons I there give, men, in that way of denominating their actions, did not for the most part much stray from the Law of Nature; which is that standing and unalterable rule by which they ought to judge of the moral rectitude and gravity of their actions, and accordingly denominate them virtues or vices. Had Mr. Lowde considered this, he would have found it little to his purpose to have quoted this passage in a sense I used it not; and would I imagine have spared the application he subjoins to it, as not very necessary. But I hope this Second Edition will give him satisfaction on the point, and that this matter is now so expressed as to show him there was no cause for scruple.
Though I am forced to differ from him in these apprehensions he has expressed, in the latter end of his preface, concerning what I had said about virtue and vice, yet we are better agreed than he thinks in what he says in his third chapter (p. 78) concerning “natural inscription and innate notions.” I shall not deny him the privilege he claims (p. 52), to state the question as he pleases, especially when he states it so as to leave nothing in it contrary to what I have said. For, according to him, “innate notions, being conditional things, depending upon the concurrence of several other circumstances in order to the soul’s exerting them,” all that he says for “innate, imprinted, impressed notions” (for of innate IDEAS he says nothing at all), amounts at last only to this—that there are certain propositions which, though the soul from the beginning, or when a man is born, does not know, yet “by assistance from the outward senses, and the help of some previous cultivation,” it may AFTERWARDS come certainly to know the truth of; which is no more than what I have affirmed in my First Book. For I suppose by the “soul’s exerting them,” he means its beginning to know them; or else the soul’s ‘exerting of notions’ will be to me a very unintelligible expression; and I think at best is a very unfit one in this, it misleading men’s thoughts by an insinuation, as if these notions were in the mind before the ‘soul exerts them,’ i. e. before they are known;—whereas truly before they are known, there is nothing of them in the mind but a capacity to know them, when the ‘concurrence of those circumstances,’ which this ingenious author thinks necessary ‘in order to the soul’s exerting them,’ brings them into our knowledge.