Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Nouveaux Essais sur l'entendement humain [New Essays on Human Understanding]

Amsterdam and Leipzig

Chez Jean Schreuder

1765

"I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as opposed to an entirely homogenous block of marble, or to a blank tablet--what the philosophers call a tabula rasa"

[...] In view of this, can it be denied that there is a great deal that is innate in our minds, since we are innate to ourselves, so to speak, and since we include Being, Unity, Substance, Duration, Change, Action, Perception, Pleasure, and hosts of other objects of our intellectual ideas? And since these objects are immediately related to our understanding and always present to it (although our distractions and needs prevent our being always aware of them), is it any wonder that we say that these ideas, along with what depends on them, are innate in us? I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as opposed to an entirely homogenous block of marble, or to a blank tablet--what the philosophers call a tabula rasa. For if the soul were like such a blank tablet then truths would be in us as as the shape of Hercules is in a piece of marble when the marble is entirely neutral as to whether it assumes this shape or some other. However, if there were veins in the block of which marked out the shape of Hercules rather than other shapes, then that block would be more determined to that shape and required to expose the veins and to polish them into clarity, removing everything that prevents their being seen. This is how ideas and truths are innate in us--as inclinations, dispositions, tendencies, or natural potentialities, and not as actualities; although these potentialities are always accompanied by certain actualities, often insensible ones, which correspond to them.
(51-2)

Mineral::Marble::Veined Marble Writing::Tabula Rasa

Reading

Written 1703-1705. Published by R. E. Raspe in 1765.

See Nouveaux Essais sur l'entendement humain in Oeuvres Philosophiques (Amsterdam and Leipzig: Jean Schreuder, 1765). <Link to Google Books>

Reading a modern translation: New Essays on Human Understanding. trans. and ed. by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996).

Innate Ideas

12/11/2006