Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding · John Dewey
LOCKE AND LEIBNIZ.--INNATE IDEAS.
But the argument of Locke rests upon yet another basis. He founds his denial of innate ideas not only upon a static conception of their ready made existence "in" the soul, but also upon an equally mechanical conception of consciousness. "Nothing can be in the mind which is not in consciousness." This statement appears axiomatic to Locke, and by it he would settle the whole discussion. Regarding it, Leibniz remarks that if Locke has such a prejudice as this, it is not surprising that he rejects innate ideas. But consciousness and mental activity are not thus identical. To go no farther, the mere empirical fact of memory is sufficient to show the falsity of such an idea. Memory reveals that we have an indefinite amount of knowledge of which we are not always conscious. Rather than that knowledge and consciousness are one, it is true that actual consciousness only lays hold of an infinitesimal fraction of knowledge. But Leibniz does not rely upon the fact of memory alone. We must constantly keep in mind that to Leibniz the soul is not a form of being wholly separate from nature, but is the culmination of the system of reality. The reality is everywhere the monad, and the soul is the monad with the power of feeling, remembering, and connecting its ideas. The activities of the monad, those representative changes which sum up and symbolize the universe, do not cease when we reach the soul. They are continued. If the soul has the power of attention, they are potentially conscious. Such as the soul actually attends to, thus giving them relief and making them distinct, are actually conscious. But all of them exist.
Thus it is that Leibniz not only denies the equivalence of soul and consciousness, but asserts that the fundamental error of the psychology of the Cartesians (and here, at least, Locke is a Cartesian) is in identifying them. He asserts that "unconscious ideas" are of as great importance in psychology as molecules are in physics. They are the link between unconscious nature and the conscious soul. Nothing happens all at once; nature never makes jumps; these facts stated in the law of continuity necessitate the existence of activities, which may be called ideas, since they belong to the soul and yet are not in consciousness. When, therefore, Locke asks how an innate idea can exist and the soul not be conscious of it, the answer is at hand. The "innate idea" exists as an activity of the soul by which it represents--that is, expresses--some relation of the universe, although we have not yet become conscious of what is contained or enveloped in this activity. To become conscious of the innate idea is to lift it from the sphere of nature to the conscious life of spirit. And thus it is, again, that Leibniz can assert that all ideas whatever proceed from the depths of the soul. It is because it is the very being of the soul as a monad to reflect "from its point of view" the world. In this way Leibniz brings the discussion regarding innate ideas out of the plane of examination into a matter of psychological fact into a consideration of the essential nature of spirit. An innate idea is now seen to be one of the relations by which the soul reproduces some relation which constitutes the universe of reality, and at the same time realizes its own individual nature. It is one reflection from that spiritual mirror, the soul. With this enlarged and transformed conception of an idea apt to be so meagre we may well leave the discussion. There has been one mind at least to which the phrase "innate ideas" meant something worth contending for, because it meant something real.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.