Innate Ideas, and Pre-existence of Souls
In the Second Series of Things not Generally Known, pp. 147-152, we have illustrated this doctrine at some length; but return to it here for the purpose of quoting an argument directly opposed to the above illustrations, by the writer of the eloquent exposition of Plato, in the Edinburgh Essays, 1856:
“Plato was distinguished from all previous philosophers by the prominence which he gave to the doctrine of innate ideas. Now, the current opinion in this country certainly is, that these innate ideas were a sort of sublime phantasm blown to the winds by John Locke and the inductive philosophy of external facts which has been achieving such conquests in the modern world from the time of Bacon downwards. But the fact is, that the doctrine of innate ideas, as taught by Plato, never was touched either by Locke or Bacon; and never can be touched in substantials by any thinker who believes that he has thoughts, and that these thoughts have their roots in a simple sovereign and plastic principle which he calls his soul. No doubt there are some pleasant imaginations floating with irridescent colours round the borderland of this Platonic philosophy, which may be blown to the wind by the puff of any cheek, without special inflation from Locke or Bacon. When the great thinker, for instance, pushes his argument for the independence of mind so far as to seem to assert, in positive terms, the existence of ideas in the human soul in ready-made panoply transferred from a previous state of existence into the present, this must be regarded as a trick of the poet immanent in the philosopher, ever ready to mistake a beautiful analogy for a substantial argument. Wordsworth, as a philosophic poet, was certainly more at liberty to illustrate this pleasant fancy than Plato as a practical philosopher.26 Reminiscence, as explained by Socrates in the Menon and elsewhere, is not a fact, if the word be taken in its natural and obvious sense; it is not true that a person studying mathematics, for instance, when the truth of any profound relation of quantity or number flashes upon his mind, is recollecting anything that he ever knew before in a previous state of existence; the simple fact is, that he recognises the evolution of this truth from other truths of which he finds himself in possession, as a consequence that cannot be avoided when once his mind is set to work in a certain direction. As certainly as a sportsman’s dog will raise game when it comes near the spot where the bird is lying, and the scent begins to tell on his eager organ, so certainly will an idea lurking in a man’s mind be hunted out into startled consciousness by a Socratic questioner. But the simile limps, like all similes, in one point: the hidden idea is not lying in the soul, like the bird in the heather, ready-made; it must be shaped, moulded, and evolved, by a long and sometimes a very painful process. All that we can legitimately say, therefore, is, that there lies in every normal human soul the dormant capacity of acknowledging every necessary truth; and that this capacity is not borrowed from without. In this sense, and this sense only, are innate ideas true; and in this sense, unquestionably, they are very far removed from what may be called a reminiscence.”