After all, these great principles of morality are more commended than practised. As to Conscience checking us in these breaches, making them fewer than they would otherwise be, men may arrive at such a conscience, or self-restraining sentiment, in other ways than by an innate endowment. Some men may come to assent to moral rules from a knowledge of their value as means to ends. Others may take up the same view as a part of their education. However the persuasion is come by, it will serve as a conscience; which conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of the rectitude or pravity of our actions.
How could men with serenity and confidence transgress rules stamped upon their inmost soul? Look at the practices of nations civilized and uncivilized; at the robberies, murders, rapes of an army sacking a town; at the legalized usages of nations, the destruction of infants and of aged parents for personal convenience; cannibalism; the most monstrous forms of unchastity; the fashionable murder named Duelling. Where are the innate principles of Justice, Piety, Gratitude, Equity, Chastity?
If we read History, and cast our glance over the world, we shall scarcely find any rule of Morality (excepting such as are necessary to hold society together, and these too with great limitations) but what is somewhere or other set aside, and an opposite established, by whole societies of men. Men may break a law without disowning it; but it is inconceivable that a whole nation should publicly reject and renounce what every one of them, certainly and infallibly, knows to be a law. Whatever practical principle is innate, must be known to every one to be just and good. The generally allowed breach of any rule anywhere must be held to prove that it is not innate. If there be any rule having a fair claim to be imprinted by nature, it is the rule that Parents should preserve and cherish their children. If such a principle be innate, it must be found regulating practice everywhere; or, at the lowest, it must be known and assented to. But it is very far from having been uniformly practised, even among enlightened nations. And as to its being an innate truth, known to all men, that also is untrue. Indeed, the terms of it are not intelligible without other knowledge. The statement, 'it is the duty of parents to preserve their children,' cannot be understood without a Law; a Law requires a Lawmaker, and Reward or Punishment. And as punishment does not always follow in this life, nothing less than a recognition of Divine Law will suffice; in other words, there must be intuitions of God, Law, Obligation, Punishment, and a Future Life: every one of which may be, and is, deemed to be innate.
It is incredible that men, if all these things were stamped on their minds, could deliberately offend against them; still more, that rulers should silently connive at such transgressions.
4. The supporters of innate principles are unable to point out distinctly what they are.[18] Yet, if these were imprinted on the mind, there could be no more doubt about them than about the number of our fingers. We well know that, if men of different sects were to write out their respective lists, they would set down exactly such as suited their several schools or churches.
There is, Locke remarks, a ready, but not very material, answer to his objections, namely, that the innate principles may, by Education and Custom, be darkened and worn out of men's minds. But this takes away at once the argument from universal consent, and leaves nothing but what each party thinks should pass for universal consent, namely, their own private persuasion: a method whereby a set of men presuming themselves to be the only masters of right reason, put aside the votes and opinions of the rest of mankind. Thus, notwithstanding the innate light, we are as much in the dark as if it did not exist; a rule that will warp any way is not to be distinguished amidst its contraries. If these rules are so liable to vary, through adventitious notions, we should find them clearest in children and in persons wholly illiterate. He grants that there are many opinions, received by men of different countries, educations, and tempers, and held as unquestionable first principles; but then the absurdity of some, and the mutual contradiction of others, make it impossible that they should be all true. Yet it will often happen that these men will sooner part with their lives, than suffer the truth of their opinions to be questioned.
We can see from our experience how the belief in principles grows up. Doctrines, with no better original than the superstition of a nurse, or the authority of an old woman, may in course of time, and by the concurrence of neighbours, grow up to the dignity of first truths in Religion and in Morality. Persons matured under those influences, and, looking into their own minds, find nothing anterior to the opinions taught them before they kept a record of themselves; they, therefore, without scruple, conclude that those propositions whose origin they cannot trace are the impress of God and nature upon their minds. Such a result is unavoidable in the circumstances of the bulk of mankind, who require some foundation of principles to rest upon, and have no means of obtaining them but on trust from others. Custom is it greater power than Nature, and, while we are yet young, seldom fails to make us worship as divine what she has inured us to; nor is it to be wondered at, that, when we come to mature life, and are engrossed with quite different matters, we are indisposed to sit down and examine all our received tenets, to find ourselves in the wrong, to run counter to the opinions of our country or party, and to be branded with such epithets as whimsical, sceptical, Atheist. It is inevitable that we should take up at first borrowed principles; and unless we have all the faculties and the means of searching into their foundations, we naturally go on to the end as we have begun.
In the following chapter (IV.), he argues the general question of
Innate Ideas in the case of the Idea of God.
In Book II., Chap. XXI., Locke discusses the freedom of the will, with some allusions to the nature of happiness and the causes of wrong conduct. Happiness is the utmost pleasure we are capable of, misery the utmost pain; pleasure and pain define Good and Evil. In practice, we are chiefly occupied in getting rid of troubles; absent good does not much move us. All uneasiness being removed, a moderate portion of good contents us; and some few degrees of pleasure in a succession of ordinary enjoyments are enough to make happiness. [Epicurus, and others among the ancients, said as much.]
Men have wrong desires, and do wrong acts, but it is from wrong judgments. They never mistake a present pleasure or pain; they always act correctly upon that. They are the victims of deceitful appearances; they make wrong judgments in comparing present with future pains, such is the weakness of the mind's constitution in this department. Our wrong judgments proceed partly from ignorance and partly from inadvertence, and our preference of vice to virtue is accounted for by these wrong judgments.