Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/528

500PROP. IX.———— named has avoided this error. They have agreed, to a man, in thinking that the word "innate" referred to a particular class of our ideas—and not to a part of each of our ideas; and that the word "foreign" or "derived" or "extraneous," referred to another class of our ideas, and not to a part of each of them. In short, they have fallen into the mistake already explained at considerable length under the Sixth Proposition of the Epistemology, Obs. 13-17. The advocates, equally with the opponents of the theory, have misapprehended the nature of the analysis on which it proceeded. They have mistaken elements for kinds. Those who maintained the doctrine, supposed that one kind or class of our ideas had its origin from within the mind, and that another kind or class of our ideas had its origin from without; while their opponents, never doubting that this was the point properly at issue, denied that any of our ideas were innate, and attributed the whole of them to an extraneous origin. Accordingly, the controversy concerning innate ideas has been one in which neither of the parties engaged had any conception of the question properly under litigation.

25. This fundamental mistake has beset the controversy during every period of its history. Des Cartes, Mallebranche, and Leibnitz were of opinion that some of our ideas came to us from without, and