Wrangling about Innate Ideas? Reflections on Locke and Cudworth

Abstract

Locke contended that knowledge is learned from experience, taught from without rather than innately known from within. The notion of innate ideas has since been seen by many as innately ridiculous, as a battle long ago waged and won in the first book of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. However, there was no fight in the first place, for the most comprehensive defence of innate ideas in the 17th century was not published until the 18th century. Ralph Cudworth’s Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality was published posthumously nearly fifty years after its writing, and while Locke and Cudworth wrote on similar subjects—and around the same time and place—the fates never aligned for them to meet and ‘have it out’. This paper places Locke and Cudworth into conversation on this question of innate ideas. Such analysis will reveal that Cudworth sidestepped much of Locke’s critique by hanging his argument not on universal consent but on the Platonic principle of like-knows-like. In the process, Cudworth anticipated many of the responses to Locke that would come in the next century from Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Thus, his forgotten role in this narrative in the history of philosophy cries out for reappraisal, along with the renewed insights he might bring to the on-going contemporary discussion.