_instinct_, is to pretend that man knows how to read before he has
learned the letters of the alphabet; that he is acquainted with the laws
of society before they are either made or promulgated.

To undeceive him, with respect to innate ideas or modifications,
imprinted on his soul, at the moment of his birth, it is simply
requisite to recur to their source; he will then see that those with
which he is familiar, which have, as it were, identified themselves with
his existence, have all come to him through the medium of some of his
senses; that they are sometimes engraven on his brain with great
difficulty,--that they have never been permanent,--that they have
perpetually varied in him: he will see that these pretended inherent
ideas of his soul, are the effect of education, of example, above all,
of habit, which by reiterated motion has taught his brain to associate
his ideas either in a confused or a perspicuous manner; to familiarize
itself with systems either rational or absurd. In short, he takes those
for innate ideas of which he has forgotten the origin; he no longer
recals to himself, either the precise epoch, or the successive
circumstances when these ideas were first consigned to his brain:
arrived at a certain age he believes he has always had the same notions;
his memory, crowded with experience, loaded with a multitude of facts,
is no longer able to distinguish the particular circumstances which have
contributed to give his brain its present modifications; its
instantaneous mode of thinking; its actual opinions. For example, not
one of his race, perhaps, recollects the first time the word God struck
his ears--the first ideas that it formed in him--the first thoughts that
it produced in him; nevertheless, it is certain that from thence he has
searched for some being with whom to connect the idea which he has
either formed to himself, or which has been suggested to him: accustomed
to hear God continually spoken of, he has, when in other respects, the