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"According to one class of speculators, the mind derives all its knowledge, judgments, maxims, from observation and experience. According to another class of thinkers, there are ideas, truths, principles, which originate in the native power, and are seen in the inward light of the mind. These last have been called by a great number of names, such as innate ideas, intuitions, necessary judgments, fundamental laws of belief, principles of common sense, first or primitive truths; and diverse have been the accounts given of them, and the uses to which they have been turned. This is a controversy which has been from the beginning, and which is ever being renewed in one form or other. It appears to me that this contest is now, and has ever been, characterized by an immense complication of confusion; and confusion, as Bacon has remarked, is more difficult to rectify than open error. I am not, in this treatise, to plunge at once into a thicket, in which so many have lost themselves as they sought to find or cut a way through it. But my aim throughout is to ascertain what are the actual laws or principles in the mind denoted by these various phrases, what is their mode of operation, what the rule which they follow, and the purpose which they are competent to serve"--Introduction.

Knowledge, Theory of.