imagination - a passage from one image to another; for when a new situation appears similar to its predecessor, it is expected to have the same concomitant features as before, as though things were linked [/atsoÇ] in reality just because their images are linked in the memory. It is true, moreover, that reason counsels us to expect ordinarily that what we find in the future will conform to long experience of the past; but even so, this is no necessary and infallible truth, and it can fail us when we least expect it to, if there is a change, in the reasons which have been maintaining it. This is why the wisest men do not trust it so implicitly that they neglect to probe somewhat, where possible, into the reason for such regularities, in order to know when they will have to allow exceptions. For only reason is capable of establishing reliable rules, of making up the deficiencies of those which have proved unreliable by allowing exceptions to them, and lastly of finding unbreakable links in the cogency of necessary inferences. This last often provides a way of foreseeing events without having to experience sensible links between images, as beasts must. Thus what shows the existence of inner sources of necessary truths is also what distinguishes man from beast.
Perhaps our gifted author will not entirely disagree with my view. For after devoting the whole of his first book to rejecting innate illumination, understood in a certain sense, he nevertheless admits at the start of his second book, and from there on, that ideas which do not originate in sensation come from reflection. But reflection is nothing but attention to what is within us, and the senses do not give us what we carry with us already. In view of this, can it be denied that there is a great deal that is innate in our minds,1 since we are innate to ourselves, so to speak?and since we include Being, Unity, Substance, Duration?Change, Action? Perception, Pleasure, and hosts of other objects of our intellectual ideas ? And since these objects are immediately related to our understanding and always present to it (although our distractions and needs prevent our being always aware of them), is it any wonder that we say that these ideas?along with what depends on them, are innate in us ? I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as opposed to an entirely homogeneous block of marble, or to a blank tablet - what the philosophers call a tabula rasa. For if the soul were like such a blank tablet then truths would be in us as the shape