Leibniz on Innate Ideas
AOur differences are on subjects of some importance. The question is to know whether, following Aristotle [and later empiricists like Locke, Berkeley and Hume] the soul in itself is entirely empty, like a tablet on which nothing has yet been written (tabula rasa) and whether all that is traced thereon comes solely from the senses and from experience; or wether as I, with Plato [and Descartes] believe, the soul contains originally the principles of several notions and doctrines which external objects merely awaken on occasions.@ [New Essays on the Human Understanding, preface]
AI have made use...of the comparison of a block of marble which has veins, rather than of a block of marble wholly even, or of blank tablets, that is to say, of what is called among philosophers tabula rasa. For if the soul resembled these blank tablets, truth would be in us as the figure of Hercules is in marble when the marble is entirely indifferent toward receiving this figure or some other. But if there were veins in the block which should mark out the figure of Hercules rather than other figures, the block would be more determined thereto, and Hercules would be in it as in some sort innate, although it would be necessary to labour in order to discover these veins and to cleanse them by polishing and cutting away that which prevents them from appearing. It is thus that ideas and truths are innate in us... [New Essays on the Human Understanding, preface]
Descartes on Innate Ideas
AWhen first in infancy we see a triangular figure depicted on paper, this figure cannot show how a real triangle ought to be conceived.@
A...because we already possess within us the idea of true triangle, and because it can be more easily conceived by our mind than the more complex figure of the triangle drawn on paper, we, therefore, when we see that composite figure, apprehend not it itself bur rather the authentic figure.@ [From AReply to Objections to the Meditations@ in Haldane and Ross, eds., The Philosophical Works of Descartes II, pp. 227-8]