Innate Ideas
(Lat. innatis, inborn) The power of understanding given in the very nature of mind. Such ideas are spoken of as a priori. Ideas which are inborn and come with the mind at birth, such as God or immortality. More generally, ideas which all men as human and rational, necessarily and universally possess.
Locke’s arguments against Descartes’ belief in innate ideas (cf. Essay on the Human Understanding, bk. I) were the target of Leibniz’s Nouveaux Essais, 1701 (publ. in 1765). — M.F.