INNATISM. — A term of philosophical language, used to designate every system or trend that admits the original (congenital, innate) existence in the human spirit of concepts, categories, and ideas not derived from experience. In the same sense, the term nativism is sometimes used (indeed, it is more common in the specific question concerning the origin of the ideas of space and time). In a broader sense, i. may also indicate the existence of spontaneous dispositions in the human spirit.
In its various forms, i. represents the historical antithesis of empiricism and sensationalism (v.), which, by reducing all contents of knowledge to pure data of experience, prejudice every true universality and necessity of human knowledge. It is precisely with the intention of providing a foundation for the concept (v.) that not a few forms of rationalism have believed it necessary to seek its origin and exclusive derivation in the very nature of the spirit.
Historically, i. took different forms. In Plato (cf. Theaet., Resp., Tim.) ideas are innate in the sense that, as regards their content, they do not derive from the sensible world, but present themselves as the immediate spiritual object of the soul’s intuitive recollection (ἀνάμνησις). This form of i. is accentuated in Plotinus’s conception and has a reflection in Augustinian gnoseology (v. AGOSTINO), subsequently continued, in substance, by not a few scholastics, particularly by St. Bonaventure (v.).
In modern philosophy, Cartesian rationalism gave new vigor to i.: already explicit in Descartes himself (cf. Medit., III), as the objective predetermination in the mind of concepts and principles, it is defended, in the sense of “virtual” preexistence, by Leibniz (cf. Nouv. ess., I, 3; II, 1) and, with Augustinian dependence, by Malebranche. In Kant, the problem of the necessity and universality of knowledge determines his particular form of i., which understands the forms of knowing (intuitions and categories) as the a priori structure of the mind, the transcendental condition of experience itself (cf. De mundi sensibilis principiis, § 6, and Kritik der V. Vernunft, introd.). In later philosophy, among others, Rosmini’s position should be recalled, according to which the idea of being is innate in human intelligence, as its immanent objectivity (cf. Nuovo saggio, sez. 5ª, cap. 1, art. 8 et passim).
The positive claim of i., asserted against the insufficiencies of empiricism, lies precisely in the demand to preserve the character of necessity and universality of knowledge, which guarantees the value of genuine knowledge. If such universality cannot dispense with the original meaning of intelligence as the power to think and affirm within the absolute order of being, nevertheless it by no means requires that the contents in which thought is actualized should preexist in the spirit prior to experience. The true solution to the problem must be sought in Thomistic realism, which locates in the objectivity of being, and subsequently in the real data of experience, the reason and ontological principle of the universality and necessity of spiritual knowledge (v. CONCETTO; CONOSCENZA; UNIVERSALISTI).
END OF THE SIXTH VOLUME.