According to the Cartesian nativism, on the other hand, particularly as it was developed by such men as Malebranche and Spinoza, the innate, which is always at once the final appeal of man's conceits and the conclusive witness to what is absolutely real, was indeed one with the divine or supernatural, but it was perhaps just by reason of its truly divine or supernatural character and origin untethered. How could the universal doubter be born with a specific knowledge or a specific programme of anything, when the definite or fixed, the specific in any quarter whatsoever, must always be a possible object of doubt? Only the purest principle, or spirit, is impregnable against the attacks of the sceptic. To doubt such a principle is indeed only to enhance its importance. The sceptic, then, the universal doubter, is born only with, and what is more he cannot be born without, a real [p.199] interest and constant faith in truth, in true knowledge and right action, but no special experience can ever compass the length and the breadth, the depth and the height of this interest or this faith. He has a native love for truth and righteousness, a belief in them, as real and as inviolable, as universal and as necessary, as his doubt; but the very doubting in him forever saves both the truth and the righteousness from being destroyed by satisfaction or crucified by any final embodiment. He loves and he trusts with all his heart, and he lives in a world that forever serves the truth and the righteousness of his love and faith.
So, taken at least for what he promised, or for what he said between the lines, Descartes was a nativist without the nativist's disastrous bondage to form and creed, to fixed character and specific programme. He was a nativist, but for him the innate lacked its self-destructive definiteness; it was just a spirit or principle, or what I have also called a life or power, ever present not in some, but in all experience, and so at once sanctioning all things, and, because able to find perfection in none alone, each single thing being relative, sanctioning also a constant conflict between things as good or true or real, and things as bad or false or unreal. Whatever is relative is necessarily, so to speak, both-sided or divided against itself. The relativity is such conflict. Before the judgment-seat of the innate, in short, all things, being relative, must be parties to conflict both individually and collectively, nor is their conflict anything but an old story to us. All the paradoxes of experience have been evidences of it. The conflict apart for the present, however, the meaning [p.200] of Descartes' nativism is just this: truth in all experience, reality in all things, and reality, or truth, a principle, not a programme. Just this, too, discloses to us the nature of the doubter's real world.