All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us.... This is the easiest of sciences,... a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love is the most melodious of all the harmonies, and we have an innate feeling for it. Woman is a delicious instrument of pleasure..., but one must know the chords, study the pose of it, the timid keyboard, the changing and capricious fingering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God ...help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I often wish for the end of the wretched remnant of my life; and that wish is a rational one; but then the innate principle of sel...f-preservation, wisely implanted in our natures, for obvious purposes, opposes that wish, and makes us endeavour to spin out our thread as long as we can, however decayed and rotten it may be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this... faculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child receives data through the sense organs; the child also has some inborn processing capacities--otherwise it would not be ...able to learn--but in addition, some "information" or "programs" are built-in at birth (for example, the child does not have to learn how to suck, for this is an innate reflex); there is a working memory, in which the child keeps those items of knowledge that are being used at a particular moment; and there is a permanent memory, which is, in Locke's terms, largely a "blank tablet" at birth, but which has a storage capacity that makes a hard disk pale into insignificance. The child gradually builds up a symbolic representation of the world around it, so there must be some inner "language" or medium of representation; even a newborn baby is starting to see and taste and smell and hear and touch, and to remember the more striking of its experiences, so the internal medium by which it represents and stores these impressions cannot be the native language (of which it is still ignorant. Jerry Fodor [in The Language of Thought] has discussed this inbuilt "language of thought," which is similar conceptually to the "machine language" that is built into the personal computer and about which most users remain completely ignorant).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In civilized societies today ... clitoris envy, or womb envy, takes subtle forms. Man's constant need to disparage woman, to humbl...e her, to deny her equal rights, and to belittle her achievements--all are expressions of his innate envy and fear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It must not be thought that the cowardly feeling of caution and uneasy self-preservation is innate in the English character. It is... the consequence of a corpulence derived from wealth and of the training of all thoughts and passions for acquisitiveness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actu...ally can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »