In a strictly literal sense, to say that a thought is “innate” is to claim that we are born with it. Reid was not concerned to claim that we have such thoughts. When discussing Locke's views on our knowledge of first principles he wrote: [Locke] endeavours to show, that axioms or intuitive truths are not innate. To this I agree. I maintain only, that when the understanding is ripe, and when we distinctly apprehend such truths, we immediately assent to them. (EIP VI.vii: 520)

This statement might seem to qualify Locke's rejection of innate principles, but it does not. Since a truth that is immediately assented to as soon as it is distinctly apprehended just is an intuitively evident truth, the statement claims no more than that there are intuitively evident truths, while allowing that our intuitions of these truths may not be “innate” in the sense of being inborn. Locke would not have disagreed with either point.

Yet there was a dispute between Locke and Reid, not made explicit in this passage. Locke thought that we intuit by inspecting ideas previously obtained from sensation or reflection and simply seeing that they stand in certain relations to one another. Reid was willing to countenance intuitions that are obtained in other ways than by discerning relations between “ideas” obtained from sensation or reflection. He was also willing to countenance types of thought that may not have fit comfortably under Locke’s notions of an idea of sensation or an idea of reflection. In so doing, Reid countenanced beliefs and thoughts that are innate in something other than the crude sense of having been inborn.