The Concept of Innateness
Though they may not have called it such, British Empiricists knew there was an autonomic nervous system because many bodily functions go on without thought. Breathing, digestion, and the pumping of the heart occur all by themselves, without a philosopher to speculate and theorize on how and why. They simply happen. These functions are innate.
The school of Empiricism rejects Descartes and the Rationalist notion of innate ideas. They believed that everything we can know must come from sensory experiences and observations of the physical world.
However, the Empiricists did not accept that they were born with, in essence, preloaded software. Knowledge was installed over time through life experience. The three main British Empiricists of the eighteenth century are John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
The British Empiricists certainly got people thinking with their controversial revisioning of what it means to be human. Of the three, Locke's philosophy proved to be the most successful and influential.
