or his senses—for example, our judgment that taking another person’s property is wrong, and that lying is wrong. Of this kind are notions that readily occur to many people’s estimative faculty. None of these judgments is required by unaided reason. If a person imagined himself as having been created all at once, with a fully developed intellect, without having received any moral instruction or yielded to any emotion or disposition, he would make no judgment concerning propositions of this kind. Rather, he could remain ignorant of them and suspend judgment. This is unlike his judgment that the whole is greater than the part.

These widely accepted propositions may be true or false. Even if they are true, they are not classed among self-evident first principles and similar propositions if their truth is not immediately evident to reason without reflection, even though reason may regard them as commendable. Truth is not the same as commendability; likewise, falsehood is not the same as repugnance. Many a repugnant proposition is true, and many a commendable one is false.