Date: 1762

"Je viens, mon jeune ami, de vous réciter de bouche ma profession de foi telle que Dieu la lit dans mon coeur."

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"Oh thou possessor of heavenly wisdom, would be this separation, this immeasurable distance from my friends, were I not able thus to delineate my heart upon paper, and to send thee daily a map of my mind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"Here it was that I exulted in my success; no blot, no stain, appeared on any part of the faithful mirror. As when the large, unwritten page presents its snowy spotless bosom to the writer's hand; so appeared the glass to my view."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1763

"The mind of man is, at first, a kind of tabula rasa; or like a piece of blank paper, and bears no original inscriptions, when we come into the world; we owe all the characters afterwards drawn upon it, to the impressions made upon our senses; to education, custom, and the like."

— Fielding, John, Sir (1721-1780)

Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)

"Memory in a great measure depends upon the body, and is often much injured by a disease, and afterwards recovered with recovering strength, which on the Cartesian hypothesis is accounted for, by supposing that those parts of the brain, on which these characters are written, are by such disorders...

— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)

Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)

"Children soon forget, as they soon learn: old people learn with difficulty, and remember best what they learnt when young. That is, say the Cartesians because the brain growing by degrees more dry retains old characters, but does not easily admit new."

— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)

Date: 1765

One might say "that there are truths engraved in the soul which it has never known, and even ones which it will never know"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"Do thou O Tablet, either both, or nothing; either let thy words and sense go together, or be thy bosom a rasa tabula."

— Warburton, William (1698-1779)

Date: 1765

"There is the question whether the soul in itself is completely blank like a writing tablet on which nothing has as yet been written--a tabula rasa--as Aristotle and the author of the Essay maintain, and whether everything which is inscribed there comes solely from the senses and ex...

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)