Date: 1770
"It is a favourite maxim with Mr LOCKE, as it was with some ancient philosophers, that the human soul, previous to education, is like a piece of white paper, or tabula rasa, and this simile, harmless as it may appear, betrays our great modern into several important mistakes."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1770
"That the mind of man, previous to the information of the senses, is a tabula rasa, a blank, without ideas, without knowledge, is a doctrine too well supported by this great master of reason to suffer a shock."
preview | full record— Baker, William (1742-1785)
Date: 1771
"As the Wax would not be adequate to its business of Signature, had it not a Power to retain, as well as to receive; the same holds of the SOUL, with respect to Sense and Imagination."
preview | full record— Harris, James (1709-1780)
Date: 1771
"For were that mind, what some suppose, a mere tabula rasa upon its first coming into the world, a pure and perfect blank, without one single impression; who can deny that it would be right, that it would be humane and wise, to make, in the earliest moments, those impressions upon it, whic...
preview | full record— Dodd, William (1729-1777)
Date: 1771
"The infant mind at coming to the world, is a meer rasa tabula, destitute of all ideas and materials of reflection."
preview | full record— Usher, James (1720-1771)
Date: 1771
"It is a charte blanche, ready for receiving the inscriptions of sense; yet it behoves us carefully to observe, that it differs from a rasa tabula or a sheet of clean paper, in the following respect, that you may write on clean paper; that sugar is bitter, wormwood sweet, fire and f...
preview | full record— Usher, James (1720-1771)
Date: December 10, 1774; 1775
"Invention is one of the great marks of genius; but if we consult experience, we shall find, that it is by being conversant with the inventions of others, that we learn to invent; as by reading the thoughts of others we learn to think."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: 1775
"Intellect, as has he [Aristotle] had said before, was in CAPACITY, after a certain manner, the several Objects intelligible; but was in ACTUALITY no one of them, until it first comprehended it--and that it was the same with the Mind or HUMAN UNDERSTANDIN...
preview | full record— Harris, James (1709-1780)
Date: 1775
"To assist the imagination, indeed, but by no means in any consistency with the notion of a nervous fluid, it had been conceived that ideas resembled characters drawn upon a tablet; and the language in which we generally speak of ideas, and their affections, is borrowed from this hypothesis."
preview | full record— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)
Date: 1775
"But neither can any such tablet be found in the brain, nor any style, by which to make the characters upon it; and though some of the more simple phænomena of ideas, as their being more or less deeply impressed, their being retained a longer or or a shorter time, being capable of being revived a...
preview | full record— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)