Date: 1754

"The human soul is so far from being furnished with forms and ideas to perceive all things by, or from being impregnated, I would rather say than printed over, with the seeds of universal knowledge, that we have no ideas till we receive passively the ideas of sensible qualities from without."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1755

A stamp may be settled deep into the mind

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"These simple ideas, offered to the mind, the understanding can no more refuse, nor alter, nor blot out, than a mirrour can refuse, alter, or obliterate, the images which the objects produce"

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

Heads overfull of matter, be like pens over full of ink, which will sooner blot, than make any fair letters at all.

— Ascham's Schoolmaster [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"Though God has given us no innate ideas of himself, though he has stampt no original characters on our minds, wherein we may read his being; yet having furnished us with those faculties our minds are endowed with, he hath not left himself without witness."

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"If the organs of perception, like wax overhardened with cold, will not receive the impression of the seal; or, like wax of a temper too soft, will not hold it."

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"He that brings this love to thee, / Little knows this love in me; / And by him seal up thy mind."

— Shakespeare [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"That natural and indelible signature of God, which human souls, in their first origin, are supposed to be stampt with"

— Bentley [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"[...] a Storehouse, as it were, with Bags, Shelves, and Drawers, to lodge Ideas in, and, at the same Time, to compare these Impressions, such as a Seal makes upon Wax, (when Impressions are worn out, how are they to be renewed without a fresh Application of the Seal?) Footsteps, Traces, &c. and ...

— Richardson, J. of Newent (fl. 1755)

Date: 1755

"Now if the human understanding be, essentially and originally, a tabula rasa, susceptible of impression from the occurrence of every casual object, then the ideas it receives thereby will be the fountain, and, as it were, the materials of all its future proficiencies; and the number and e...

— Sharp, William, Vicar of Long Burton