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."

— 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...

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

Date: 1775

"To the mere novice in philosophical investigations, it will appear impossible to reduce all the variety of thinking to so simple and uniform a process; but to the same person it would also appear impossible a priori, that all the varieties of language, as spoken by all the nations in the world, ...

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

Date: 1776-1789

"Such a festival must indeed have degenerated, in a wealthy and despotic empire, into a theatrical representation; but it was at least a comedy well worthy of a royal audience, and which might sometimes imprint a salutary lesson on the mind of a young prince."

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776-1789

"These convenient maxims of reverence and implicit faith were doubtless imprinted with care on the tender minds of youth"

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776

"The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, who have made such a great progress in the sciences, were not actuated by supernatural causes, or any innate principles in their original formation; the mind is a mere blank, but capable of receiving such impressions as custom, education, or any other relative c...

— Gwynn, John (bap. 1713, d. 1786)

Date: 1777, 1778

"The mind of youth is a kind of tabula rasa;--at first unstained with guilt, and unadorned with virtue."

— Rack, Edmund (1735-1787)

Date: 1777, 1778

"May the fair page never be polluted!--may it become inscribed with every excellent virtue--and be thereby rendered comely in the sight of Men, of Angels, of the Deity!"

— Rack, Edmund (1735-1787)

Date: ca. 1780

"Let Truth then, my dear, still dwell on your tongue, / From her maxims O never depart; / But give yourself up to her guidance while young, / Her precepts engrave on your heart."

— Kilner, Dorothy (1755-1836)

Date: 1781

"Ideas of sense are but the first elements of thought: and the produce raised from these elements by the operation of the mind upon them is as far superiour to the elements themselves in variety, copiousness and use, as books are to the characters of which they are composed."

— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)