Date: 360-355 B.C.

"Imagine, then, for the sake of argument, that our minds contain a block of wax, which in this or that individual may be larger or smaller, and composed of wax that is comparatively pure or muddy, and harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes of just the right consistency."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 360-355 B.C.

"When a person has what the poet's wisdom commends as a 'shaggy heart,' or when the block is muddy or made of impure wax, or oversoft or hard, the people with soft wax are quick to learn, but forgetful, those with hard wax the reverse."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 360-355 B.C.

"Once more then, just as a while ago we imagined a sort of waxen block in our minds, so now let us suppose that every mind contains a kind of aviary stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks apart from the rest, some in small groups, and some solitary, flying in any direction among them all."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 360-355 B.C.

"Let us call it the gift of the Muses' mother, Memory, and say that whenever we wish to remember something we see or hear or conceive in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them on it as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 360-355 B.C.

"When a man has in his mind a good thick slab of wax, smooth and kneaded to the right consistency, and the impressions that come through the senses are stamped on these tables of the 'heart'--Homer's word hints at the mind's likeness to wax--then the imprints are clear and deep enough to last a l...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 355-347 B.C.

"Would you have us raise a laugh by express statutes directing the pregnant mother to take constitutionals, to mold her infant, when she has borne it, like so much wax while it is still plastic, and to keep it swaddled for its first two years? "

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

The soul "is substance in the sense which corresponds to the definitive formula of a thing's essence."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

"Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters voice, it being only by a metaphor that we speak of the voice of a flute or the lyre or generally of what (being without soul) possesses the power of producing a succession of notes which differ i...

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

"The doctrine of the Pythagoreans seems to rest upon the same ideas; some of them declared the motes in air, others what moved them, to be soul."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

"Generally, about all perception, we can say that a sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold; what produces the impression is a signet of ...

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)