Date: 1757

"Did I wait upon Bishop Gibson to acquaint him that I was a Free-thinker, that my mind was a tabula rasa!"

— Bower, Archibald (1686-1766)

Date: 1757

"And whatever any talk of (the rasa tabula,) an indifferency by nature, to virtue or vice: never could I find any such thing; but all men inclined the wrong way: and abundance of work, by discipline, and the grace of God, to make any one better than the rest."

— Jenks, Benjamin (bap. 1648, d. 1724)

Date: 1757

"Since, therefore, the mind of man appears of so loose and unsteddy a contexture, that, even at present, when so many persons find an interest in continually employing on it the chissel and the hammer, yet are they not able to engrave theological tenets with any lasting impression; how much more ...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1759

"That medling Ape Imitation, as soon as we come to years of Indiscretion (so let me speak), snatches the Pen, and blots out nature's mark of Separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental Individuality"

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"All these particulars, I say, consider'd, why should it seem altogether impossible, that heaven's latest editions of the human mind may be the most correct, and fair."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: September 1, 1759.

" Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away, and which new images are striving to obliterate."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1760

"A man this emptied and vacuated of self-conceit, these lines of natural pride, being blotted out, the soul is as a Tabula rasa, an unwritten table, to receive any impression of the law of God, that he pleases to put on it; and then his words are all plain to him that understandeth, and right to ...

— Binning, Hugh (1627-1653)

Date: 1760

"SUCH was her external Form, and though her Mind might, with the utmost Propriety, be said to resemble a mere Tabula rasa, yet was it, at the same time, of so naturally delicate a Texture, that it would retain the smallest Impression made on it by the Hands of Wisdom."

— Anonymous

Date: 1761

"Yea, the Soul herself is radically deprav'd and essentially invenom'd by her Disunion from God, so that she is the Seat of Defilement in the human Composition; even the Soul of an Infant since the lapse of the Protoplasts is no more born as a Tabula rasa, nor is that Saying of an Orator "Homines...

— Hammond, William (1719-1783)

Date: 1761

"The great Mr. Locke has resembled the infant mind to a rasa tabula, as he expresses it a clean piece of paper, with no inscriptions, tho' susceptible of them."

— Stiles, Ezra (1727-1795)