"Our minds are like blank paper, as a great philosopher has observed, and the first impressions they receive are generally the most permanent and powerful."
— Anonymous
Author
Work Title
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Printed for J. Murray
Date
1786
Metaphor
"Our minds are like blank paper, as a great philosopher has observed, and the first impressions they receive are generally the most permanent and powerful."
Metaphor in Context
The situation of the places of our birth, the climate and temperature of the air, the circumstances of our parents, their humours and dispositions; but more especially their method of treating us in our infant years, I am persuaded give bias to our manners and actions, through the whole course of our lives. Our minds are like blank paper, as a great philosopher has observed, and the first impressions they receive are generally the most permanent and powerful. What is commonly and vulgarly called our natural temper is only what we acquire, after our births, from the example of those from whom we receive our institution, or upon whom we depend. And agreeable to this, the mild conduct of my parents, and the engaging tenderness of their behaviour to every body, certainly fixed that good humour and complacency in my soul, that no succeeding misfortune had ever the power to efface. My disposition, as the reader will have frequent occasion to observe, was serious, but not unpliant, was gentle, but not slavish. My countenance was open, and my spirit intrepid. But as my designs were not lost in the clouds of gaiety, so neither did they render my vain, conceited, and pedantic. [...]
(I.ii, p. 9-10)
(I.ii, p. 9-10)
Provenance
Reading Christopher Flint's The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2011), 81.
Citation
The Adventures of George Maitland, Esq., 3 vols. (London: Printed for J. Murray, 1786). <Link to ECCO>
Theme
Blank Slate
Date of Entry
07/29/2012
