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."
preview | full record— 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...
preview | full record— 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, ...
preview | full record— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)
Date: 1783
Children's "minds, like a sheet of white paper, are susceptible to every impression"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: February 1791
"Call to mind the sentiments which nature has engraved on the heart of every citizen, and which take a new force when they are solemnly recognised by all."
preview | full record— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)
Date: 1795
"A soft sponginess of character that will easily acquire any hue, or any stain; a tabula rasa of intellect; a spirit invulnerable to insult; that (for example) after vain endeavors to disunite and discourage the Catholics of Ireland, could condescend to [end page 2] truck and chaffer, for the off...
preview | full record— Drennan, William (1754-1820)
Date: 1797
"Their [young persons'] minds are like a sheet of white paper, which takes any impression that it is proposed to make upon it."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)