Date: 1748

The "Author of our Being, when he breathers into us the Breath of Life, and speaks us into Existence, leaves our Minds a pure Tabula rasa capable of any Impression, and free from all innate Prepossessions in favour of Vice or vicious Habits, but more susceptible from its own nature of virt...

— Anonymous

Date: 1748

"The Soul is created in a State of moral Rectitude, but receives its vicious Tinctures from the Body, and is warped into its perverse and crooked Disposition by the Influence of the Senses"

— Anonymous

Date: 1748

"Consequently, whenever a Man attempts to subdue his Passions, and to put them under the regular Government of their natural sovereign Reason, the irrational Part must submit to the rational, the Brute must yield to the Man, and the Soul in the Event gain the Superiority over every Passion or App...

— Anonymous

Date: 1748

"And he labours hard to prove that these Ideas are not innate, but would have our Souls like a Blank Paper, a Rasa Tabula, ready to receive Ideas, but void of all; And affirms that these Ideas are the Foundation of all our Knowledge; and that they are conveyed to the Mind by external Objects."

— Anonymous [A Gentleman Late of the Temple, George Osborn]

Date: 1749

"The soul of man is originally a pure tabula rasa, capable of any impression either good or evil, and receives its bent from habits and education."

— Anonymous [Old Sportsman]

Date: June, 1753

"It is indeed a curious and interesting letter, and sufficient (if such a thing is possible) to make the Jacobites themselves ashamed of Jacobitism; but shews plainly, that lord Bolingbroke was a slave to his passions, passions too of the most malignant nature, and one who would stick at nothing ...

— Anonymous

Date: Thursday, September 4, 1755

"No; let me consider this room [a library] as the great charnel-house of human reason, where darkness and corruption dwell."

— Anonymous

Date: Thursday, December 25, 1755

"The mind as well as the stomach must have food fitted and prepared to it's taste and humour, or it will reject and loath it."

— Anonymous

Date: 1758

Some "stare like a second-sighted Scot, and, like him, see Things invisible by the sober Eye of Reason purged from the Films of Fancy"

— Anonymous [by the Author of "Emily; or, The History of a Natural Daughter]

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