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: 1790, 1794
He was allowed to do so, and read it till every word was imprinted on his memory; and after enjoying the sad luxury of holding it that night on his bosom, was forced the next morning to relinquish his treasure."
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
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: 1792
"The understanding, it is true, may keep us from going out of drawing when we group our thoughts, or transcribe from the imagination and warm sketches of fancy; but the animal spirits, the individual character, give the colouring."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1792
"For any kind of reading, I think better than leaving a blank still blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
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)