Date: 1750
"The Soul is a Tabula rasa, and gets all it knows thro' the Body; so there is no Law implanted in the Soul."
preview | full record— Bate, Julius (1711-1771)
Date: January 3, 1750-51, 1807
"Live then upon the paper, and upon my memory, every stroke of his pen! For there is no gall in his ink, but only precious balm, and honied drops of salutary counsel."
preview | full record— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)
Date: February 4, 1752
"My parents, though otherwise not great philosophers, knew the force of early education, and took care that the blank of my understanding should be filled with impressions of the value of money."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1754
"And so Dr. Edwards remarks of Socinus, that Adam, according to Him, had only the Faculty of Understanding, but none of the Accomplishments of it: His Mind being a pure rasa tabula, capable indeed of any Impressions, but having no Characters of Wisdom engraven upon it, by the Finger of God, when ...
preview | full record— Holloway, Benjamin (1690/1-1759)
Date: 1754
"The human soul is so far from being furnished with forms and ideas to perceive all things by, or from being impregnated, I would rather say than printed over, with the seeds of universal knowledge, that we have no ideas till we receive passively the ideas of sensible qualities from without."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1756-9
"From their cradle she instilled into them the most perfect maxims of piety, and contempt of the world. the ancient Romans dreaded nothing more in the education of youth than their being ill taught the first principles of the sciences; it being more difficult to unlearn the errours then imbibed, ...
preview | full record— Butler, Alban (1709-1773)
Date: 1756
"This heart is become a mere rasa tabula; you must help it to the [GREEK CHARACTERS], you must lay in it the foundation of natural religion, (i.e. "the dictates of common sense, for natural religion, according to Mr. H. is nothing else,) if you would raise the superstr...
preview | full record— Patten, Thomas (1714-1790)
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."
preview | full record— Jenks, Benjamin (bap. 1648, d. 1724)
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"
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)