Date: 1536

"If the Gentiles by nature have law righteousness engraved upon their minds, we surely cannot say they are utterly blind as to the conduct of life. There is nothing more common than for a man to be sufficiently instructed in a right standard of conduct by natural law (of which the apostle is here...

— Calvin, John (1509-1564)

Date: 1536

"that inward law, which we have ... described as written, even engraved, upon the hearts of all, in a sense asserts the very same things that are to be learned from the two Tables."

— Calvin, John (1509-1564)

Date: 1580

The Pyrrhonist's mind "is a white sheet prepared to take from the finger of God what form soever it shall please him to imprint therein."

— Montaigne, Michel Eyquem seigneur de (1533-1592)

Date: 1606

To properly prepare a soul for God, one must "qualify it, cleanse it, strip it, and denude it of all opinion, belief, inclination, make it like a white sheet of paper, dead to itself and the world, so that God may live and operate in it."

— Charron, Pierre (1541-1603)

Date: 1644, 1647

False judgments stick in the memory and are difficult to erase

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"Thus they also trace figures in these gaps, which correspond to those of the objects. At first they do this less easily and perfectly than they do on gland H, but gradually they do it better and better, as their action becomes stronger and lasts longer, or is repeated more often. That is why the...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"Again, the pen as a whole does not move in exactly the same way as its lower end; on the contrary, the upper part of the pen seems to have a quite different and opposite movement. This enables us to understand how all the movements of other animals can come about, even though we refuse to allow ...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"Secondly, when an external sense organ is stimulated by an object, the figure which it receives is conveyed at one and the same moment to another part of the body known as the 'common' sense, without any entity really passing from the one to the other. In exactly the same way I understand that w...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1748, 1749

"But as the structure of this organ is such, that when once the eye formed for vision has received the pictures of objects, the brain cannot help seeing their images and differences: in the same manner when the signs of these differences are marked or ingraved in the brain, the soul must necessar...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: w. 1753-1758

"Si la loi naturelle n'était écrite que dans la raison humaine, elle serait peu capable de diriger la plupart de nos actions. Mais elles est encore gravée dans le coeur de l'homme en caractères ineffaçables; et c'est là qu'elle lui parle plus fortement que tous les préceptes des philosophes; c'es...

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)