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: 1754
"They are, if I may say so, of the mind's own growth, the elements of knowledge, more immediate, less relative, and less dependent than sensitive knowledge, as any man will be apt to think, who compares his ideas of remembering, recollecting, bare thought, and intenseness of thought, with those o...
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1754
But when we enter into a serious and impartial detail concerning this knowledge, and analyse carefully what the great pretenders to it have given and give us daily for knowledge, we shall be obliged to confess, that the human intellect is rather a rank than a fertile soil, barren without due cult...
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1787
"They [the Indians] will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation."
preview | full record— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)
Date: 1787
"This will in some measure stop the increase of this great political and moral evil, while the minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature."
preview | full record— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)