Date: 360-355 B.C.

"Let us call it the gift of the Muses' mother, Memory, and say that whenever we wish to remember something we see or hear or conceive in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them on it as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 360-355 B.C.

"When a man has in his mind a good thick slab of wax, smooth and kneaded to the right consistency, and the impressions that come through the senses are stamped on these tables of the 'heart'--Homer's word hints at the mind's likeness to wax--then the imprints are clear and deep enough to last a l...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

"Generally, about all perception, we can say that a sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold; what produces the impression is a signet of ...

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

"The process of movement stamps in, as it were, a sort of impression of the percept, just as persons do who make an impression with a seal."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

"This explains why, in those who are strongly moved owing to passion, or time of life, no memory is formed; just as no impression would be formed if the movement of the seal were to impinge on running water; while there are others in whom, owing to the receiving surface being frayed, as happens t...

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

"The former are too moist, the latter too hard, so that in the case of the former the image does not remain in the soul, while on the latter it is not imprinted at all."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Date: 101

"I mean the things which belong to him as a man, the marks (stamps) in his mind with which he came into the world, such as we seek also on coins, and if we find them, we approve of the coins, and if we do not find the marks, we reject them."

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 250

The "one-in-many" soul derives from "not-in-many" as if it were an image stamped by one ring on many pieces of wax

— Plotinus (c. 205-270)

Date: 1594

"Hereby it cometh to pass that custom inuring the mind by long practice, and so leaving there a sensible impression, prevaileth more than reasonable persuasion what way soever."

— Hooker, Richard (1554-1600)

Date: 1605, 1640

"By which wordes he declares, not obscurely, that God hath framed the Mind of Man, as a Mirror or Glasse capable of the Image of the universall world, and as joyfull to receive the impressions thereof, as the eye joyeth to receave light; and not only delighted in the beholding, the variety of thi...

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)