Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)

"Memory in a great measure depends upon the body, and is often much injured by a disease, and afterwards recovered with recovering strength, which on the Cartesian hypothesis is accounted for, by supposing that those parts of the brain, on which these characters are written, are by such disorders...

— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)

Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)

"Children soon forget, as they soon learn: old people learn with difficulty, and remember best what they learnt when young. That is, say the Cartesians because the brain growing by degrees more dry retains old characters, but does not easily admit new."

— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)

Date: 1765

One might say "that there are truths engraved in the soul which it has never known, and even ones which it will never know"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"[F]or 'tis a known Observation, that a young Mind is like a white Sheet of Paper, on which may be inscribed the most beautiful Images, as well as the ugliest Deformities."

— Anonymous

Date: 1765

"Do thou O Tablet, either both, or nothing; either let thy words and sense go together, or be thy bosom a rasa tabula."

— Warburton, William (1698-1779)

Date: 1765

"There is the question whether the soul in itself is completely blank like a writing tablet on which nothing has as yet been written--a tabula rasa--as Aristotle and the author of the Essay maintain, and whether everything which is inscribed there comes solely from the senses and ex...

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as opposed to an entirely homogenous block of marble, or to a blank tablet--what the philosophers call a tabula rasa"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1766

"Cecil is infinitely desirous that King James, as he favours him, should write the letter of satisfaction concerning 40 by the very next dispatch; for it should seem to me, by secret intimation from Cecil this afternoon, that the party is a little tickle, and like rasa tabula, that is, rea...

— Howard, Howard, Earl of Northampton (1540-1614)

Date: 1766

"YOU see already, my dear patron, by the date of my letter, that I am arrived at the place of my destination; but you cannot see all the charms which I find in it; to do this, you should be acquainted with the situation, and be able to read my heart. You ought, however, to read at least those of ...

— Hume, David (1711-1776); with Rousseau, d'Alembert, and Walpole