Date: 1704

"But this is the great Difficulty, What the Voice and Sense of Nature is; which if it signify any Thing, must signify some Natural and Inbred Knowledge; which is exploded as a ridiculous Conceit by some great and profound Philosophers of our Age; who will allow no Innate Knowledge, but assert the...

— Sherlock, William (1639/40-1707)

Date: 1704

"Now I confess I am of Opinion, that the Mind is so far from being a Rasa Tabula, that it is plentifully furnished with all Ideas of Truth, which are the Seeds and Principles of all Knowledge we have, or ever shall have; that we cannot form any one true Notion, but what is founded in some ...

— Sherlock, William (1639/40-1707)

Date: 1720

"For as in the Body Politick, the Prince, (whom Seneca calls the Soul of the Commonwealth.) receiveth no Passages of State, or false Ones, where there is Negligence, or Disability in those subjectate Inquirers, (whom Xenophon terms the Eyes and Ears of Kings.) In like Manner the Soul of Man being...

— Hales, John (1584-1656)

Date: 1742 [see first edition, 1733]

"The Mind, like a Tabula rasa, easyly receives the first Impression; and, like that, when the first Impression is deeply made, it with Difficulty admits of an Erasement of the first Characters, which in some Minds are indelible"

— Cooke, Thomas (1703-1756)

Date: 1748

"Our LORD uses both Methods at once, in order to fit his Disciples for their Duty, to open their Eyes, to extend their Views, to extirpate Prejudices, to make every Man's Mind a rasa Tabula, or as his own Phrase is, to make plain the Ways of the LORD."

— Anonymous; [Lyttleton]

Date: 1761

"Yea, the Soul herself is radically deprav'd and essentially invenom'd by her Disunion from God, so that she is the Seat of Defilement in the human Composition; even the Soul of an Infant since the lapse of the Protoplasts is no more born as a Tabula rasa, nor is that Saying of an Orator "Homines...

— Hammond, William (1719-1783)

Date: 1761

"The great Mr. Locke has resembled the infant mind to a rasa tabula, as he expresses it a clean piece of paper, with no inscriptions, tho' susceptible of them."

— Stiles, Ezra (1727-1795)

Date: December 10, 1774; 1775

"Invention is one of the great marks of genius; but if we consult experience, we shall find, that it is by being conversant with the inventions of others, that we learn to invent; as by reading the thoughts of others we learn to think."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: 1780

"Not an indifferency to, or equilibrium betwixt right and wrong; for that had been to have a mixed, or no quality, a mere rasa tabula, to be impressed things extrinsical to it, without any understanding and choice of its own: Both which were foreign to the primitive state of man."

— Manners, Nicholas