Date: 1756-9

"From their cradle she instilled into them the most perfect maxims of piety, and contempt of the world. the ancient Romans dreaded nothing more in the education of youth than their being ill taught the first principles of the sciences; it being more difficult to unlearn the errours then imbibed, ...

— Butler, Alban (1709-1773)

Date: 1756

"This heart is become a mere rasa tabula; you must help it to the [GREEK CHARACTERS], you must lay in it the foundation of natural religion, (i.e. "the dictates of common sense, for natural religion, according to Mr. H. is nothing else,) if you would raise the superstr...

— Patten, Thomas (1714-1790)

Date: 1756

"But the Truth is, this unnatural Power corrupts both the Heart, and the Understanding. And to prevent the least Hope of Amendment, a King is ever surrounded by a Crowd of infamous Flatterers, who find their Account in keeping him from the least Light of Reason, till all Ideas of Rectitude and Ju...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1756, 1766

A recipe for sympathetic ink

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1746, 1757

"Shall He, to God / Dear as his Eye and Heart, engraven there / Deep from Eternity; alone Belov'd, / Alone Begotten! say, shall He become / A Man of Grief--for Man?"

— Thompson, William (bap. 1712, d.c. 1766)

Date: 1757

"Did I wait upon Bishop Gibson to acquaint him that I was a Free-thinker, that my mind was a tabula rasa!"

— Bower, Archibald (1686-1766)

Date: 1757

"And whatever any talk of (the rasa tabula,) an indifferency by nature, to virtue or vice: never could I find any such thing; but all men inclined the wrong way: and abundance of work, by discipline, and the grace of God, to make any one better than the rest."

— Jenks, Benjamin (bap. 1648, d. 1724)

Date: 1757-9

"[N]o Sentence so severe / As this, my Mind, much less my Paper, stains"

— Duncombe, John (1729-1786) [Editor]

Date: 1757

"Since, therefore, the mind of man appears of so loose and unsteddy a contexture, that, even at present, when so many persons find an interest in continually employing on it the chissel and the hammer, yet are they not able to engrave theological tenets with any lasting impression; how much more ...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: March 25, 1758

"Non, mon digne ami; ce n’est point sur quelques feuilles éparses qu’il faut aller chercher la loi de Dieu, mais dans le coeur de l’homme, où sa main daigna l’écrire. [It is not at all in a few sparse pages that we must seek for God's law, but in the human heart, where His hand deigned to write."

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)