Date: 1710, 1714

"Fancy in the mean while carry'd her point: For she was absolute over the Monarch; and had been too little talk'd to by her-self, to bear being reprov'd in Company. The Prince grew sullen; turn'd the Discourse; abhor'd the Profanation offer'd to his Sovereign-Empress; deliver'd up his Thoughts to...

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)

Date: 1710, 1714

"'Tis easy to bring the Hero's Case home to our-selves; and see, in the ordinary Circumstances of Life, how Love, Ambition, and the gayer Tribe of Fancys (as well as the gloomy and dark Specters of another sort) prevail over our Mind, 'Tis easy to observe how they work on us, when we refuse to be...

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)

Date: 1710, 1714

"For Nature will not be mock'd. The Prepossession against her can never be very lasting. Her Decrees and Instincts are powerful. She has a strong Party abroad; and as strong a one within our-selves."

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)

Date: 1731-2

"It is a kind of annihilation to have our minds made a tabula rasa, and to date our existence from a new period."

— Jortin, John (1698-1770)

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: 1760

"A man this emptied and vacuated of self-conceit, these lines of natural pride, being blotted out, the soul is as a Tabula rasa, an unwritten table, to receive any impression of the law of God, that he pleases to put on it; and then his words are all plain to him that understandeth, and right to ...

— Binning, Hugh (1627-1653)

Date: 1767

"He is now reduced to the greatest want and beggary, he is become a meer tabula rasa, a sheet of blank paper, a page of perfect inanity."

— Campbell, Archibald (bap. 1724, d. 1780)

Date: 1767

His existence is now at last in no danger of comminution, but then his powers are absolutely gone and quite evaporated. In a word, he is as dry and empty as a beer barrel after it has been some time set a-broach to a drunken mob at a general election."

— Campbell, Archibald (bap. 1724, d. 1780)

Date: 1794

"Emporium, a market-town; but metaphorically applied to the brain, which is the seat of all rational and sensitive transaction."

— Quincy, John (d. 1722)

Date: 1798

"Women have a frame of body more delicate and susceptible of impression than men, and, in proportion as they receive a less intellectual education, are more unreservedly under the empire of feeling."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)