Date: 1764

"No: if you will be a true member of this church, you must give up your reason, and even the testimony of your senses too; as appears notoriously in the affair of transubstantiation."

— Murray, James (1732-1782)

Date: 1765

"Une pierre de marbre qui a des veines plutôt que d'une pierre de marbre tout unie ou de tablettes vides, c'est-à-dire de ce qui s'appelle tabula rasa chez les philosophes."

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

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

"Modern philosophers give them other fine names and Julius Scaliger, in particular, used to call them "seeds of eternity" and also "zopyra"--meaning living fires or flashes of light hidden inside us but made visible by stimulation of the senses, as sparks can be struck by steel."

— 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: 1765

"That is, a sentient or thinking being is not a mechanical thing like a watch or a mill: one cannot conceive of sizes and shapes and motions combining mechanically to produce something which thinks, and senses too, in a mass where [formerly] there was nothing of the kind--something which would li...

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)