Date: 1594

"I deny not but lewd and wicked custom, beginning perhaps at the first amongst few, afterwards spreading into greater multitudes, and so continuing from time to time, may be of force even in plain things to smother the light of natural understanding; because men will not bend their wits to examin...

— Hooker, Richard (1554-1600)

Date: MS. 1640, 1650

"[T]here is no doubt, if the true doctrine concerning the law of nature, and the properties of a body politic, and the nature of law in general, were perspicuously set down, and taught in the Universities, but that young men, who come thither void of prejudice, and whose minds are yet as white pa...

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: MS. 1640, 1650

"For certainly men are not otherwise so unequal in capacity as the evidence is unequal of what is taught by the mathematicians, and what is commonly discoursed of in other books: and therefore if the minds of men were all of white paper, they would almost equally be disposed to acknowledge whatso...

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1652

"I speak now in relation between the Oppressor and the oppressed; the inward bondages I meddle not with in this place, though I am assured that, if it be rightly searched into, the inward bondages of the mind, as covetousness, pride, hypocrisy, envy, sorrow, fears, desperation and madness, are al...

— Winstanley, Gerrard (bap. 1609, d. 1676)

Date: w. 1663, 1954 publication

"Without the help and assistance of the senses [the mind] can achieve nothing more than a labourer working in darkness behind shuttered windows"

— Locke, John (1632-1704)

Date: 1667

"And yet those Souls, when first they met, / Lookt out at windows through the Eyes."

— Philips [née Fowler], Katherine (1632-1664)

Date: 1672, 1727

"The Obligation arises no otherwise from the Love of our Happiness, than the Truth of Propositions concerning the Existence of Things natural, and of their First Cause, which is thence discover'd, arises from the Credit given to the Testimony of our Senses."

— Cumberland, Richard (1632-1718)

Date: 1681

The Law of Nature has often been "described and discoursed in metaphorical and allusive Expressions, such as Engravings, and Inscriptions, and the Tables of the Heart."

— Parker, Samuel (1640-1688)

Date: 1681

"Also the ignorance of what is Equity in their own causes, which Equity not one Man in a thousand ever Studied, and the Lawyers themselves seek not for their Judgments in their own Breasts, but in the precedents of former Judges, as the Antient Judges sought the same, not in their own Reason, but...

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1701

"For I will here suppose the Soul, or Mind of Man, to be at first, rasa Tabula, like fair paper, that hath no connate Character or Idea's imprinted upon it (as that Learned Theorist Mr. Lock hath, I suppose, fully proved) and that it is not sensible of any thing at its coming...

— Cumberland, Richard (1632-1718)