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It is undeniable that English philosophy in Leibnitz's time had the general character which he ascribes to it. The phenomena of nature were held to be resolvable into the attractions and the repulsions of particles of matter; all knowledge was attained through the senses; the mind antecedent to experience was a tabula rasa.
Apart from this inherited predestination the soul is held to present itself, in Locke's classical phrase, as a tabula rasa upon which are stamped all manner of external impressions. The similarity between this modern picture of man and the earlier theological one is striking.
The Bearer answers for the MackInnans, MackLeods of Rasa at least . . . . . 300 The Bearer answers for the Chisolms . . . 200 The Bearer answers for the Robertsons . . . 250 Camerons . . . 500 Stuart of Alpin . . . 250 McNeals of Barra . . . 150 MackPhersons . . . 350 McIntoshes . . . 350 Frazers . . . 400 MackGregors . . . 200 Athol men, at least . . . 500 Out of Brodulbin . . . . 300
All the rest is his own look-out. If you prepossess your mind with a theme, you do not give him an even chance. You must offer him in the beginning a tabula rasa, a fair field, and then it is his business to go in and win your attention; and if he cannot, let him pay the costs, for the fault is his own. This also is torture, but its name is Zoar, a little one. There is yet another way.
Woodward then rode on, reflecting on the novel and extraordinary character of this hypocritical old villain, in whose withered and repulsive visage he could not discover a single trace of anything that intimated the existence of sympathy with his kind. As to that, it was a tabula rasa, blank of all feelings except those which characterize the hyena and the fox.
The doings and actions of last year are as uninteresting and vague to me as the blank gulf of the future, the tabula rasa that may never be anything else. I remember a confused hotch-potch of unconnected events, a "chaos without form, and void"; but nothing salient or striking rises from the dead level of "flat, stale, and unprofitable" generality.
Nay, and if any one thing is more probable than another, in the great TABULA RASA, or unknown land, which we are fain to call the biography of Villon, it seems probable enough that he may have gone upon a visit to Charles of Orleans.
This: you have made a sort of tabula rasa within yourself, and are ready to hear a sermon on morality that you will hear nowhere else; for mankind in the mass are even more consummate hypocrites than any one individual can be when his interests demand a piece of acting. Most of us spend a good part of our lives in clearing our minds of the notions that sprang up unchecked during our nonage.
Yet the ambiguous term sensible ideas unfortunately led to their being regarded as ideas derived, not from our action in any form, but from pure sensation alone. This extraordinary error was intensified in the speculation of Berkeley and Hume. Experience with them appeared to consist solely of a succession of sensations appearing to, impressing, or affecting a tabula rasa of consciousness.
In reality they made a tabula rasa of the existing organisation. If the introduction of public oral procedure and trial by jury was a return to ancient customs, it was a return to what had been long since forgotten by all except antiquarian specialists, and no serious attempt was made to develop what actually existed.
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