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When national character and surrounding circumstances operate it is not on a tabula rasa, but on one already bearing imprints. According as this tabula is taken at one or at another moment so is the imprint different, and this suffices to render the total effect different.
The irenic character of the Augsburg Confession was owing to this principle. The Reformed Churches, on the other hand, made a tabula rasa of history, and, ignoring even the legitimate contributions of the Christian centuries, professed to return to apostolical simplicity, and to accept for their church-life only that which was explicitly prescribed by the Holy Scriptures.
The attribute of Rasa attaches to the waters which are, again, liquid. It is from Him that Heat or Light having the attribute of form or vision has arisen. It attaches itself to the sun in consequence of which the Sun becomes able to shine and give heat. It is from that illustrious and foremost of Beings that Touch also has arisen.
Cockrell, really made the first distinct mark I can detect on the tabula rasa of my memory, by giving me a charming pasteboard figure of a little girl, to whose serene and sweetly smiling countenance, and pretty person, a whole bookful of painted pasteboard petticoats, cloaks, and bonnets could be adapted; it was a lovely being, and stood artlessly by a stile, an image of rustic beauty and simplicity.
The very emphasis of those objects, their importunity to the eye, the ear, the finite intelligence, was but the measure of their distance from what really is. One's personal presence, the presence, such as it is, of the most incisive things and persons around us, could only lessen by so much, that which really is. To restore tabula rasa, then, by a continual effort at self-effacement!
And this the French socialists, misled by a priori notions, attempted to do, on the theory of the Contrat-Social, as if they had a tabula rasa, without regarding the existing constituents of society, or traditions, or historical growths. Equality, as a phrase, having done duty as a dissolvent, was pressed into service as a constructor.
If the exclusion of the parts were necessary to the grandeur of the whole composition, if the more entire this exclusion, if the more like a tabula rasa, a vague, undefined, shadowy and abstracted representation the picture was, the greater the grandeur, there could be no danger of pushing this principle too far, and going the full length of Sir Joshua's theory without any restrictions or mental reservations.
So undecided were the parties about that type that the author had to leave it altogether an open question a tabula rasa not announcing that his hero was either tall or short, fat or lean, pale or rosy; all he commits himself to in his opening chapter is that he was bald, that he wore tights and gaiters, and, what is rather singular, circular spectacles.
His mind was that exquisite TABULA RASA that a university education sometimes leaves, but he had both energy and influence, so he used his former ability as a dodging half-back in twisting through Wall Street crowds as runner for a bank. His diversion was women. They had met on a ferry-boat. "Do you come over often?" he inquired casually. "Just to shop," she said shyly.
London, of course, was even more amazing than Edinburgh. They had a day to spend there, and the doctor took her to Regent Street and Bond Street in the morning. He was enjoying himself in a melancholy sort of fashion. Marcella was tabula rasa. It was interesting to watch the impressions registered on her surface. The shops gave her none of the acquisitive pleasure he had expected.
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