United States or Ethiopia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


It makes me really believe that the smallest illness would destroy my memory, and wipe out all my previous existence, when I see with what ease I become a stranger to myself, and fall back once more into the condition of a blank sheet, a tabula rasa.

Moreover, neither the mind nor the will is a tabula rasa; no mature person comes to a work of art without certain habits and preferences already predetermined, which no mere imagination can destroy, but only, if at all, some concrete opportunity and temptation. Hence men can lead a manifold life, partly in the imagination and partly in action, without any corruption of heart or paralysis of will.

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.

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.

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.

The knowing mind was only a passive recipient of impressions thus imparted to it. It was as wax under the stylus, tabula rasa, clean paper waiting to be written upon. Kant departed from this radically. He declared that all cognition rests upon the union of the mind's activity with its receptivity.

Latin is the stiffer tongue; it is by nature at once laconic and grandiloquent, and the exceptional condensation and transposition of which it is capable make its effects entirely foreign to a modern, scarcely inflected, tongue. Take, for instance, these lines of Horace: me tabula sacer votiva paries indicat uvida suspendisse potenti vestimenta maris deo,

But the first attempt to gather facts of this order into a whole, and to coordinate them into a series of generalizations, or laws of Geographical Distribution, is not a century old, and is contained in the "Specimen Zoologiae Geographicae Quadrupedum Domicilia et Migrationes sistens," published, in 1777, by the learned Brunswick Professor, Eberhard Zimmermann, who illustrates his work by what he calls a "Tabula Zoographica," which is the oldest distributional map known to me.

Semitic admixture Closed fist and open hand 'Tabula rasa' Necessity of evil Hymn of Cleanthes Things indifferent Ideal and real Philosophy and humanity The city was Greek, but with a large Phoenician admixture.

He is right also in asserting that our simple ideas at least are innate, and in rejecting the Tabula rasa of Aristotle and of Mr. Locke.