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Updated: September 21, 2025
For these new nations are as a tabula rasa; they easily accept the beliefs of our religion and discard their barbarous and primitive rusticity after contact with our compatriots.
Indeed, the tree, whether in planks, bark, or leaves, seems in ancient times to have afforded the principal materials for writing on. Hence the word codex, originally signifying the "trunk or stem of a tree," now means a manuscript volume. Tabula, which properly means a "plank" or "board," now also signifies the plate of a book, and was so used by Addison, who calls his plates "tables."
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.
Our method of supplying the means, too, is peculiar. Instead of making a tabula rasa, and beginning from the foundations, we utilise to the utmost what we happen to possess, and add merely what is absolutely indispensable.
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.
This northern half of the great American continent, however, seems to have been kept back by Nature as a tabula rasa, a clean blackboard, on which the great problem of civil government might be worked out, without any of the incongruous drawbacks which have cast perplexity and despair upon those who have undertaken its solution in the elder world.
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.
It may be fairly claimed that to this extent he occupied common ground with the sensationalists, in that he was an adherent of the tabula rasa view of the Mind, expressed in the maxim: Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit in sensu.
Then I rooted out the shrubbery; did away with the fowl-house, using its materials to build two little sheds against the back fence; dug up the potato-garden made tabula rasa, in fact; dismissed my labourers, and considered. I meant to be my own gardener. But already, sixteen years ago, I had a dislike of stooping. To kneel was almost as wearisome.
By such simple exercises the mind learns how to rest and refresh itself. Its quickness of apprehension and its retentive power are considerably increased, for words and facts imprinted on it when by the suppression of its ordinary activities it has thus been made a tabula rasa remain fixed and clear.
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