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In the latter, the Pagan form was adopted and improved; but with respect to the former, she made a tabula rasa, and descended to the rudest efforts of daubing and carving. The shapes, both of men and animals, were awkward, cumbrous, and unnatural; every part was out of proportion, and the most solemn scenes acquired a ludicrous grotesqueness.
Other fragments of deep interest are preserved by Augustine. One, showing the conception of the state religion as a purely human institution, explains why human antiquities are placed before divine, "Sicut prior est pictor quam tabula picta, prior faber quam aedificium; ita priores sunt civitates, quam ea quae a civitatibus instituta sunt."
Blind, passive, literal, unintelligent obedience is the basis on which the whole system of Western education has been reared. The child must distrust himself absolutely, must realise that he is as helpless as he is ignorant, before he can begin to profit by the instruction that will be given to him. His mind must become a tabula rasa before his teacher can begin to write on it.
Without having written a treatise on the Æolic digamma, probably the reader is aware that F is V, and that, in many languages, B and V are interchangeable letters through thousands of words, as the Italian tavola, from the Latin tabula. Under that little process it was that the Greek baskaino transmigrated into the Latin fascino; so that St. Apparently she was not so much a Medea as an Erichtho.
And then a host of vividly-pictured images began to succeed each other with frightful rapidity across the tabula rasa of her mind. It seemed to her in that quiet hour she saw her son as he walked dawn the dark road to Dunmuir. The moon was just rising; the trees on either hand lifted their gaunt branches to a wild and starless sky.
The chemical plate has two advantages over the human retina: First, it is sensitive to rays which are utterly powerless to produce any visual effect; next, it can accumulate impression almost indefinitely, while from the retina they fade after one-tenth part of a second, leaving it a continually renewed tabula rasa.
And we have thus shown that it has two functions. One is to endow sublunar nature with the intelligence and purpose visible in its processes and evolutions; the other is to enable the rational power in man to rise from a tabula rasa to an actual intellect with a content. From both these activities it is evident that the Active Intellect has a knowledge of sublunar creation as a systematic unity.
Indeed I shall no longer look upon a petticoat, unless I am able first entirely to spiritualise it. It must first be disinfected of every earthly thought. Yes, I am once more a young man, sound in wind and limb, with not a tooth or an illusion lost, my mind tabula rasa, my heart to be had for the asking. Oh, come, ye merry, merry maidens! The fairy prince is on the fairy road. Incipit vita nuova!
Many years afterwards when I and my wife saw Pulszky at Pesth, and were talking of old times, he reminded me of this person; and on my doubting that any man in his senses could believe in the practicability of the extreme Nihilist theories, he instanced our old acquaintance, saying, "Yes, there is a man, who in his very inmost conscience believes that no good of any sort can be achieved for humanity till the sponge shall have been passed over all that men have instituted and done, and a perfect tabula rasa has been substituted for it!"
Such is the pretension and the boast of this new Peter the Hermit, who would get rid of all we have done in the way of improvement on a state of barbarous ignorance, or still more barbarous prejudice, in order to begin again on a tabula rasa of Calvinism, and have a world of his own making.
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