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So far as Nature was concerned, the Mind was regarded as a tabula rasa, and the physician set himself to ascertain the laws of nature not by reflection upon his own mental processes or requirements, but by experiment with and observation of natural processes themselves. The result has been the establishment of modern science the greatest triumph which the human mind has yet achieved.
Thenceforth the only effort was to secure a tabula rasa on which to rear that new and perfect state of which the model was at hand, if only the proper materials could be found and the foundations be laid. Of the men who acquired a temporary mastery, three only, by the massive force of practical genius, were able to free themselves from the fascination of the common ideal.
Actually it is a tabula rasa, an empty slate, a blank paper. Hence it is called hylic or material intellect, because it is like matter which in itself is nothing actual but is potentially everything, being capable of receiving any form and becoming any real object. As matter receives sensible forms, so the material intellect acquires intelligible forms, i. e., thoughts, ideas, concepts.
In this, as in all other matters, the continuity between Romano-British and English times is far greater than it is generally represented to be. The English invasion was a cruel and a desolating one, no doubt; but it could not and it did not sweep away wholly the old order of things, or blot out all the past annals of Britain, so as to prepare a tabula rasa on which Mr.
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.
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.
These fundamental principles were published by Imperial command on September 29th, 1862 a year and a half after the publication of the Emancipation Manifesto and on November 20th, 1864, the new legislation founded on these principles received the Imperial sanction. Like most institutions erected on a tabula rasa, the new system is at once simple and symmetrical.
What he must admire, and love if he could, was "equilibrium," the void, the tabula rasa, into which, through all those apparent energies of man and nature, that in truth are but forces of disintegration, the world was really settling. And, himself a mere circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the clay of the potter was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect to be "loved in return."
But thus far he has laid only the foundation, has acquired only rudiments and generalities, has only served his apprenticeship to letters. God gave mind and nature, but art has furnished him a new capacity and a new world, the capacity to read, and the world of books. He has simply acquired a new nature, a psychological texture of letters, but the artificial tabula rasa has yet to be filled.
"But if as would undoubtedly happen each adoptive parent spent his six months in undoing the other's work, it must follow that, at the end of any given period, the child's mind would be a mere tabula rasa.
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