tabula rasa, inepistemology (theory of knowledge) andpsychology, a supposed condition thatempiricists have attributed to the humanmind beforeideas have been imprinted on it by the reaction of thesenses to the external world of objects.

Comparison of the mind to a blank writing tablet occurs inAristotle’sDe anima (4th centurybce;On the Soul), and theStoics as well as thePeripatetics (students at theLyceum, the school founded by Aristotle) subsequently argued for an original state of mental blankness. Both theAristotelians and theStoics, however, emphasized those faculties of the mind orsoul that, having been only potential or inactive before receiving ideas from the senses, respond to the ideas by anintellectual process and convert them into knowledge.

A new and revolutionary emphasis on the tabula rasa occurred late in the 17th century, when the English empiricistJohn Locke, inAn Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), argued for the mind’s initial resemblance to “white paper, void of all characters,” with “all thematerials of reason and knowledge” derived from experience. Locke did not believe, however, that the mind is literally blank or empty prior to experience, and almost no other empiricist has taken such an extreme position. Locke himself acknowledged an innate power of “reflection” (awareness of one’s own ideas, sensations,emotions, and so on) as a means ofexploiting the materials given by experience as well as a limited realm ofa priori (nonexperiential) knowledge, which he nevertheless regarded as “trifling” and essentially empty of content (e.g., “soul is soul” and “every man is an animal”). The 18th-century Scottish empiricistDavid Hume held similar views. Suitably qualified notions of the tabula rasa remained influential in British and subsequently Anglo-American (analytic)philosophy through the mid-20th century.