Editing Tabula rasa (section)

=== Descartes (17th century) ===
[[René Descartes|Descartes]], in his work ''[[The Search for Truth by Natural Light]]'', summarizes an empiricist view in which he uses the words ''table rase'',<ref>{{Cite web |title=Recherche de la vérité par les lumières naturelles - Wikisource |url=https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Recherche_de_la_v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9_par_les_lumi%C3%A8res_naturelles |access-date=2022-05-11 |website=fr.m.wikisource.org |language=fr}}</ref> in French; in the following English translation, this was rendered ''tabula rasa'':

<blockquote>All that seems to me to explain itself very clearly if we compare children's imagination to a ''tabula rasa'' on which our ideas, which resemble portraits of each object taken from nature, should depict themselves. The senses, the inclinations, our masters and our intelligence, are the various painters who have the power to execute this work; and amongst them, those who are least adapted to succeed in it, i.e., the imperfect senses, blind instinct, and foolish nurses, are the first to mingle themselves with it. There finally comes the best of all, intelligence, and yet it is still requisite for it to have an apprenticeship of several years, and to follow the example of its masters for long, before daring to rectify a single one of their errors. In my opinion this is one of the principal causes of the difficulty we experience in attaining to true knowledge. For our senses really perceive that alone which is most coarse and common; our natural instinct is entirely corrupted; and as to our masters, although there may no doubt be very perfect ones found amongst them, they yet cannot force our minds to accept their reasoning before our understanding has examined it, for the accomplishment of this end pertains to it alone. But it is like a clever painter who might have been called upon to put the last touches on a bad picture sketched out by prentice hands, and who would probably have to employ all the rules of his art in correcting little by little first a trait here, then a trait there, and finally be required to add to it from his own hand all that was lacking, and who yet could not prevent great faults from remaining in it, because from the beginning the picture would have been badly conceived, the figures badly placed, and the proportions badly observed.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Descartes |first=René |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/37600400 |title=Key philosophical writings |date=1997 |publisher=Wordsworth Editions Ltd |isbn=1-85326-470-9 |location=Hertfordshire |oclc=37600400}}</ref></blockquote>