Tabula Rasa
Locke's doctrine that the mind at birth is a blank slate, with all ideas derived from sensation or reflection — the founding statement of empiricism.
Tabula rasa, Latin for blank slate, names John Locke's empiricist account of the mind in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Locke argues that the mind at birth is empty of ideas: there are no innate principles, no innate knowledge of God, no innate moral truths. All ideas come from one of two sources: sensation (the impressions of the external world) or reflection (the mind's awareness of its own operations).
The doctrine was developed against the rationalist tradition of innate ideas associated with Descartes and the seventeenth-century Cartesians. Leibniz wrote the New Essays on Human Understanding as a sustained reply, arguing that the mind has innate dispositional truths present as veins in marble. The tabula rasa framework shaped Hume's empiricism, Mill's psychology, and the broader Anglo-American tradition. The metaphor itself goes back to Aristotle's De Anima, but Locke gave it the canonical modern statement.