Tabula rasa, (Latin: “scraped tablet”—i.e., “clean slate”) in epistemology (theory of knowledge) and psychology, a supposed condition that empiricists have attributed to the human mind before ideas have been imprinted on it by the reaction of the senses to the external world of objects. Comparison of the mind to a blank writing tablet occurs in Aristotle’s De anima (4th century BCE; On the Soul), and the Stoics, as well as the Peripatetics (students at the Lyceum, the school founded by Aristotle), subsequently argued for an original state of mental blankness.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica