1690s
Showing 40 works across all media from the 1690s
Iphigenia; Phaedra; Athaliah
Phaedra confesses she wants her stepson, a father is ordered to sacrifice his daughter for a favorable wind, and a hidden boy threatens a usurping queen. Racine packs this into polite rhymed couplets.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Nothing is in the mind at birth, Locke says. It is blank paper, and everything you know arrives through the senses or through watching your mind work. British empiricism runs out from there.
Look round the habitable world! how few Know their own good; or knowing it, pursue.
The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine
La Fontaine rewrote Aesop's animals as a comedy of French manners: the ant turns the cicada away, the fox flatters the crow out of his cheese. French children still learn them by heart.
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom.
Nature never makes excellent things for mean or no uses.