Tabula Rasa and Temporality

'Tabula rasa' is best known as a cardinal thesis of Locke's Empiricism, a characterization of the human mind at birth. Less appreciated is how it is a thesis that has been generalized to other phases of experience, by not only Locke, but by most rival theories, as well. For, wherever a mental event, regardless of its genesis--an effect, a representation, a proposition, a phenomenon, etc.--is treated as a datum that is independent of others, mind is presupposed as receiving it as a blank slate, even beyond the moment of birth. For example, the independence of the datum 'cold' becomes plain when contrasted with the datum 'cooler', which is clearly conditioned by its antecedents, and it is difficult to find a theory, even Bergson's, that does not treat every new mental datum as similarly independent of what has preceded it. Such recursive Tabula Rasa thus entails a Temporality that consists of a sequence of unrelated moments, thereby preempting the possibility of a concept of Temporality as fundamentally cumulative.