St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq.

London

1754

"This is the great intellectual province, wherein our minds range with much freedom, and often with exorbitant licence, in the pursuit of real or imaginary science."

[...] In like manner, an action which we see performed, as in the case of killing mentioned above, gives an idea no doubt; but this idea, in the respect in which it is considered here, is nothing more than a hint to the mind, that passes from a bare perception of the action to contemplate of the circumstances of it, and all the relations both of the action, and of the actors, and so frames by reflection, without the concurrence of sensation, ideas and notions, of another kind, both particular and general. This is the great intellectual province, wherein our minds range with much freedom, and often with exorbitant licence, in the pursuit of real or imaginary science. We add ideas to ideas, and notions to notions of all these; we acquire at length such a multitude as astonishes the mind itself, and is both for number and variety inconceivable.
(Essay I, §4; vol. iii, p. 408)

Geography::Province Motion::Ranging

Reading

At least 5 entries in ESTC (1754, 1777, 1793).

See "Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq." in the third volume of David Mallet's The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (London : [s.n.], Printed in the Year 1754). <Link to ESTC><Link to ESTC>

Text from the third volume of The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (Dublin: Printed by P. Byrne: 1793). <Link to Google Books>

Reading also in the 1967 reprint of The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1844).

03/14/2014