"The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity."
— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Place of Publication
London
Date
1754
Metaphor
"The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity."
Metaphor in Context
Our complex ideas being assemblages of simple ideas, that have often no other connection except that which the mind gives them, we might be easily led to conceive the difficulty of this task by a base reflection on the weakness of memory, and if I may say so, on the seeming caprice of this faculty, before we were made sensible of it by repeated experiences. The ideas that are lodged there begin to fade almost as soon as they are framed. They are continually slipping from us, or shifting their forms; and if the objects that excited some did not often renew them, and if we had not a power to recall others before they are gone too far out of the mind, we should lose our simple, and much more our complex ideas, and all our notions would become confused and obscure. The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity. But our case is not so bad. They are often renewed, and we can recall them as often as we please. There is, however, a difference between the renewing of them, and the recalling of them. When ideas are renewed by the same objects that excited them first in the mind, they are renewed such as they were [...]
(Essay I, ยง4; vol. iii, p. 418)
(Essay I, ยง4; vol. iii, p. 418)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
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).
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).
Date of Entry
03/14/2014
