Date: 380-360 B.C.
"[T]here is in every soul an organ or instrument of knowledge that is purified and kindled afresh by such studies when it has been destroyed and blinded by our ordinary pursuits, a faculty whose preservation outweighs ten thousand eyes, for by it only is reality beheld."
preview | full record— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Date: 1257
"Consequently, while original sin is a disease infecting both elements, the personal and the physical - the personal through the will and the physical through the flesh - the stain of original sin is blotted out in the soul, while on the other hand the infection and its consequences remain in the...
preview | full record— St. Bonaventure [born Giovanni di Fidanza] (1217-1274)
Date: 1641
"I am not that structure of limbs which is called a human body. I am not even some thin vapour which permeates the limbs - a wind, fire, air, breath, or whatever I depict in my imagination; for these are things which I have supposed to be nothing."
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1657
Fancy is "The roving, pregnant, busie, teeming sence."
preview | full record— Poole, Joshua (c.1615–c.1656)
Date: 1682
"Our Passions are nothing else but certain Disallowable Motions of the Mind; Sudden, and Eager; which, by Frequency, and Neglect, turn to a Disease; as a Distillation brings us first to a Cough, and then to a Phthisick."
preview | full record— L'Estrange, Sir Roger (1616-1704)
Date: 1691
"Trade is the very Life and Soul of the Universe, which, like the Vital Blood in the Body, Circulates to the Health, and well-being of the whole, and when by the failure of Industry, there is a stop put to Commerce, it often proves as fatal to the Body Politick, as the stagnating of the Blood doe...
preview | full record— Blount, Thomas Pope, Sir (1649-1697)
Date: 1692
"He has clearly overthrown all those Metaphysical Whymsies, which infected mens Brains with a Spice of Madness, whereby they feign'd a Knowledge where they had none, by making a noise with Sounds, without clear and distinct Significations."
preview | full record— Molyneux, William (1656-1698)
Date: 1697
"St. Austin names Memory the Soul's Belly or Storehouse, or the Receptacle of the Mind, because it is appointed to receive and lay up as in a Treasury, those things that may be for our Benefit and Advantage."
preview | full record— D'Assigny, Marius (1643-1717)
Date: 1708, 1714
"They are certainly as ill Physicians in the Body-Politick, who wou'd needs be tampering with these mental Eruptions; and under the specious pretence of healing this Itch of Superstition, and saving Souls from the Contagion of Enthusiasm, shou'd set all Nature in an uproar, and turn a few innocen...
preview | full record— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)
Date: Tuesday, January 22, 1712
"Our Operator, before he engaged in this Visionary Dissection, told us, that there was nothing in his Art more difficult than to lay open the Heart of a Coquet, by reason of the many Labyrinths and Recesses which are to be found in it, and which do not appear in the Heart of any other Animal."
preview | full record— Addison, Joseph (1672-1719)