Date: Wednesday, July 2, 1712
"Perhaps there may not be room in the Brain for such a variety of Impressions, or the Animal Spirits may be incapable of figuring them in such a manner, as is necessary to excite so very large or very minute Ideas."
preview | full record— Addison, Joseph (1672-1719)
Date: 1713, 1734
"You cannot say objects are in your mind, as books in your study: or that things are imprinted on it, as the figure of a seal upon wax."
preview | full record— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)
Date: September 10, 1726
"To explain this, we must consider that the first Image which an outward Object imprints on our Brain is very slight; it resembles a thin Vapour which dwindles into nothing, without leaving the least track after it. But if the same Object successively offers itself several times, the Image it occ...
preview | full record— Arbuckle, James (d. 1742)
Date: 1741
"So for Instance, in Children; they perceive and forget a hundred Things in an Hour; the Brain is so soft that it receives immediately all Impressions like Water or liquid Mud, and retains scarce any of them: All the Traces, Forms or Images which are drawn there, are immediately effaced or closed...
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1759
"His mind is continually occupied with what is too grand and solemn, to leave any room for the impressions of those frivolous objects, which fill up the attention of the dissipated and the gay."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1762
"In the latter passage, the most striking circumstances are selected to fill the mind with the grand and terrible. The former is a collection of minute and low circumstances, which scatter the thought and make no impression."
preview | full record— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)
Date: 1767
"A Poet, on the other hand, who is possessed of original Genius, feels in the strongest manner every impression made upon the mind, by the influence of external objects on the senses, or by reflection on those ideas which are treasured up in the repository of the memory, and is consequently quali...
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)