Date: 1794

"Whereas a due exercise of the faculties of the mind strengthens and improves those faculties, whether of imagination or recollection; as the exercise of our limbs in dancing or fencing increases the strength and agility of the muscles thus employed."

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)

Date: 1794

"[T]he thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1798

"The original plan of Mary, respecting her residence in France, had no precise limits in the article of duration; the single purpose she had in view being that of an endeavour to heal her distempered mind."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1802

"With my inward eye 'tis an old man grey, / With my outward a thistle across the way."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1808

"The Soul awakes; and, wond'ring, sees / In her mild Hand the golden Key."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1817

"My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above the ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1820

"Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne / In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer, / And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane, / Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1822

"I see him plainly with my Minds Eye."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1831

"In the ruminations of the inner man, and the dissecting our thoughts and desires, we employ our intellectual arithmetic, we add, and subtract, and multiply, and divide, without asking the aid, without adverting to the existence, of our joints and members"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)