Date: 1785
"If different religions be professed in the same country, and the minds of men remain unfettered and unawed by intimidations of law, that religion which is founded in maxims of reason and credibility, will gradually gain over the other to it."
preview | full record— Paley, William (1743-1805)
Date: 1786
"Add to this, that, whenever you sell the liberty of a man, you have the power only of alluding to the body: the mind cannot be confined or bound: it will be free, though its mansion be beset with chains."
preview | full record— Clarkson, Thomas (1760–1846)
Date: 1788-89
"The former [Platonic philosophy] fills the soul with intelligible light, breaks her lethargic fetters, and elevates her to the principle of things; the latter [Lockean philosophy] clouds the intellectual eye of the soul, by increasing her oblivion, strengthens her corporeal bands, and hurries he...
preview | full record— Taylor, Thomas (1758-1835)
Date: February 3, 1788
"The spirit of the Gospel 'proclaims liberty to the captive, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound:' but these men rivet the chains of slavery; 'the iron enters into the Negro's soul,' while while his mind is left in all the darkness of ignorance, without one ray of those comforts ...
preview | full record— Agutter, William (1758-835)
Date: 1793
"The genuine and wholsome state of mind is, to be unloosed from shackles, and to expand every fibre of its frame according to the independent and individual impressions of truth upon that mind."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1793
The extirpation of error "frees us from the influence of those phantoms which before misled us, shows us our true advantage as consisting in independence and integrity, and binds us by the general consent of our fellow citizens to the dictates of reason, more strongly than with fetters of iron."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1793
"We put shackles upon our minds, and dare not trust ourselves at large in the pursuit of truth."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1794
"And as these irritative ideas make up a part of the chain of our waking thoughts, introducing other ideas that engage our attention, though themselves are unattended to, we find it very difficult to investigate by what steps many of our hourly trains of ideas gain their admittance."
preview | full record— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)
Date: February, 1821
"Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity."
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)