Date: August 27, 1751
"The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1754
"This is the great intellectual province, wherein our minds range with much freedom, and often with exorbitant licence, in the pursuit of real or imaginary science."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1759
"His mighty mind travelled round the intellectual world; and, with a more than eagle's eye, saw, and has pointed out blank spaces, or dark spots in it, on which the human mind never shone."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: September 1, 1759.
"The incursions of troublesome thoughts are often violent and importunate; and it is not easy to a mind accustomed to their inroads to expel them immediately by putting better images into motion; but this enemy of quiet is above all others weakened by every defeat; the reflection which has been o...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)
"When the senses are gently and naturally shut up, and the command over the body intermitted, as in sleep, if we think at all we are said to dream; and generally wander through airy tracks of thought, which have no agreement with each other, nor are at all corrected by the judgment."
preview | full record— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)
Date: 1793
"Milton had perhaps wandered in the fields of fancy, and consoled his blindness with listening to the voice of his nation, that was to have resounded with his name."
preview | full record— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)