Date: 1748, 1749

"'Tis thus the brain, that matrix, if I may use the expression, of the soul, is perverted after its manner, together with that of the body."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"The mind has, as well as the body, its epidemical and scorbutic disorders."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"By its flattering pencil the cold skeleton of abstract reason assumes living and vermillion flesh; but it the sciences flourish, arts are embellished, woods speak, echoes sigh, rocks weep, marble breathes, and all the inanimate bodies are suddenly inspired with life."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Besides what would the very best school avail without a matrix perfectly open for the entrance, or conception of ideas? It is as impossible to give a single idea or notion to a man, deprived of his senses, as it is to get a woman with child, to whom nature in a hurry has denied a womb; as I once...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Such is the chaos, such the rapid and continual succession of our ideas; they drive one another successively, as one wave impels another; so that it the imagination does not employ a part of its muscles, poised as it were in an equilibrium upon the strings of the brain, so as to sustain itself s...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"'Tis this which is the source of all our sentiments, of all our pleasures, passions, and thoughts; for the brain has its proper muscles for thinking, as well as the legs have theirs for walking."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1759

The mind sees the truth as the eye sees light

— Alembert, Jean le Rond d' (1717-1783)

Date: 1762

"The legislative power is the heart of the State; the executive power is its brain, which causes the movement of all the parts."

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)

Date: 1762

"The public force therefore needs an agent of its own to bind it together and set it to work under the direction of the general will, to serve as a means of communication between the State and the Sovereign, and to do for the collective person more or less what the union of soul and body does for...

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)