Date: 1713, 1734

"We are chained to a body, that is to say, our perceptions are connected with corporeal motions."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1714

"Well then, I own my Heart has broke your Chains. / Patient I bore the painful Bondage long, / At length my generous Love disdains your Tyranny."

— Rowe, Nicholas (1674-1718)

Date: 1735-6

"Snatch'd by these wonders to that world where thought / Unfetter'd ranges, Fancy's magic hand / Led me anew o'er all the solemn scene, / Still in the mind's pure eye more solemn dress'd."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1748, 1754

"If we attend to that Curiosity, or prodigious Thirst of Knowledge, which is natural to the Mind in every Period of its Progress, and consider withal the endless Round of Business and Care, and the various Hardships to which the Bulk of Mankind are chained down, it is evident, that in this presen...

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1776-1789

"In the same manner [says Longinus] as some children always remain pigmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely confined; thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we ...

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1778

"A thirst for knowledge, which can never be gratified, would not have been implanted; a mind which was to be chained to the earth, would never have been bent on the skies"

— Caulfield (fl. 1778)

Date: 1778

"But, as an author of great fame / (I can't just recollect his name) / Has somewhere said, who seeks to bind / By force, or fraud, a woman's mind, / With locks, and bolts, and bars, and chains, / But gets his labour for his pains."

— Moore, Sir John Henry (1756-1780)

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...

— Taylor, Thomas (1758-1835)