Date: 1594

"O, that delightful engine of her thoughts, / That blabbed them with such pleasing eloquence, / Is torn from forth that pretty hollow cage / Where, like a sweet melodious bird, it sung / Sweet varied notes, enchanting every ear."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1605

"But from whatsoever root or cause this restiveness of mind proceedeth, it is a thing most prejudicial; and nothing is more politic than to make the wheels of our mind concentric and voluble with the wheels of fortune."

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: 1630

"The apostle tells us that this love is the fulfilling of the law, not that it is enough to love our brother and so no further; but in regard of the excellency of his parts giving any motion to the other as the soul to the body and the power it hath to set all the faculties at work in the outward...

— Winthrop, John (1588–1649)

Date: 1641

"As I have just used it, 'nature' is simply a label which depends on my thought; it is quite extraneous to the things to which it is applied, and depends simply on my comparison between the idea of a sick man and a badly-made clock, and the idea of a healthy man and a well-made clock."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1641

"Yet a clock constructed with wheels and weights observes all the laws of its nature just as closely when it is badly made and tells the wrong time as when it completely fulfils the wishes of the clockmaker. In the same way, I might consider the body of a man as a kind of machine equipped with an...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1651, 1668

"For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?"

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1664

"I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"Indeed, one may compare the nerves of the machine I am describing with the pipes in the works of these fountains, its muscles and tendons with the various devices and springs which serve to set them in motion, its animal spirits with the water which drives them, the heart with the source of the ...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"And finally, when a rational soul is present in this machine it will have its principal seat in the brain, and reside there like the fountain-keeper who must be stationed at the tanks to which the fountain's pipes return if he wants to produce, or prevent, or change their movements in some way."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"Now I maintain that when God unites a rational soul to this machine (in a way that I intend to explain later) he will place its principal seat in the brain, and will make its nature such that the soul will have different sensations corresponding to the different ways in which the entrances to th...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)