Date: 1664

"You can think of our machine's heart and arteries, which push the animal spirits into the cavities of its brain, as being like the bellows of an organ, which push air into the wind-chests; and you can think of external objects, which stimulate certain nerves and cause spirits contained in the ca...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"That is to say, it is only the latter figures which should be taken to be the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"I should like you to consider, after this, all the functions I have ascribed to this machine -- such as the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the limbs, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by the external sense organs of light, so...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1667

"For, though Man's Soul, and Body are not onely one natural Engine (as some have thought) of whose motions of all sorts, there may be as certain an accompt given, as those of a Watch or a Clock"

— Sprat, Thomas (bap. 1635, d. 1713)

Date: 1673

"The methodical Block-head that is as regular as a Clock, and as little knows why he is so, is the man cut out by Nature and Fortune for business and government."

— Shadwell, Thomas (1642-1692)

Date: 1676

The understanding argues before the will can choose and "the last Dictate of the Judgment sways / The Will, as in a Balance, the last Weight / Put in the Scale, lifts up the other end"

— Shadwell, Thomas (1642-1692)

Date: 1678, 2nd edition in 1743

"But as for that prodigious paradox of Atheists, that cogitation itself is nothing but local motion or mechanism, we could not have thought it possible, that ever any many should have given entertainment to such a conceit, but that this was rather a meer slander raised upon Atheists."

— Cudworth, Ralph (1617-1688)

Date: 1680

"'Tis an Error as groundless as Vulgar, to think that there goes no more to the furnishing a Poet, than a Wind-mill in the Head, a Stream of Tattle, and convenient Confidence; whereas no Exercise of the Soul requires a more compos'd Thought, more sparingness of Words, more Modesty and Caution in ...

— Tate, Nahum (c. 1652-1715)

Date: 1686, 1689, 1697

"Let us but consider a little the Receptacles of Images, the Regions of Imagination, the curious formation in all the Instruments of Sense; to which we may add the activity and subtlety of the Spirits, the delicate Contexture of the Nerves, the various Articulations of the Voice, the Harmony of F...

— Nourse, Timothy (c.1636–1699)

Date: 1686, 1689, 1697

"No less inquisitive have they been about the first Principle of Life, which sets the Wheels of this curious Engine on Work."

— Nourse, Timothy (c.1636–1699)