Date: 1641

A geometrical argument fills the mind and allows one to see everything at a single glance

— Mersenne, Marin (1588-1648)

Date: 1641

A calm mind, free from the hurly-burly of external things, may fix its gaze on itself

— Arnauld, Antoine (1612-1694)

Date: 1641

"Now if we are to become aware of something, it is necessary for the thing to act on the cognitive faculty by transmitting its semblance to the faculty or by informing the faculty with its semblance. Hence it seems clear that the faculty itself, not being outside itself, cannot transmit a semblan...

— Gassendi, Pierre (1592-1655)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"We can best learn how mental intuition is to be employed by comparing it with ordinary vision."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1696

"Pray is not the Face the Mirror of the Mind?"

— Motteux, Peter Anthony (1663-1718)

Date: 1748, 1749

"I always use the word imagine, because I am of the opinion that everything is imagined, and that all the parts of the soul may be justly reduced to the imagination only, which forms them all; and thus the judgment, reason, and memory are not absolute faculties of the soul, but real modifications...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"If a person is said to have but little judgment with a strong imagination, this is as much to say, that the imagination being too much abandoned to itself, and almost constantly employed in looking at itself in the mirror of its sensations, has not sufficiently contracted the habit of examining ...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"The sun, the air, the water, the organization and form of bodies, are all rang'd in order in the eye, as in a looking-glass, which represents to the imagination the pictures of all the objects painted there, according to the laws of vision, which prevail amongst that numberless variety of partic...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: w. 1757-1758, 1861

"Nous ne voyons ni l'âme d'autrui, parce qu'elle se cache, ni la notre, parce que nous n'avons point de miroir intellectuel [We do not see the soul of others, because it hides itself, nor our own, because we have no intellectual mirror]."

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)