Date: 1637

"I kept uprooting from my mind any errors that might previously have slipped into it."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1637

"I supposed, too, that in the beginning God did not place in this body any rational soul or any other thing to serve as a vegetative or sensitive soul, but rather that he kindled in its heart one of those fires without light which I had already explained, and whose nature I understood to be no di...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1641

"But if the entire soul is something of this kind, why should you, who may be thought of as the noblest part of the soul, not be regarded as being, so to speak, the flower, or the most refined and pure and active part of it?"

— Gassendi, Pierre (1592-1655)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"For the human mind has within it a sort of spark of the divine, in which the first seeds of useful ways of thinking are sown, seeds which, however neglected and stifled by studies which impede them, often bear fruit of their own accord."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"But I am convinced that certain primary seeds of truth naturally implanted in human minds thrived vigorously in that unsophisticated and innocent age - seeds which have been stifled in us through our constantly reading and hearing all sorts of errors"

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1721, 1722

"On the contrary, the countries of the Mahometans every day become deserts, from an opinion, which, all holy as it is, yet is not without very hurtful consequences, when it is rooted in the mind."

— Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Date: 1748, 1749

"But if the brain be at the same time well framed and instructed, it is a fruitful and well sown soil, that produces a hundred fold to what it received."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: January 1762

"Richardson sème dans les cœurs des germes de vertu qui y restent d’abord oisifs et tranquilles: ils y sont secrètement, jusqu’à ce qu’il se présente une occasion qui les remue et les fasse éclore. [Richardson sows in our hearts the seeds of virtue which at first remain still and inactive: their ...

— Diderot, Denis (1713-1784)