Date: w. April 18, 1776; 1777

"Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: w. 1755, 1777

"But admitting a spiritual substance to be dispersed throughout the universe, like the ethereal fire of the Stoics, and to be the only inherent subject of thought, we have reason to conclude from analogy, that nature uses it after the same manner she does the other substance, matter."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: w. 1755, 1777

"She [Nature] employs it [spiritual substance] as a kind of paste or clay; modifies it into a variety of forms and existences; dissolves after a time each modification, and from its substance erects a new form."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: w. 1755, 1777

"And does any thing steel the breast of judges and juries against the sentiments of humanity but reflections on necessity and public interest?"

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: March, 1778

"What that power is by which the conscious spirit governs and directs various mental faculties, is, it must be confessed, utterly inexplicable as long as our souls are enclosed in material frames. While a watch is shut up in its case, we cannot see how the operations of its curious machinery are ...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: March, 1778

"An eminent physician in Holland, entrusted at once with a medical chair in the university of Leyden, and with the health of the Prince of Orange, being asked what the soul was? paused, and then answer, 'C'est un ressort. It is a spring.' As the main-spring actuates the wheels and other component...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: March, 1778

"And my similitude between a watch in its case, and the soul in its material frame, will, I persuade myself, be agreeable to all my readers, whose dispositions are mild, and like better to be pleased with what they read, than to attack it."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: March, 1778

"An antient philosopher indeed, full of real or pretended honesty, declared it to be his wish that there were a window in his breast that every body might see the integrity and purity of his thoughts. It would be truly be very pretty and amusing if our bodies were transparent, so that we could se...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1778

"Cicero, upon whose mind the advancing rays of celestial philosophy beamed with a brightness very admirable in a Pagan period of time, before the Sun of Righteousness arose, and shone forth in full splendour upon the world, informs us, in his Tusculan Questions, of a very remarkable interview bet...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1778

"The sound of the mind we hear; but what it is we cannot tell. The music which it utters, its melody, its harmony, its discord, its variety of notes, have been written by Shakespeare with a wonderful degree of perfection, so as to be themselves to every cultivated reader. We have even gamuts and ...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)