Date: 1754

"The words man or animal, raise in his mind no general idea; but in this case, as in the former, some particular idea of man, which the mind can frame without thinking of Alexander or Henry, rises there, and becomes representative of all men in general: or else several ideas of men, and other ani...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Ideas and notions are the money of wise men, and they pay with these; whilst they mark and compute, with words, the money of fools."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"But yet so difficult is the intellectual commerce, so narrow the intellectual fund, that the wisest men are frequently obliged to employ their money like counters, and their counters like money, in one case, however, without loss, in the other without fraud. We may be said to do the first, that ...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"It is hard for another reason; because imagination, whose talents are neither precision nor propriety, not the former at least, is employed in the application of one of these sets of ideas and words to the other, and because it rarely happens that great heat of imagination, and great coolness of...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Such they may be called, for though foreign ideas divert the attention of the mind, when they break in unsought and by violence, they help it often when they have been sought and are admitted by choice."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"What is the juxta-position of ideas? what is that chain which connects, by intermediate ideas that are the links of it, ideas that are remote, but figurative stile?"

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"When they have really such ideas in their minds, they must remember too that figures and comparisons are varnish still. It must not be used to alter the intellectual picture, it must only serve to give a greater lustre, and to make it better seen."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Now the application of this corporeal image to what passes in the mind, or to the action of the mind when we meditate on various subjects, or on many distinct parts of the same subjects and when we communicate these thoughts to one another, sometimes with greater, and sometimes with less agitati...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"But a nature capable of sensation, that is of perception, that is of thought (to say nothing of spontaneous motion, of memory, nor of the passions) cannot be incapable of another mode of thinking, any more than finite extension can be capable of one figure alone, or a piece of wax that receives ...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1755

"Ideas of the same race, though not exactly alike, are sometimes so little different, that no words can express the dissimilitude, though the mind easily perceives it, when they are exhibited together; and sometimes there is such a confusion of acceptations, that discernment is wearied, and disti...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)