Date: 1704

"The practitioners of this famous art proceed, in general, upon the following fundamental, that the corruption of the senses is the generation of the spirit; because the senses in men are so many avenues to the fort of reason, which, in this operation, is wholly blocked up."

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1704

"Some again think that when our earthly tabernacles are disordered and desolate, shaken and out of repair, the spirit delights to dwell within them, as houses are said to be haunted, when they are forsaken and gone to decay."

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1710, 1734

"They indeed, who hold the soul of man to be only a thin vital flame, or system of animal spirits, make it perishing and corruptible as the body, since there is nothing more easily dissipated than such a being, which it is naturally impossible should survive the ruin of the tabernacle, wherein it...

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1710, 1734

"[I]deas are not any how and at random produced, there being a certain order and connexion between them, like to that of cause and effect: there are also several combinations of them, made in a very regular and artificial manner, which seem like so many instruments in the hand of nature, that bei...

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1713, 1734

"And although it may, perhaps, seem an uneasy reflexion to some, that when they have taken a circuit through so many refined and unvulgar notions, they should at last come to think like other men: yet, methinks, this return to the simple dictates of Nature, after having wandered through the wild ...

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1713

"On the 11th day of October, in the year 1712, having left my body locked up safe in my study, I repaired to the Grecian coffee-house, where, entring into the pineal gland of a certain eminent Free-thinker, I made directly to the highest part of it, which is the seat of the Understanding, expecti...

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1713, 1734

"It is supposed the soul makes her residence in some part of the brain, from which the nerves take their rise, and are thence extended to all parts of the body."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1713, 1734

"You cannot say objects are in your mind, as books in your study: or that things are imprinted on it, as the figure of a seal upon wax."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1713

"One while to trace a theorem in mathematicks through a long labyrinth of intricate turns and subtilties of thought; another, to be conscious of the sublime ideas and comprehensive views of a philosopher, without any fatigue or wasting of my own spirits"

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1713

To visit the Imagination one must "descend a story lower," out of the Understanding and "into the Imagination, which [one may find] larger, indeed, but cold and comfortless."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)