Date: 1732

"Have patience, good Euphranor. I will show you in the first place, that whatever was sound and good we leave untouched, and encourage it to grow in the mind of man. And secondly, I will show you what excellent things we have planted in it."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1732

"And suppose that in man, after a certain season, the appetite of lust or the faculty of reason shall shoot forth, open, and display themselves as leaves and blossoms do in a tree; would you therefore deny them to be natural to him, because they did not appear in his original infancy?"

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1732

" It seems then that from what you have granted it should follow, things may be natural to men, although they do not actually show themselves in all men, nor in equal perfection; there being as great difference of culture and every other advantage with respect to human nature, as is to be found w...

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1732

"And as those fruits which grow from the most generous and mature stock, in the choicest soil, and with the best culture, are most esteemed; even so ought we not to think, those sublime truths which are the fruits of mature thought, and have been rationally deduced by men of the best and most imp...

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1732

"And if so, being in fact reasonable, natural, and true, they ought not to be esteemed unnatural whims, errors of education, and groundless prejudices, because they are raised and forwarded by manuring and cultivating our tender minds, because they take early root and sprout forth betimes by the ...

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1737

"From threshing Corn, he turns to thresh his Brains; / For which Her M------y allows him Grains."

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1750, 1752

"Whether the Mind, like Soil, doth not by Disuse grow stiff; and whether Reasoning and Study be not like stirring and dividing the Glebe?"

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1750, 1752

"Whether even those Parts of Academical Learning which are quite forgotten, may not have improved and enriched the Soil, like those Vegetables which are raised, not for themselves, but plowed in for a Dressing of Land?"

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)