Date: 1745

"He says that, tho' he were not nobly born, / Nature has form'd him noble, generous, brave, / Truely magnanimous, and warmly scorning / Whatever bears the smallest Taint of Baseness: / That every easy Virtue is his own; / Not learnt by painful Labour, but inspir'd, / Implanted in his Soul."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1745

"Behold the fatal Work of my dark Hand, / That by rude Force the Passions would command, / That ruthless sought to root them from the Breast; / They may be rul'd, but will not be opprest."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1746

"Deep to the root / Of vegetation parch'd, the cleaving fields / And slippery lawn an arid hue disclose, / Blast Fancy's bloom, and wither e'en the soul."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1746

Yet the kind source of every gentle art, / And all the soft civility of life: / Raiser of human kind! by Nature cast, / Naked, and helpless, out amid the woods / And wilds, to rude inclement elements; / With various seeds of art deep in the mind / Implanted, and profusely pour'd around / Material...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1748

"But more he search'd the mind, and roused from sleep / Those moral seeds whence we heroic actions reap."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1754

"The human soul is so far from being furnished with forms and ideas to perceive all things by, or from being impregnated, I would rather say than printed over, with the seeds of universal knowledge, that we have no ideas till we receive passively the ideas of sensible qualities from without."

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

Date: 1754

"They are, if I may say so, of the mind's own growth, the elements of knowledge, more immediate, less relative, and less dependent than sensitive knowledge, as any man will be apt to think, who compares his ideas of remembering, recollecting, bare thought, and intenseness of thought, with those o...

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

Date: 1754

But when we enter into a serious and impartial detail concerning this knowledge, and analyse carefully what the great pretenders to it have given and give us daily for knowledge, we shall be obliged to confess, that the human intellect is rather a rank than a fertile soil, barren without due cult...

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

Date: 1787

"They [the Indians] will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)

Date: 1787

"This will in some measure stop the increase of this great political and moral evil, while the minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)