Date: 1708, 1714

"But the knowledg of our Passions in their very Seeds, the measuring well the Growth and Progress of Enthusiasm, and the judging rightly of its natural Force, and what command it has over our very Senses, may teach us to oppose more successfully those Delusions which come arm'd with the specious ...

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)

Date: 1710, 1714

"For company is an extreme provocative to fancy and, like a hotbed in gardening, is apt to make our imaginations sprout too fast."

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)

Date: 1710, 1714

"So that, if there be no certain inspector or auditor established within us to take account of these opinions and fancies in due form and minutely to animadvert upon their several growths and habits, we are as little like to continue a day in the same will as a tree, during the summer, in the sam...

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)

Date: 1728

"Then infant Reason grows apace, and calls / For the kind Hand of an assiduous Care: / Delightful Task! to rear the tender Thought, / To teach the young Idea how to shoot, / To pour the fresh Instruction o'er the Mind, / To breathe th' inspiring Spirit, and to plant / The generous Purpose in...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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)