Date: 1734
"A surprising Phænomenon of nature is this, that the soul of man, which ranges abroad though the heavens, and the earth, and the deep waters, and unfolds a thousand mysteries of nature, which penetrates the systems of stars and suns, worlds upon worlds, should be so unhappy a stranger at home, an...
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: January 1739
"I shall therefore observe, that as the mind is endowed with a power of exciting any idea it pleases; whenever it despatches the spirits into that region of the brain, in which the idea is placed; these spirits always excite the idea, when they run precisely into the proper traces, and rummage th...
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: January 1739
"The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: January 1739
Personal identity may be like a church, "which was formerly of brick, fell to ruin, and that the parish rebuilt the same church of free-stone, and according to modern architecture."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1770
"Let him not intrude upon the company of men of science; but repose with his brethren Aquinas and Suarez, in the corner of some Gothic cloister, dark as his understanding, and cold as his heart."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1774
"While awake, and in health, this busy principle [the imagination] cannot much delude us: it may build castles in the air, and raise a thousand phantoms before us; but we have every one of the senses alive, to bear testimony to its falsehood."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1774
"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1779
"All our ideas derived from the senses are confusedly false and illusive; and cannot therefore be supposed to have place in a supreme intelligence: and as the ideas of internal sentiment, added to those of the external senses, compose the whole furniture of human understanding, we may conc...
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: [1782]
"I must now further observe to you, that the Brain is also the Seat or Residence of the MIND or SOUL of the Animal.--That it is the Grand Emporium of all Intelligence, and of all Ideas and Species of external Objects presented there by the Nerves."
preview | full record— Martin, Benjamin (bap. 1705, d. 1782)
Date: 1831
"We spurn at the bounds of time and space; nor would the thought be less futile that imagines to imprison the mind within the limits of the body, than the attempt of the booby clown who is said within a thick hedge to have plotted to shut in the flight of an eagle"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)