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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."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

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Date: 1774

"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

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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...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

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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."

— Martin, Benjamin (bap. 1705, d. 1782)

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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"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1831

"The body is apprehended as no more important and of intimate connection to a man engaged in a train of reflections, than the house or apartment in which he dwells"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1831

"On set occasions and at appropriate times we examine our stores, and ascertain the various commodities we have, laid up in our presses and our coffers. Like the governor of a fort in time of peace, which was erected to keep out a foreign assailant, we occasionally visit our armoury, and take acc...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1831

"Hence arises the notion, which has been entertained ever since the birth of reflection and logical discourse in the world, and which in some faint and confused degree exists probably even among savages, that the body is the prison of the mind"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1831

"The human mind is a creature of celestial origin, shut up and confined in a wall of flesh"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1901-2, 1902

"A mental system may be undermined or weakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception a sudden emotional shock or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together; and t...

— James, William (1842-1910)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.