Date: 1718

""Lausippus and Zeno, [sperm] 'tis a Body, and it is a Fragment of the Soul."

— Plutarch (c. 46-120)

Date: 1718

"Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, that the Spermatick Faculty is incorporeal, as the Mind is which moves the Body, but the effused Matter is corporeal."

— Plutarch (c. 46-120)

Date: 1728

A peevish, pettish temper "disarms the Heart of its natural Integrity; it induces us to throw away our true Armour, our natural Courage, and cowardly to commit our selves to the vain Protection of others, while we neglect our own Defence"

— Hutcheson, Francis (1694-1746)

Date: 1733

"Nothing is more void of real improvement and instruction to the mind, and more fulsom, than heaps of quotations, and tedious disquisitions what opinions such and such men were of, in relation to matters properly determinable only by right reason and Scripture."

— Browne, Peter (d. 1735)

Date: 1734

"Speaking according to natural philosophers, 'tis a clear case, that wit is a generative power, and, if we may so say, becomes pregnant, and brings forth; moreover, as Plato affirms, wants a midwife to deliver her"

— Huartes, John

Date: 1734

Wit "has the Power and natural force to produce and bring forth within it self a Son, which the natural Philosophers call NOTION, or Idea, or, as it has been accounted, the word of the spirit."

— Huartes, John

Date: January 1739

"The mind, as well as the body, seems to be endowed with a certain precise degree of force and activity, which it never employs in one action, but at the expence of all the rest."

— 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."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: January 1739

"Let us therefore apply this method of enquiry, which is found so just and useful in reasonings concerning the body, to our present anatomy of the mind, and see what discoveries we can make by it."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: January 1739

"As nature has given to the body certain appetites and inclinations, which she encreases, diminishes, or changes according to the situation of the fluids or solids, she has proceeded in the same manner with the mind."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)