Date: September 17, 1726
"I Need not expatiate upon other Characters; for I have too good an Opinion of your Readers, to doubt of their beginning now to be sensible that most Men speak and act but from a fortuitous Concourse of Images, or a Train of them stored up in the Brain."
preview | full record— Arbuckle, James (d. 1742)
Date: [1726]
"Let what I have said be written in thy Heart, and keep it ever treasured in thy Mind."
preview | full record— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)
Date: 1727
"Homer's Notion of the State of the Dead, was something like the ancient Philosophy of the Aegyptians, which gave the Soul a Shape like the Body, and that it was only a Receptacle of the Mind; the Mind they made to be the sublime and superior Part, and that only."
preview | full record— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)
Date: 1728
It is by the senses that "the Ideas of external sensible Objects are first conveyed into the Imagination; and Reason or the pure Intellect ... operates upon those Ideas, and upon them, Only after they are so lodged in that common Receptacle"
preview | full record— Browne, Peter (d. 1735)
Date: 1728
"All Nature fades extinct; and She alone / Heard, felt, and seen, possesses every Thought, / Fills every Sense, and pants in every Vein."
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1729, 1731
"Thus after long Experience oft has prov'd / His steady Virtue is not to be moved, / Of his known Faithfulness so well assur'd, / From Fears of Fraud his Master rests secur'd: / And, should Occasion happen, in his Breast, / His Gold, his Secrets, or his Life might rest."
preview | full record— Dodsley, Robert (1703-1764)
Date: 1729
"What Numbers of learned Fools do we not meet with in large Libraries; from whose Works it is evident, that Knowledge must have lain in their Heads, as Furniture at an Upholder's; and the Treasure of the Brain was a Burden to them, instead of an Ornament!"
preview | full record— Mandeville, Bernard (bap. 1670, d. 1733)
Date: 1729
"But as to the mysterious Structure of the Brain itself, and the more abstruse Oeconomy of it, that he knows nothing; but that the whole seems to be a medullary Substance, compactly treasur'd up in infinite Millions of imperceptible Cells, that dispos'd in an unconceivable Order, are cluster'd to...
preview | full record— Mandeville, Bernard (bap. 1670, d. 1733)
Date: 1730
"And when with these the serious thought is foil'd, / We, shifting for relief, would play the shapes / Of frolic fancy; and incessant form / Unnumber'd pictures, fleeting o'er the brain / Yet rapid still renew'd, and pour'd immense / Into the mind, unbounded without space."
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1730
"By a Mind, laudably filled with a Zeal for his Country's Safety, every Hint, that infers its Danger, should be thought of the utmost Importance."
preview | full record— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)