Date: 1748, 1749
"If reason is the slave of depraved, or distracted sense, how then can it be expected, that at that time it should be governor?"
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: Saturday, September 15, 1750
"The first effect of this meditation is, that it furnishes a new employment for the mind, and engages the passions on remoter objects; as kings have sometimes freed themselves from a subject too haughty to be governed and too powerful to be crushed, by posting him in a distant province, till his ...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1759
"The different passions and appetites, the natural subjects of this ruling principle, but which are so apt to rebel against their master, he reduced to two different classes or orders."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1761
"Such persons are not accustomed to consult the judge within concerning the opinion which they ought to form of their own conduct."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1761
"This inmate of the breast, this abstract man, the representative of mankind, and substitute of the Deity, whom nature has constituted the supreme judge of all their actions is seldom appealed to by them."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1761
"It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1761
"Even in good men, the judge within is often in danger of being corrupted by the violence and injustice of their selfish passions, and is often induced to make a report very different from what the real circumstances of the case are capable of authorizing."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1762
"En méditant sur la nature de l’homme, j’y crus découvrir deux principes distincts, dont l’un l’élevoit à l’étude des vérités éternelles, à l’amour de la justice & du beau moral, aux régions du monde intellectuel dont la contemplation fait les délices du sage, & dont l’autre le ramenoit bassement...
preview | full record— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)
Date: 1770
"But this faculty [Reason] has been much perverted, often to vile, and often to insignificant purposes; sometimes chained like a slave or malefactor, and sometimes soaring in forbidden and unknown regions."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
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)