Date: 1792

"The business of education in this case, is only to conduct the shooting tendrils to a proper pole; yet after laying precept upon precept, without allowing a child to acquire judgement itself, parents expect them to act in the same manner by this borrowed fallacious light, as if they had illumina...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1796

"The effect [of wit on the mind] is strong,--because it's odd, / Like fire electric from a clod; / Or when fix'd air puts out a light, / Tho' vital makes it blaze more bright."

— Courtenay, John Lees (1775?-1794)

Date: 1797

"This place, perhaps, infests my mind with congenial gloom, for I find that, at this moment, there is scarcely a superstition too dark for my credulity."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1803

The muse "beams a visionary day: / Bright as the magic torch she early gave / To light thy ven'trous way, through fancy's secret cave."

— Hunter [née Home], Anne (1742-1821)

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: August 31, 1837

"For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, — darker than can be enlightened."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)