Date: 1760-7
"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1760-7
"Figuratively speaking, dear Toby, it may, for aught I know, said my father; but the spring I am speaking of, is that great and elastic power within us of counterbalancing evil, which like a secret spring in a well-ordered machine, though it can't prevent the shock--at least it imposes upon our s...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1760-7
"Though man is of all others the most curious vehicle, said my father, yet at the same time 'tis of so slight a frame and so totteringly put together, that the sudden jerks and hard jostlings it unavoidably meets with in this rugged journey, would overset and tear it to pieces a dozen times a day...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1761
"The Body is the Machine which the Soul actuates and directs to perpetrate its Desires, so that the [GREEK CHARACTERS] as Paul stiles him, the Man whose Soul is unconverted is by the Darkness of his Understanding, the Preposterousness of his Will and the Disconcertedness of his Faculties and ment...
preview | full record— Hammond, William (1719-1783)
Date: 1761, 1790
"Whence can this very motion take its birth? / Not sure from matter, from dull clods of earth; / But from a living spirit lodg'd within, / Which governs all the bodily machine"
preview | full record— Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787); Browne, Isaac Hawkins (1706-1760)
Date: 1762
"Ils sont sourds, en effet, à la voix intérieure qui leur crie d’un ton difficile à méconnaître: Une machine ne pense point, il n’y a ni mouvement, ni figure qui produise la réflexion: quelque chose en toi cherche à briser les liens qui le compriment; l’espace n’est pas ta mesure, l’univers entie...
preview | full record— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)
Date: 1760-1761, 1762
"However, I found their conversation more vulgar than I could have expected from personages of such distinction: if these, thought I to myself, be Princes, they are the most stupid Princes I have ever conversed with: yet still I continued to venerate their dress; for dress has a kind of mechanica...
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)
"The power which the mind evidently has of moving the various parts of the body by nerves inserted in the muscles is truly wonderful, seeing the mind neither knows the muscles to be moved, nor the machinery, by which the motion in it is to be produced: so that it is as if a musician should always...
preview | full record— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)
Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)
"When actual thought is suspended, there may remain some secret power of thinking resulting from the constitution of the soul, which will exert itself when the obstruction is removed. As a bow when bent has a disposition to straiten itself again, or a clock to strike, though the hammer be held ba...
preview | full record— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)
Date: 1763
"After all, are we not a little in the machine style, not to be able to withdraw our love when our esteem is at an end?"
preview | full record— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)