Date: 1807
"The formalism of such a 'Philosophy of Nature' teaches, say, that the Understanding is Electricity, or the Animal is Nitrogen, or that they are the equivalent of the South or North Pole, etc., or represent it."
preview | full record— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)
Date: 1817
Mackintosh, following Hobbes and Hartley, analogizes mind and matter: "the law of association being that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter. "
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1817
"Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity, (Leibnitz's Lex Continui) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena considered as material. At the utmost, ...
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1805-6, published 1833-6
"It would make no difference if there had been no Reason there, just as with physicists it is a matter of perfect indifference whether, for instance, there is such a thing as magnetism or not."
preview | full record— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)
Date: August 31, 1837
"But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; — must relinquish display and immediate fame."
preview | full record— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
Date: 1854
"And it is but a twin fact with this, that in France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, ...
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Date: 1854
"The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic-pile is not strong enough to produce crystallizations; phantasms of great ideas float through her mind, but she has not ...
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Date: January, 1884
"The demand for atoms of feeling, which shall be real units, seems a sheer vagary, an illegitimate metaphor."
preview | full record— James, William (1842-1910)
Date: January, 1884
"The best symbol for [the brain] seems to be an electric conductor, the amount of whose charge at any one point is a function of the total charge elsewhere."
preview | full record— James, William (1842-1910)