Date: 1786
"'Remember,' concluded he, 'that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad: the mind stagnates for want of employment, grows morbid, and is extinguished like a candle in foul air.'"
preview | full record— Piozzi, [née Salusbury; other married name Thrale] Hester Lynch (1741-1821)
Date: 1791
"In progress of time, when my mind was, as it were, strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian aether, I could with much more facility and exactness, carry in my memory and commit to paper the exuberant variety of his wisdom and wit."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1794
"It [Christianity] has put the whole orbit of reason into shade."
preview | full record— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)
Date: 1798
"Moral reasoning is nothing but the awakening of certain feelings; and the feeling by which he is actuated, is too strong to leave us much chance of impressing him with other feelings, that should have force enough to counterbalance it."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1798
"Objects or thoughts, that have been associated with pleasure, retain the power of pleasing; as the needle touched by the loadstone acquires polarity, and retains it long after the loadstone is withdrawn."
preview | full record— Edgeworth, Maria
Date: w. 1796, 1799
"My soul was held up by the power of God, as the needle by the loadstone, and I did by faith, with joy draw water out of these wells of salvation."
preview | full record— Osborn, Sarah (1714-1796)
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)