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.'"

— 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."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1794

"It [Christianity] has put the whole orbit of reason into shade."

— 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."

— 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power of pleasing; as the needle touched by the loadstone acquires polarity, and retains it long after the loadstone is withdrawn."

— 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."

— 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."

— 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. "

— 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, ...

— 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."

— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)