Date: 1652

"And truly he might as well phansie such implanted Ideas, such seeds of light in his external eye, as such seminal principles in the eye of the minde."

— Culverwell, Nathanael (bap. 1619, d. 1651)

Date: 1686, 1689, 1697

"How doth Reason exert it self by little and little, what Helps and Arts are there us'd to make the Flower open and shew it self to the World?"

— Nourse, Timothy (c.1636–1699)

Date: January 1739

"The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1751

"This sentiment, rooted in the mind, is an antidote to all misfortune."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1757

"Their root strikes deeper into the mind, and springs from the essential and universal properties of human nature."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1831

"We spurn at the bounds of time and space; nor would the thought be less futile that imagines to imprison the mind within the limits of the body, than the attempt of the booby clown who is said within a thick hedge to have plotted to shut in the flight of an eagle"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"There are a multitude of causes that will produce a miscarriage of this sort, where the richest soil, impregnated with the choicest seeds of learning and observation, shall entirely fail to present us with such a crop as might rationally have been anticipated"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1989

"Like trees similar in their gross physical profile, brains can be similar in their gross functional profiles while being highly idiosyncratic in the myriad details of their fine-grained arborization."

— Churchland, Paul (b. 1942)