Date: 1754

"I shall not, therefore, say any thing further about the nature of mind in general, that secret spring of thought, unknown and unknowable, but shall content myself to observe, in Mr. Locke's method and with his assistance, something about the phænomena of the human mind, by which we may judge sur...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Sensation would be of little use to form the understanding, if we had no other faculty than mere passive perception; but without sensation these other faculties would have nothing to operate upon, reflection would have by consequence nothing to reflect upon, and it is by reflection that we multi...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"If we consider them like materials, for so they may be considered likewise, employed to raise the fabric of our intellectual system, they will appear like mud, and straw, and lath, materials fit to erect some frail, and homely cottage, but not of substance, nor value sufficient for the construct...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"He maintained, according to his usual method, one hypothesis by another, and assumed that memory consists in certain traces made on the brain by the thoughts that pass through it, and that as long as they last we remember, but that the brain of the child in the womb being too moist, and too soft...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"On the other hand, we are able, at our will and with design, to put a sort of force on memory, to seize, as it were, the end of some particular line, and to draw back into the mind, a whole set of ideas that seem to be strung to it, or linked one with the other."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"They have been called arts of the mind, but improperly, in some respects; for though the mind is forced to employ several arts, and to call in sense to the aid of intellect, even after it has full possession of its ideas, to help out its imperfect manner of knowing, and to lengthen a little its ...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"These ideas added to those of substances, and the whole stock compleated by such as the mind acquires of the relations of its ideas, in comparing them as far as it is able to compare them, make up the entire system of human knowledge."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"But when they are recalled with difficulty, and dragged back slowly, as it were, and by pieces and parcels into the mind, it is no wonder if they receive much greater alteration."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"When they are assigned to complex ideas, they are meant as knots according to the very proper image Mr. Locke gives of them, to tie each specific bundle of ideas together: and in these respects they are not only useful, but necessary."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)