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Date: 350 B.C.

"It is not necessary to ask whether the soul and its body are one, just as we do not ask about wax and its shape."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: 350 B.C.

"What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: 1707

"'O let my Name ingraven stand, / 'Both on thy Heart and on thy Hand."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

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Date: 1730

"Now, if such a complex being were in nature, how would that spiritual Soul act in that Body, that in its first Union with it (excepting some universal Principles) is a rasa Tabula, as a white Paper, without the Notices of Things written in it?"

— Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715); Anonymous

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Date: 1761, 1790

If the mind is corporeal it must be composed of infinite parts: "Which then can claim dominion o'er the rest, / Or stamp the ruling passion in the breast"

— Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787); Browne, Isaac Hawkins (1706-1760)

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Date: 1761, 1790

"This then's the first great law by Nature giv'n, / Stamp'd on our souls, and ratify'd by Heav'n"

— Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787); Browne, Isaac Hawkins (1706-1760)

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Date: 1781

"Ideas of sense are but the first elements of thought: and the produce raised from these elements by the operation of the mind upon them is as far superiour to the elements themselves in variety, copiousness and use, as books are to the characters of which they are composed."

— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)

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Date: 1789

"I conceive that a newly created spiritual substance would be a perfect tabula rasa, without a single idea till it was supplied by its own experience and reflection; nor can I understand how matter, mere matter, unconnected with a really active substance, could begin to perceive or ...

— Holmes, Edward (1737/8-1799)

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Date: November 22, 1990

"The nervous system adapts, is tailored, evolves, so that experience, will, sensibility, moral sense, and all that one would call personality or soul becomes engraved in the nervous system."

— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.