Date: 1754

"As the mind does not act till it is rouzed into action by external objects; so when it does act, it acts conformably to the suggestions it receives from these impressions, and takes with its first ideas the hints how to multiply, and improve them."

— 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

"This is the great intellectual province, wherein our minds range with much freedom, and often with exorbitant licence, in the pursuit of real or imaginary science."

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

Date: 1754

But when we enter into a serious and impartial detail concerning this knowledge, and analyse carefully what the great pretenders to it have given and give us daily for knowledge, we shall be obliged to confess, that the human intellect is rather a rank than a fertile soil, barren without due cult...

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

Date: 1754

"This now, whereof we have taken some view in several of its branches, is that noble fund of ideas from whence all our intellectual riches are derived."

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

Date: 1754

"The mind of man does often what princes and states have done. It gives a currency to brass and copper coined in the several philosophical and theological mints, and raises the value of gold and silver above that of their true standard."

— 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)

Date: 1754

"The scene of the mind, like a moving picture, must be governed with attention, that it may bring into our view the images we want, and as we want them. Otherwise ideas that are foreign to our actual train of thinking will frequently rush into our thoughts, and become objects of them whether we w...

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