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)

Date: 1829

"Death is only the removal of an immortal soul from dead matter, which many have considered merely as a clog to the soul."

— Balfour, Walter (1776-1852)

Date: 1829

"And if the man is as complete without the body, as he is without the house he resides in, the immortal soul ought to be thankful when it gets quit of the body."

— Balfour, Walter (1776-1852)

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)

Date: November 22, 1990

"I do not feel alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling -- perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me."

— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)

Date: November 22, 1990

"One is not an immaterial soul, floating around in a machine."

— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)

Date: 1999

"As the brain gets more complex in the womb, then, like a dimmer switch, consciousness gradually grows and burgeons until, of course, in adulthood it reaches its particular pinnacles or depths."

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 1999

"On its own this trigger, as we can see from the earlier definition, is not going to generate consciousness. Imagine a candyfloss machine with a stick in the centre that then gathers more and more candyfloss as time goes on. Think of the epicentre as the stick in the centre, the burgeoning candy...

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 1999

"Another rather simplistic analogy might be a boss, at the centre of a big organization that is eventually going to recruit managers and submanagers. What in the brain could be the equivalent of the boss? The most obvious candidate, and one that might immediately spring to mind, is the basic comp...

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 1999

"Perhaps the consciousness of dreaming is the almost random formation of little groups forming in different configurations like pebbles thrown very gently into the water. One can imagine the gentle ripples easily being displaced by the next pebble as it hits the water."

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)