Date: 1755

"When she rates things, and moves from ground to ground, / The name of reason she obtains by this; / But when reason she the truth has found, / And standeth fixed, she understanding is."

— Davies [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"When valour preys on reason / It eats the sword it fights with"

— Shakespeare [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"Whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge, which can never permit the mind to reject a greater evidence to embrace what is less evident."

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"Malignant tempers ... will discover their natural tincture of mind."

— Addison [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

A stamp may be settled deep into the mind

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"These simple ideas, offered to the mind, the understanding can no more refuse, nor alter, nor blot out, than a mirrour can refuse, alter, or obliterate, the images which the objects produce"

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

Heads overfull of matter, be like pens over full of ink, which will sooner blot, than make any fair letters at all.

— Ascham's Schoolmaster [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"These prodigious conceits in nature spring out of framing abstracted conceptions, instead of those easy and primary notions which nature stamps alike in all men of common sense."

— Digby on Bodies [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"No constant reason of this can be given, but from the nature of man's mind, which hath this notion of a deity born with it, and stamped upon it; or is of such a frame, that in the free use of itself will find God."

— Tillotson [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"Though God has given us no innate ideas of himself, though he has stampt no original characters on our minds, wherein we may read his being; yet having furnished us with those faculties our minds are endowed with, he hath not left himself without witness."

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]