work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
7856,"",Reading,2014-03-14 20:29:14 UTC,"Our complex ideas being assemblages of simple ideas, that have often no other connection except that which the mind gives them, we might be easily led to conceive the difficulty of this task by a base reflection on the weakness of memory, and if I may say so, on the seeming caprice of this faculty, before we were made sensible of it by repeated experiences. The ideas that are lodged there begin to fade almost as soon as they are framed. They are continually slipping from us, or shifting their forms; and if the objects that excited some did not often renew them, and if we had not a power to recall others before they are gone too far out of the mind, we should lose our simple, and much more our complex ideas, and all our notions would become confused and obscure. The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity. But our case is not so bad. They are often renewed, and we can recall them as often as we please. There is, however, a difference between the renewing of them, and the recalling of them. When ideas are renewed by the same objects that excited them first in the mind, they are renewed such as they were [...]
(Essay I, ยง4; vol. iii, p. 418)",,23725,"","""The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity.""","",2014-03-14 20:29:14 UTC,""
8269,"",Reading The Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.,2018-04-17 15:26:36 UTC,"That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must some time be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect, and perhaps none more than the speculative reasoner, whose thoughts are always from home, whose eye wanders over life, whose fancy dances after meteors of happiness kindled by itself, and who examines every thing rather than his own state.",,25164,"","""That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must some time be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect, and perhaps none more than the speculative reasoner, whose thoughts are always from home, whose eye wanders over life, whose fancy dances after meteors of happiness kindled by itself, and who examines every thing rather than his own state.""","",2018-04-17 15:26:36 UTC,""
8270,"",Reading at The Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. ,2018-04-17 16:24:53 UTC,"The incursions of troublesome thoughts are often violent and importunate; and it is not easy to a mind accustomed to their inroads to expel them immediately by putting better images into motion; but this enemy of quiet is above all others weakened by every defeat; the reflection which has been once overpowered and ejected, seldom returns with any formidable vehemence.
Employment is the great instrument of intellectual dominion. The mind cannot retire from its enemy into total vacancy, or turn aside from one object but by passing to another. The gloomy and the resentful are always found among those who have nothing to do, or who do nothing. We must be busy about good or evil, and he to whom the present offers nothing will often be looking backward on the past.",,25167,"","""The incursions of troublesome thoughts are often violent and importunate; and it is not easy to a mind accustomed to their inroads to expel them immediately by putting better images into motion; but this enemy of quiet is above all others weakened by every defeat; the reflection which has been once overpowered and ejected, seldom returns with any formidable vehemence.""","",2018-04-17 16:27:01 UTC,""