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Date: 1701, 1704

"[I]t follows that the most direct and natural Way for the discovery of Truth, is, instead of going abroad for Intelligence, to retire into our selves, and there with humble and silent Attention, both to consult and receive the Answers of interior Truth, even that Divine Master which teaches in t...

— Norris, John (1657-1712)

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Date: 1709

"There croud into his mind the ideas which compose the visible man, in company with all the other ideas of sight perceived at the same time."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

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Date: 1713

"Your soul (continued he) being at liberty to transport herself with a thought wherever she pleases, may enter into the Pineal Gland of the most learned philosopher, and, being so placed, become spectator of all the ideas in his mind, which would instruct her in a much less time than the usual me...

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

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Date: 1722

"[O]r that hence, as swiftly those imperceptible Messengers called animal Spirits, should, at the Nutus Animae, rush through their Meandrous Paths like Lightning, and having dispatched the Mandates of the Will, as speedily bring back their Errand to the common Sensory."

— Turner, Daniel (1667-1741)

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Date: Saturday, September 15, 1750

"The first effect of this meditation is, that it furnishes a new employment for the mind, and engages the passions on remoter objects; as kings have sometimes freed themselves from a subject too haughty to be governed and too powerful to be crushed, by posting him in a distant province, till his ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: Tuesday, April 10, 1750

"Our senses, our appetites, and our passions, are our lawful and faithful guides, in most things that relate solely to this life; and, therefore, by the hourly necessity of consulting them, we gradually sink into an implicit submission, and habitual confidence."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: Saturday, April 14, 1750

"For such is the inequality of our corporeal to our intellectual faculties, that we contrive in minutes what we execute in years, and the soul often stands an idle spectator of the labour of the hands, and expedition of the feet."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: Saturday, April 14, 1750

"Since by revolving with pleasure the facility, safety, or advantage of a wicked deed, a man soon begins to find his constancy relax, and his detestation soften; the happiness of success glittering before him, withdraws his attention from the atrociousness of the guilt, and acts are at last confi...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: Saturday, April 14, 1750

"Such, therefore, is the importance of keeping reason a constant guard over imagination, that we have otherwise no security for our own virtue, but may corrupt our hearts in the most recluse solitude, with more pernicious and tyrannical appetites and wishes than the commerce of the world will gen...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: 1754

"Our simple ideas, and even our complex ideas, and notions return sometimes of themselves, we know not why, nor how, mechanically, as it were, uncalled by the mind, and often to the disturbance of it in the pursuit of other ideas, to which these intruders are foreign."

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

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