Date: 1708, 1714
"The Human Mind and Body are both of 'em naturally subject to Commotions: and as there are strange Ferments in the Blood, which in many Bodys occasion an extraordinary discharge; so in Reason too, there are heterogeneous Particles which must be thrown off by Fermentation."
preview | full record— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)
Date: 1734
"I'm in a raging storm, / Where seas and skies are blended, while my soul / Like some light worthless chip of floating cork / Is tost from wave to wave."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: January 1739
"The vividness of the first conception diffuses itself along the relations, and is convey'd, as by so many pipes or canals, to every idea that has any communication with the primary one."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: January 1739
"The attention is on the stretch; the posture of the mind is uneasy; and the spirits being diverted from their natural course, are not governed in their movements by the same laws, at least not to the same degree, as when they flow in their usual channel."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1760-7
"But here, you must distinguish--the thought floated only in Dr. Slop's mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swiming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man's understanding, without being carried backwards o...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1791
"I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1794
"With shadowy trident how Volition guides, / Surge after surge, his intellectual tides; / Or, Queen of Sleep, Imagination roves / With frantic Sorrows, or delirious Loves."
preview | full record— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)
Date: 1892, 1899
"The flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence."
preview | full record— James, William (1842-1910)