Date: 1794

"Whereas a due exercise of the faculties of the mind strengthens and improves those faculties, whether of imagination or recollection; as the exercise of our limbs in dancing or fencing increases the strength and agility of the muscles thus employed."

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)

Date: w. 1788-93, 1796 (rev. 1815, 1827, 1837, 1897)

"My personal freedom had been somewhat impaired by the House of Commons and the Board of Trade; but I was now delivered from the chain of duty and dependence, from the hopes and fears of political adventure: my sober mind was no longer intoxicated by the fumes of party, and I rejoiced in my escap...

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: w. 1788-93, 1796 (rev. 1815, 1827, 1837, 1897)

"By many, conversation is esteemed as a theatre or a school: but, after the morning has been occupied by the labours of the library, I wish to unbend rather than to exercise my mind; and in the interval between tea and supper I am far from disdaining the innocent amusement of a game at cards."

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1797

"But it is sometimes not difficult to any one who is accustomed, if the phrase may be allowed, to the anatomy of the human mind, to discern, that generally speaking, the persons who use the above language, rely not so much on the merits of Christ, and on the agency of Divine Grace, as on their ow...

— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)

Date: 1797

"But 'the mind diseased' is neglected and forgotten."

— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)

Date: 1798

"The original plan of Mary, respecting her residence in France, had no precise limits in the article of duration; the single purpose she had in view being that of an endeavour to heal her distempered mind."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1810

"If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his righ...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1817

"My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above the ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: August 1817

"There is no natural harmony in the ordinary combinations of significant sounds: the language of prose is not the language of music, or of passion: and it is to supply this inherent defect in the mechanism of language--to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo ...

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)