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

"But Nature had designed him to think as he pleased, and to speak as he thought: his piety was offended by the excessive worship of creatures; and the study of physics convinced him of the impossibility of transubstantiation, which is abundantly refuted by the testimony of our senses."

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1798

"Women have a frame of body more delicate and susceptible of impression than men, and, in proportion as they receive a less intellectual education, are more unreservedly under the empire of feeling."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1798

"Wounded affection, wounded pride, all those principles which hold absolute empire in the purest and loftiest minds, urged her to still further experiments to recover her influence, and to a still more poignant desparation, long after reason would have directed her to desist, and resolutely call ...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1798

"But a connection more memorable originated about this time, between Mary and a person of her own sex, for whom she contracted a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1817

"Ah! when will the yoke of Custom--Custom, the blind tyrant, of which all the other tyrants make their slave--ah! when will that misery-perpetuating yoke be shaken off?--when, when will Reason be seated on her throne?"

— Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)

Date: 1817

"Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity, (Leibnitz's Lex Continui) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena considered as material. At the utmost, ...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1831

"They attempt many things, sketch out plans, which, if properly filled up, might illustrate the literature of a nation, and extend the empire of the human mind, but which yet they desert as soon as begun, affording us the promise of a beautiful day, that, ere it is noon, is enveloped in darkest t...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"Terence and Virgil maintain an universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men. "

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: January, 1833

"What they know has come by observation of themselves; they have found within them one highly delicate and sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the laws of emotion are written in large characters, such as can be read off without much study."

— Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)