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Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)

"The power which the mind evidently has of moving the various parts of the body by nerves inserted in the muscles is truly wonderful, seeing the mind neither knows the muscles to be moved, nor the machinery, by which the motion in it is to be produced: so that it is as if a musician should always...

— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)

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Date: 1775

"[T]here may be a farther difference in the constitution of the nerves belonging to the different senses, or there may be so many circumstances that affect or modify their vibrations, that they may be as distinguishable from one another, as different human voices sounding the same note; and proba...

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

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Date: 1776

"If you really then think that, every process, termed mental, in man, is in fact nothing more than so many distinct nervous vibrations, then I readily grant that matter may think, for undoubtedly every stretched cord, when touched, will vibrate; and I will farther grant, that a fiddle, in that se...

— Berington, Joseph (1743-1827)

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Date: 1817

Milton in his "latter days" was "poor, sick, blind, slandered, persecuted [...] yet still listening to the music of his thoughts."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

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Date: August 1817

"Poetry is the music of language, expressing the music of the mind."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

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Date: August 1817

"The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought and feeling is the sustained and continuous also."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

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Date: 1818

"But poetry makes these odds all even. It is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying as it were 'the secret soul of harmony.'"

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

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Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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