Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"We can best learn how mental intuition is to be employed by comparing it with ordinary vision."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"Moreover, as we said, we should not contemplate, in one and the same visual or mental gaze, more than two of the innumerable different dimensions which it is possible to depict in the imagination."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1721, 1722

"Dissimulation, an art among us universally practised, and so necessary, is unknown here: they speak every thing, see every thing, and hear every thing: the heart, like the face, is visible."

— Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Thus it is only a posteriori, or as it were by disentangling the soul from the organs of the body, that we can, I do not say, discover with evidence the nature of man, but obtain the greatest degree of probability the subject will admit of."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"In proportion as the motion of the blood grows calm, a soft soothing sense of peace and tranquility spreads itself over the whole machine; the soul finds itself sweetly weighed down with slumber, and sinks with the fibres of the brain: it becomes thus paralytic as it were, by degrees, together w...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"'Tis thus the brain, that matrix, if I may use the expression, of the soul, is perverted after its manner, together with that of the body."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"The mind has, as well as the body, its epidemical and scorbutic disorders."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"By its flattering pencil the cold skeleton of abstract reason assumes living and vermillion flesh; but it the sciences flourish, arts are embellished, woods speak, echoes sigh, rocks weep, marble breathes, and all the inanimate bodies are suddenly inspired with life."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Besides what would the very best school avail without a matrix perfectly open for the entrance, or conception of ideas? It is as impossible to give a single idea or notion to a man, deprived of his senses, as it is to get a woman with child, to whom nature in a hurry has denied a womb; as I once...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Such is the chaos, such the rapid and continual succession of our ideas; they drive one another successively, as one wave impels another; so that it the imagination does not employ a part of its muscles, poised as it were in an equilibrium upon the strings of the brain, so as to sustain itself s...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)