Date: 1785

"He appears to me like a great mill, into which a subject is thrown to be ground. It requires, indeed, fertile minds to furnish materials for this mill. I regret whenever I see it unemployed; but sometimes I feel myself quite barren, and having nothing to throw in. I know not if this mill be a go...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1789

"Hope and fear are the two grand springs by which that curious machine, the human mind, is actuated; and to deprive Virtue of that support which she receives from their influence and operation, and to substitute in their room a sense of honour, or a love of moral beauty and order, is to betray th...

— Belsham, William (1752-1827)

Date: 1790

"Their view calls off his attention from his own view; and his breast is, in some measure, becalmed the moment they come into his presence. This effect is produced instantaneously and, as it were, mechanically; but, with a weak man, it is not of long continuance."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1793

"It was from a view of this truth that the poets derived their fictions respecting the early history of mankind; well aware that, when luxury was introduced and the springs of mind unbent, it would be a vain expectation that should hope to recal men from passion to reason, and from effeminacy to ...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"Human nature, like a vast machine, is not to be understood by looking on its superficies, but by dwelling on its minute springs and little wheels."

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)

Date: 1874

"The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works"

— Huxley, Thomas H. (1825-1895)

Date: 1874

Consciousness "answers to the sound which the bell gives out when struck"

— Huxley, Thomas H. (1825-1895)

Date: 1874

Phenomena of the senses are as unlike the causes which set the mechanism of the body in motion, "as the sound of a repeater is unlike the pushing of the spring which gives rise to it"

— Huxley, Thomas H. (1825-1895)

Date: 1874

"The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upo...

— Huxley, Thomas H. (1825-1895)

Date: January, 1884

"They involve no new psychic dimension, as when the transcendentalists, after letting a number of 'pure' feelings successively go 'bang,' bring their deus ex machina of an Ego swooping down upon them from his Olympian heights to make a cluster of them with his wonderful 'relating thought.'"

— James, William (1842-1910)