Date: 1765
"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"
preview | full record— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)
Date: 1766-1769, 1956
"Only this more. The ideas--my lodgers--are of all sorts. Some, gentlemen of the law, who pay me a great deal more than others. Divines of all sorts have been with me, and have ever disturbed me. When I first took up house, Presbyterian ministers used to make me melancholy with dreary tones. Meth...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1767, 1784
"Shall we, because we strive in vain to tell / How Matter acts on incorporeal Mind, / Or how, when sleep has lock'd up ev'ry sense, / Or fevers rage, Imagination paints / Unreal scenes, reject what sober sense, / And calmest thought attest?"
preview | full record— Jago, Richard (1715-1781)
Date: 1777
"Images of vengeance and destruction paint themselves to my mind, when I think of his discovering that weakness which I cannot hide from myself."
preview | full record— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)
Date: 1780, 1781, 1788
"Two passions there by soft contention please, / The love of martial Fame, and learned Ease: / These friendly colours, exquisitely join'd, / Form the enchanting picture of thy mind."
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1785
"Language is the express image and picture of human thoughts; and, from the picture, we may often draw very certain conclusions with regard to the original."
preview | full record— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)
Date: 1792
"They bade retentive memory on their mind / Impress each image, in distinctive lines / That mock'd erasure."
preview | full record— Polwhele, Richard (1760-1838)
Date: w. 1798, 1803-4
"He had perceived the presence and the power / Of greatness, and deep feelings had impressed / Great objects on his mind with portraiture / And colour so distinct that on his mind / They lay like substances, and almost seemed / To haunt the bodily sense."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
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...
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)