Date: 1620

"For when we try to recollect or call a thing to mind, if we have no prenotion or perception of what we are seeking, we seek and toil and wander here and there, as if in infinite space."

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: 1620

"Lastly, knowing how much the sight of man's mind is distracted by experience and history, and how hard it is at the first (especially for minds either tender or preoccupied) to become familiar with nature, I not unfrequently subjoin observations of my own, being as the first offers, inclinations...

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: 1620

"For every one (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolours the light of nature; owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authorit...

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: 1630

"Now when the soul, which is of a sociable nature, finds anything like to itself, it is like Adam when Eve was brought to him."

— Winthrop, John (1588–1649)

Date: 1632

"Looke as it is with a Gold smith that melteth the metall that he is to make a vessell of, if after the melting thereof, there follow a cooling, it had beene as good it had never beene melted, it is as hard, haply harder, as unfit, haply unfitter, then it was before to make vessell of; but after ...

— Hooker, Richard (1554-1600)

Date: 1640

"The minds of men are after such strange waies besieged, that for to admit the true beams of things, a sincere and polisht Area is wanting"

— Watts, Gilbert (d. 1657)

Date: 1641

"As Lots wife was turned into a Pillar of Salt, that her inconstancie might be fixt, and yet be melting still: So, thou, my Soule, if I had my wish, shouldst be turned into a Pillar of Thoughts; that thy volubility might be restrain'd, and yet be thinking still."

— Baker, Richard, Sir (c. 1568-1645)

Date: 1649

"But since humane flesh (that king of Beasts) began to delight himself in the objects of the Creation, more then in the Spirit Reason and Righteousness, who manifests himself to be the indweller in the Five Sences, of Hearing, Seeing, Tasting, Smelling, Feeling; then he fell into blindness of min...

— William Everard, John Palmer, John South, John Courton. William Taylor, Christopher Clifford, John Barker, Ferrard Winstanley, Richard Goodgroome, Thomas Starre, William Hoggrill, Robert Sawyer, Thomas Eder, Henry Bickerstaffe, John Taylor, &c,

Date: 1651, 1668

"And therefore of absurd and false affirmations, in case they be universal, there can be no understanding, though many think they understand them, when they do but repeat the words softly, or con them in their mind."

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

"This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself (I mean fancy itself), we call imagination, as I said before; but when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is called memory."

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)