Date: 1722
"[W]ho can tell / How each [image] awaken'd from its little cell / Starts forth, and how the soul's command it hears / And soon on fancy's theatre appears?"
preview | full record— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)
Date: 1723
"The Cells, and little Lodgings, Thou canst see / In Mem'ry's Hoards and secret Treasury; / Dost the dark Cave of each Idea spy, / And see'st how rang'd the crouded Lodgers lye; / How some, when beckon'd by the Soul, awake, / While peaceful Rest their uncall'd Neighbours take."
preview | full record— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)
Date: 1725
"He must be a Master of the Science; and be able to lead a Reader, knowingly, thro’ that Labyrinth of the Passions, which fill the Heart of Man, and make him either a noble or a despicable Creature."
preview | full record— Gally, Henry (bap. 1696, d. 1769)
Date: May 6, 1736
"To express this to us by Similitudes both just and beautiful; some Philosophers compare an human Soul to an empty Cabinet, of inexpressible Value for the Matter and Workmanship: and particularly, for the wonderful Contrivance of it, as having all imaginable Conveniencies within, for treasuring u...
preview | full record— Denne, John (1693-1767)
Date: Tuesday, May 15, 1750
"The soul cannot long be held in prison, but will fly away, and leave a lifeless body to human malice."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Saturday, November 3, 1750
"When we have heated our zeal in a cause, and elated our confidence with success, we are naturally inclined to persue the same train of reasoning, to establish some collateral truth, to remove some adjacent difficulty, and to take in the whole comprehension of our system. As a prince in the ardou...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: August 27, 1751
"The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1759
"He shewed, with great strength of sentiment, and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and debased, when the lower faculties predominate over the higher; that when fancy, the parent of passion, usurps the dominion of the mind, nothing ensues but the natural effect of unlawful go...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1760-7
"[I]n the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better still for [the biographer];--for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that of red hot iron,--must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of ...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1760-7
The gifts and endowments of wit and judgment may "be poured down warm as each of us could bear it,--scum and sediment an' all; (for I would not have a drop lost) into these veral receptacles, cells, cellules, domiciles, dormitories, refectories, and spare places of our brains,--in such sort, that...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)