text,updated_at,metaphor,created_at,context,theme,reviewed_on,dictionary,comments,provenance,id,work_id
"I am not unacquainted with the reasonings of materialists, that the whole of man is composed of one substance. But whoever can really bring himself to believe, that the consciousness of power is an attribute of matter, is, I am pretty certain, not composed of the same substance that I am; for I have an immediate impression of that proposition being as impossible to believe, as that my eyes are shut when I feel they are wide open, and perceive by them a number and diversity of objects. To reason or even fancy, concerning what we do not see, from what we have seen, is pleasing to the mind. And my similitude between a watch in its case, and the soul in its material frame, will, I persuade myself, be agreeable to all my readers, whose dispositions are mild, and like better to be pleased with what they read, than to attack it. An antient philosopher indeed, full of real or pretended honesty, declared it to be his wish that there were a window in his breast that every body might see the integrity and purity of his thoughts. It would be truly be very pretty and amusing if our bodies were transparent, so that we could see one anothers sentiments and passions working as we see bees in a glass-hive.
(I, p. 143 in SUP edition)",2013-07-09 03:05:47 UTC,"""An antient philosopher indeed, full of real or pretended honesty, declared it to be his wish that there were a window in his breast that every body might see the integrity and purity of his thoughts. It would be truly be very pretty and amusing if our bodies were transparent, so that we could see one anothers sentiments and passions working as we see bees in a glass-hive.""",2013-07-09 03:05:47 UTC,"","",,"Animals, Optics, and Rooms","","Reading Ann Jessie van Sant's Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 60.",21540,7513
"The construction of the human mind is a mystery which there seems to be no probability will ever be known in this state of human existence. Of its operations we have many registers, as we have many meteorological journals. But of itself we know no more than of the original substance of the planets. He, ""who spake as never man spake,"" saith of one well-known quality in the natural world, ""The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof; but cannot tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth."" The sound of the mind we hear; but what it is we cannot tell. The music which it utters, its melody, its harmony, its discord, its variety of notes, have been written by Shakespeare with a wonderful degree of perfection, so as to be themselves to every cultivated reader. We have even gamuts and treatises of the grounds of its music--witness a Locke and other metaphysicians. But the instrument is as much concealed from our intelligence, as the spheres of which the delightful music has been fancied by romantic imaginations. Models enough of this unknown instrument have been framed, as portraits have been drawn of personages whom the painters never saw; but such models being ""fabrics of a vision,"" have faded away, and been succeeded by others as vain as images in the clouds, painted with light, melt into air, and are succeeded by other forms as fleeting. How then can we represent, by a sensible image, the mind as a theatre to its own actings? Let us conceive a spacious saloon, in which our thoughts and passions exert themselves, and let its walls be encrusted with mirrour, for the purpose of reflection, in the same manner that rooms in voluptuous oriental countries are said to be finished for the purposes of increasing sensual delight.
(I, pp. 151-3 in SUP edition)",2013-07-09 03:11:58 UTC,"""How then can we represent, by a sensible image, the mind as a theatre to its own actings? Let us conceive a spacious saloon, in which our thoughts and passions exert themselves, and let its walls be encrusted with mirrour, for the purpose of reflection, in the same manner that rooms in voluptuous oriental countries are said to be finished for the purposes of increasing sensual delight.""",2013-07-09 03:11:58 UTC,"","",,Optics and Rooms,INTEREST. USE IN ENTRY,Reading,21543,7514