Date: 1794

"If our recollection or imagination be not a repetition of animal movements, I ask, in my turn, What is it? You tell me it consists of images or pictures of things. Where is this extensive canvas hung up? or where are the numerous receptacles in which those are deposited? or to what else in the a...

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)

Date: 1817

"In our perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvas on which some unknown hand paints it."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

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...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1885

"For example, to express our ideas concerning their physical basis we use different metaphors--stored up ideas, engraved images, well-beaten paths."

— Ebbinghaus, Hermann (1850-1909)

Date: 1902

"An image is like the painter's Madonna or the sculptor's Diana: it is the result of delicate workmanship."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 1911

"As for Mr. Woodhouse, whose most famous sentences hang like texts in frames on the four walls of our memories, he is, next to Don Quixote, perhaps the most perfect gentleman in fiction; and under outrageous provocation he remains so."

— Bradley, A.C. (1851-1935)

Date: 1975

"The remainder [of the brain] is more like an exposed negative waiting to be dipped into developer fluid."

— Wilson, E. O. (b. 1929)

Date: 1980

"Cause is the cement of the universe; the concept of cause is what holds together our picture of the universe, a picture that would otherwise disintegrate into a diptych of the mental and the physical."

— Davidson, Donald (1917-2003)

Date: 1986

"On the view of imagery I am sketching, the imagination systematically misinterprets in the interests of interior cinema."

— Skulsky, Harold

Date: 1990

"But in the case of her visual experience of a tree, I want to say that she is not aware of, as it were, the mental paint by virtue of which her experience is an experience of seeing a tree."

— Harman, Gilbert (b. 1938)