12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Medical tag
Mind Body
Psychosomatic illness, emotion causing disease, the mind–body relation.
Works
A Burnt-Out Case follows Querry, a celebrated European architect of churches who has lost all feeling: for his work, for women, for God and for himself. Travelling as far as the river boats will take him, he arrives at a leproserie deep in the Belgian Congo run by a community of missionary fathers and by Dr Colin, an atheist physician devoted to his patients.
A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity is a short paper with a long afterlife. McCulloch and Pitts propose an idealized model of neurons that fire or do not fire according to logical relations among their inputs.
This entry joins Claude Shannon's 1938 master's thesis on relay and switching circuits with his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The thesis made a decisive engineering move: it showed that Boolean algebra could describe and simplify relay circuits.
A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, was published in London in 1843 in two volumes and went through eight editions in John Stuart Mill's lifetime, the last revised in 1872. Of its six books, the third, Of Induction, is the longest and the most influential; the library text gives that book alone, from an 1882 American printing of the eighth edition.
A Theologico-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) was published anonymously in Latin in Amsterdam in 1670, under a false Hamburg imprint, by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Its title page announces its purpose: to show that freedom to philosophize can be granted without harm to piety or the peace of the commonwealth, and cannot be withheld without destroying both.
George Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, published in Dublin in 1710 when its author was a twenty-five-year-old fellow of Trinity College, argues that the material world, understood as an unthinking substance existing outside every mind, is a philosophers' invention. What exists are minds and the ideas they perceive; for sensible things, to be is to be perceived.
Hume subtitled his first book 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects', and he meant it literally: as Newton had explained the heavens by a few observed principles, Hume would explain belief, emotion and morality by a few principles of the mind. Book I, Of the Understanding, begins by dividing all perceptions into vivid impressions and fainter ideas, and holds that every simple idea is copied from a prior impression.
Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in about six weeks in the autumn of 1791, and Joseph Johnson published it in London early in 1792. Two years earlier she had answered Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France with A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
Hume first published this book in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and gave it its present title in 1758. It is his deliberate second attempt at the material of Book I of the Treatise, written, he said, so that the argument would no longer fail through its manner.
Claude Bernard published this book in Paris in 1865 as the opening of a larger treatise on experimental medicine that he never completed. It sets out, for physicians, the method by which he had made his own discoveries, and argues that medicine must become a science grounded in physiology and the laboratory.
An Investigation of the Laws of Thought is George Boole's attempt to express logic, probability, and reasoning in mathematical form. The book begins from a bold premise: the operations of the mind in reasoning can be studied through symbols and laws analogous to those of algebra.
As We May Think is a speculative essay about the problem of intellectual abundance. Written at the end of World War II, it asks what scientists should do when their wartime energies turn toward peace and when the record of human knowledge has grown too large for traditional methods of indexing, filing, and retrieval.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
Maudsley's Body and Mind argues that mental life cannot be separated from bodily organization, nervous function, heredity, and disease. Based on the Gulstonian Lectures, the book brings Victorian psychiatry, physiology, and evolutionary thought into one frame.
Sallust wrote two short monographs on episodes of the late Roman Republic, each opened by a philosophical preface and each meant to show how ambition and greed were corrupting the state. The library text is the Rev. John Selby Watson's literal English version, with his argument (chapter outline) before each work and his explanatory notes after it.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Christ Legends is a book of eleven stories in which the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf retells and invents legends about the life of Jesus, from the night of His birth to the Crucifixion and after. Some come from old Christian tradition, some from folk tales, and some are her own; all are told in a simple, warm voice suited to reading aloud.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, published at Riga in 1788, is the second of his three Critiques. Where the first Critique limited what reason can know about God, freedom and the soul, this book argues that pure reason is practical by itself: it can determine the will without any help from desire, and in doing so it gives freedom, God and immortality a secure footing as matters of rational belief.
Kant's first Critique asks whether metaphysics is possible as a science, and answers by examining reason's own powers before trusting any of its claims about God, the soul or the world as a whole. The first-edition preface describes human reason as burdened by questions it cannot dismiss and cannot answer, and the second-edition preface proposes a Copernican experiment: instead of assuming that knowledge must conform to objects, suppose that objects must conform to the forms of our knowing.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.
Cybernetics presents one of the twentieth century's boldest attempts to unite machines, organisms, and societies under a single vocabulary of control, communication, feedback, and information. Wiener begins from wartime problems of prediction, especially the effort to anticipate the path of aircraft quickly enough for anti-aircraft fire.
De Anima asks what soul is by beginning with the observable powers of living things. Aristotle reviews earlier accounts from thinkers such as Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Plato, then rejects explanations that make soul either a wandering body, a harmony, or a separate passenger inside the organism.
Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-dalal) is the intellectual autobiography of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the most influential theologian of medieval Sunni Islam. Written in Arabic about 1106–1110, after he had resumed teaching at Nishapur, it answers a 'brother in the faith' who has asked how he found his way through the quarrelling schools of his day and why he gave up his famous chair at Baghdad.
Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias reworks Kraepelin's deteriorating psychosis into a broader and more psychologically complex group of disorders. Its most famous act is terminological: Bleuler introduces schizophrenia to name a splitting or disjunction in psychic functions, not a split personality in the popular sense.
Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings gather John Boyd's strategic thought from thermodynamics and epistemology to conflict, command, and adaptation. Destruction and Creation argues that organisms and organizations must break apart old mental concepts and rebuild new ones in order to cope with a changing reality.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's answer to a prize question set by the Academy of Dijon in 1753: what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law? Rousseau's essay did not win the prize, but it was printed at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in 1755 with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva, a preface and extensive notes.
The Discourses and the Encheiridion preserve the teaching of Epictetus, a lame former slave who ran a school of Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis in western Greece in the early second century. Epictetus wrote nothing.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's late self-interpretation, part autobiography, part literary self-defense, part philosophical performance. Its chapter headings are famously outrageous: why he is so wise, clever, and a destiny; why he writes such good books.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Elements of Chemistry (Traité élémentaire de chimie, Paris, 1789) is Antoine Lavoisier's systematic textbook of the new chemistry he had built over the previous fifteen years. The library text is Robert Kerr's English translation, published at Edinburgh in 1790; Kerr, an Edinburgh surgeon, added Fahrenheit temperatures in brackets beside Lavoisier's Réaumur degrees and appended rules for converting French weights and measures, and the text describes the thirteen copperplates of apparatus drawn by Madame Lavoisier.
The Enneads collect Plotinus's treatises as arranged by his student Porphyry into six groups of nine. They do not form a continuous textbook, but they return again and again to a metaphysical pattern: all reality proceeds from the One, through Intellect, to Soul, and the philosophical life is a movement of return toward unity.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J. Hollingdale from Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, the two volumes of 'appendices and omissions' he published in 1851 to make his system available to general readers. The book that resulted is the opposite of a treatise: short, sardonic, quotable pieces on suffering, death, religion, women, reading, noise, ethics and psychology, all resting on the metaphysics of his early masterpiece.
Essays on Education in a Republic gathers the six essays on schooling that open Benjamin Rush's Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, published in Philadelphia in 1798. Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote them between 1786 and 1791 to ask what kind of education a free people needs once it has made itself a republic.
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political first appeared anonymously in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, after his Treatise of Human Nature had, in his own phrase, fallen dead-born from the press. Written in the manner of Addison's Spectator for a polite reading public, they brought the philosophy of the Treatise to bear on British politics, religion, taste and manners.
Essays: First Series gathers twelve essays that Emerson worked up from his journals and from the lecture courses he gave in Boston in the late 1830s. Each pursues one idea through a rush of aphorisms, examples and images rather than a step-by-step argument, and together they set out his conviction that the same universal mind or soul speaks in every person and in nature.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Experimental Researches in Electricity gathers the numbered papers that Michael Faraday read to the Royal Society and printed in its Philosophical Transactions, in which he discovered electromagnetic induction, showed that all kinds of electricity are one, and found the quantitative laws of electrolysis. Volume 1, first published in London in 1839, collects the first fourteen Series, written between 1831 and 1838, in 1,748 numbered paragraphs, with a preface, an index and plates; the library text is the 1849 second edition reprint.
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry is an anthology of Irish fairy lore, ghost stories, legends and comic tales chosen and introduced by the young W. B. Yeats. Rather than collecting stories himself, Yeats gathered the best versions already printed by nineteenth-century Irish writers and folklorists: Thomas Crofton Croker, William Carleton, Samuel Lover, Patrick Kennedy, Lady Wilde, Letitia Maclintock, Douglas Hyde and others, along with poems by William Allingham, Samuel Ferguson, Edward Walsh and Yeats himself.
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is not a polished monograph but a technical memorandum whose influence exceeds its form. Written in 1945 for the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer project, it describes a general-purpose electronic digital computer in which numerical data and operating instructions occupy the same high-speed memory.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan's account of his own conversion, written in the Bedford county jail and first published in 1666. It is told in 339 numbered paragraphs, opened by a preface addressed to the members of his congregation, whom he calls his children in the faith, and to whom he sends what he calls honey taken from the carcase of a lion.
On a cold December morning in Holland, fifteen-year-old Hans Brinker and his twelve-year-old sister Gretel skate on the canal near the village of Broek on wooden runners Hans has carved himself. Their family is very poor.
The Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel of John are pastoral expositions of one of Christianity's most theologically dense texts. Preached to a congregation rather than composed as a detached treatise, they move through John's prologue, signs, discourses, passion narrative, resurrection appearances, and final scenes with Peter and the beloved disciple.
Illustrations of the Logic of Science is a series of six essays that Charles Sanders Peirce published in Popular Science Monthly between November 1877 and August 1878. Written for a general educated readership, they set out a theory of inquiry, a rule for clarifying the meaning of ideas, a frequency account of probability, and a three-part classification of inference.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
Ivanhoe is set in England in 1194, when King Richard the Lion-Hearted is making his way home in secret after captivity in Austria and his brother Prince John is scheming to take the crown. More than a century after the Norman Conquest, Saxons and Normans are still bitterly divided.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
Journey to the West is the great Ming-dynasty comic and religious novel about the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage from Tang China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by a band of supernatural disciples. The library text is not a full translation.
Charcot's lectures show clinical neurology becoming a public method: observe signs, localize lesions, correlate symptoms with anatomy, and teach by cases. The English volumes gather Salpetriere lectures on spinal cord disease, paralysis, tremor, sclerosis, locomotor ataxia, hysteria, epilepsy, and related nervous disorders.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Tintern Abbey, as the poem is usually called, is a meditation in blank verse spoken on the banks of the River Wye a few miles upstream of the ruined Cistercian abbey on the border of England and Wales. Its first title dates it to 13 July 1798, when Wordsworth was on a walking tour with his sister Dorothy, and it was printed that autumn as the last poem in Lyrical Ballads.
Cedric Errol is a curly-haired American boy of seven, living with his widowed mother in a modest side street of New York. He calls her Dearest, as his father did, and his best friends are Mr. Hobbs, the corner grocer who rails against earls as grasping tyrants, and Dick Tipton, a bootblack.
Leibniz's logical writings on binary arithmetic and universal character are scattered across essays, letters, drafts, and memoranda rather than gathered in a single finished book. Their unity lies in a dream: reasoning might be made clearer, more reliable, and more inventive by a symbolic language whose elements combine according to rules.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.
Mere Christianity is C. S. Lewis's case for, and plain explanation of, the beliefs held in common by Christians of most denominations. In the preface Lewis borrows the phrase "mere Christianity" from the Puritan writer Richard Baxter and compares the shared faith to a hall from which doors open into the rooms of the separate churches; he says he is describing the hall, not recommending a room, and that people must eventually live in a room rather than in the hall.
Notes from Underground is a short novel in two parts, presented as the private notes of an unnamed retired civil servant of forty who lives in a shabby room on the edge of St. Petersburg. A footnote signed by the author explains that the writer of the notes is imaginary but represents a type produced by Russian society of the time.
Ada Lovelace's Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine begin as an act of translation and become a theory of computation. Luigi Menabrea had published a French account of Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine after hearing Babbage lecture in Turin.
Novum Organon Renovatum ('The New Organon Renewed') was published in London in 1858 by William Whewell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is the revised second part of his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840; second edition 1847), which for its third edition he divided into three books: the History of Scientific Ideas (1858), this volume on method, and On the Philosophy of Discovery (1860).
In the Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats addresses an ancient vase carved with figures and asks what it can tell us that living speech cannot. The first stanza piles up names for the urn, a still unravished bride of quietness, a foster-child of silence and slow time, a sylvan historian, and then a rush of questions about the scene on its side: men or gods, reluctant maidens, mad pursuit, pipes and timbrels, wild ecstasy.
This paired entry brings together Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem and his 1950 essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The first paper attacks a precise mathematical problem: what does it mean for a number or function to be computable?
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained inquiry into the historical and psychological origins of moral values. In three treatises he asks where good and evil came from, how guilt and bad conscience developed, and what ascetic ideals do for priests, philosophers, artists, scientists, and sufferers.
On the Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness.
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals is the short Latin treatise, printed at Frankfurt in 1628, in which William Harvey argued that the blood moves continuously in a circuit, driven out by the heart through the arteries and returned to it by the veins. The library text is Robert Willis's English translation of 1847, as revised by Alexander Bowie and reprinted in 1910 in the Harvard Classics, with that series' introductory note on Harvey's life.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, is Isaac Newton's experimental account of light and colour, written in English and published in London in 1704. Newton opens by announcing that his design is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments, and the three books carry out that plan.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher is Charles Babbage's late memoir of invention, public controversy, and scientific administration. It is not a continuous autobiography so much as a set of argued recollections.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy was published in 1958 by Routledge and Kegan Paul in London and by the University of Chicago Press. Its author, Michael Polanyi, had been a physician and a distinguished physical chemist before turning to philosophy, and the book grew from his Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1951–52.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were written in a race against death. In the spring of 1884 the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward collapsed through his partner's fraud, leaving the former president living on borrowed money.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Philosophical Investigations is the major work of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, published in 1953, two years after his death, in a bilingual German and English edition with a translation by his student G. E. M. Anscombe. It consists of numbered remarks, from a single sentence to a page long, in which Wittgenstein questions, imagines examples, answers an imaginary interlocutor and frequently turns against views he himself had held in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) was written as a textbook for his Berlin lectures on law, ethics and the state. Its preface is dated June 1820, and the book appeared in Berlin late that year with 1821 on the title page.
Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science is Werner Heisenberg's account of what quantum theory means for our understanding of nature, knowledge and language, set within the history of Western thought from the Greek atomists to the twentieth century. It grew from the Gifford Lectures he gave at the University of St Andrews in the winter of 1955-56 and was published in New York in 1958 by Harper and Brothers in the World Perspectives series, with an introduction by the Yale philosopher F. S. C. Northrop; a German edition, Physik und Philosophie, followed in 1959.
This volume gathers the three books that first introduced Emily Dickinson's poetry to the public, all published in Boston in the decade after her death in 1886. Poems (1890) was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, a young Amherst neighbor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man of letters with whom Dickinson had corresponded since 1862; Poems: Second Series followed in 1891 under the same two editors, and Poems: Third Series in 1896, edited by Todd alone.
The Poetics is Aristotle's short treatise on the art of poetry, chiefly tragedy and epic, and the oldest surviving work of literary theory in the West. It opens by defining all poetry, together with music and dance, as imitation (mimesis), and by distinguishing the arts according to the medium of imitation (rhythm, language, melody), the objects imitated (people better than us, worse, or like us), and the manner (narration or enactment).
Pollyanna Whittier, eleven years old, is the orphaned daughter of a poor missionary minister in the American West. Her mother, Jennie, had long ago disappointed her proud New England family by marrying the young minister instead of a wealthy suitor.
Popular Scientific Lectures gathers fifteen lectures and addresses that the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach gave between the 1860s and 1897 to general audiences, learned societies and university gatherings. They were first collected in English, translated by Thomas J. McCormack for the Open Court Publishing Company of Chicago in 1894–95; the library text is the enlarged third edition of 1898, whose proofs Mach read himself.
This volume joins two treatises by Aristotle that together set out what scientific knowledge is and how the natural world is to be understood. The Posterior Analytics, in two books, belongs to the logical works later grouped as the Organon.
Pragmatism collects eight popular lectures that William James gave at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December 1906 and at Columbia University in January 1907. Published that year and dedicated to the memory of John Stuart Mill, the book presents pragmatism as both a method for settling disputes and a theory of what truth is.
Newton's Principia sets out the mathematical principles of natural philosophy and shows that the same laws can explain terrestrial motion and celestial order. The work begins with definitions of mass, quantity of motion, inertia, impressed force, centripetal force, absolute and relative space, and absolute and relative time.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
Science and Hypothesis (La Science et l'hypothèse, Paris, 1902) is the first of Henri Poincaré's three books on the foundations of science, written by one of the leading mathematicians of his age for a general educated public. It asks how much of science is fact, how much is reasoning, and how much is choice.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the central monuments of medieval monastic spirituality. They do not offer a continuous modern commentary on every verse.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Patrick's own writings are the narrow bridge between the global St. Patrick's Day figure and a real late Roman Christian voice. The Confessio begins with a self-portrait of abasement: Patrick calls himself a sinner, unlearned, rustic, and contemptible to many.
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement. The saint layer is late antique and medieval.
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
Structural Anthropology (Anthropologie structurale) is a collection of seventeen essays by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, published by Plon in Paris in 1958 and translated into English by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf for Basic Books in 1963. In his preface Lévi-Strauss explains that he chose them from roughly a hundred papers written over some thirty years; most had appeared in journals between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, and two were printed for the first time in the book.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. It opens with the preliminary communication on hysterical symptoms, then presents case histories including Anna O., Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina, and Elisabeth von R., followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal. Tom is an orphan living with his kind, anxious Aunt Polly, his priggish half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary.
The Antichrist is Nietzsche's most direct assault on Christianity as a moral and cultural force. It argues that Christianity reverses life-affirming values, sanctifies weakness, elevates pity, falsifies psychology, and turns resentment into virtue.
The Art of War is a short treatise of thirteen chapters, around six thousand Chinese characters, written as a sequence of terse sayings introduced by the formula 'Sun Tzu said'. It begins by declaring war a matter of life and death for the state, to be studied through five constant factors: the moral law that binds people to their ruler, heaven (weather and seasons), earth (terrain and distance), the commander's qualities, and method and discipline.
Dell'arte della guerra, printed in Florence in 1521, is the only one of Machiavelli's political works published in his lifetime. It is a dialogue in seven books, set in 1516 in the Orti Oricellari, the shaded garden of Cosimo Rucellai, where the humanist circle that Machiavelli frequented met to discuss Livy and republican government.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) is Ibn Sina's encyclopedia of medicine in five books, and Book I, the subject of this record, sets out the general principles on which the rest depends. It opens with a definition: medicine is the science of the states of the human body in health and when not in health, and of how health is lost and restored, with a theoretical part that gives knowledge and a practical part that guides the physician's judgment.
The Chemical History of a Candle prints six lectures that Michael Faraday gave to a 'juvenile audience' at the Royal Institution in London over the Christmas season of 1860–61. Faraday opens by declaring that no door into natural philosophy is more open than the burning candle, and he keeps the whole course tied to that single object while it leads him through heat, chemistry, the air and the living body.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Comedy of Errors takes place in a single day in the Greek city of Ephesus, where two sets of identical twins, separated as babies, are mistaken for each other until the whole town seems bewitched. Egeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, has been arrested because the two cities are at war and any Syracusan found in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks or die.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
The Descent of Man applies evolutionary theory to human beings and develops Darwin's account of sexual selection. Darwin argues that humans share ancestry with other animals and that differences between human and animal mental faculties are differences of degree rather than absolute kind.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions is one of the founding works of comparative psychology. It asks how humans and animals express fear, anger, joy, grief, shame, disgust, attention, and other states through face, posture, voice, tears, hair, muscles, and involuntary action.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
The Gay Science, also translated as The Joyful Wisdom, is Nietzsche's book of convalescence, experiment, and dangerous cheerfulness. Its aphorisms and songs range across knowledge, art, women, morality, religion, science, friendship, self-creation, health, and style.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published by Macmillan in London in February 1936, is John Maynard Keynes's attempt to explain why an economy can remain for long periods with many people out of work. Written during the Great Depression, it argues that the classical economics Keynes had been taught describes only a special case, one of full employment, and that a more general theory is needed for the world as it is.
The Golden Ass is a comic, erotic, violent and religious novel about curiosity transformed into degradation and salvation. Lucius, a young man fascinated by magic, travels in Thessaly, a region famous for witches.
Books I-V are the first pentad of Livy's vast history of Rome from its foundation, carrying the story from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to the recovery of the city after the Gallic sack of about 390 BC. Livy opens with a preface that admits the earliest traditions are closer to poetry than to record, and then states his purpose: history sets before the reader examples of every kind of conduct, to be imitated or avoided, and Rome, he believes, was richer in good examples than any other state until luxury and avarice came late.
The Hound of the Baskervilles brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Dartmoor to investigate a family curse. It opens in Baker Street with a walking stick left by a visitor, from which Holmes deduces a young country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Journey of the Mind into God is Bonaventure's compact map of contemplative ascent, written after meditation on Francis of Assisi's vision of the six-winged seraph at La Verna. The work is structured around six stages, corresponding to the seraph's wings, by which the mind rises through creation, the self, and the names of God before passing beyond conceptual mastery into ecstatic union.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
Tristram Shandy promises to tell the life and opinions of its narrator, a Yorkshire gentleman, and spends most of its nine volumes failing to reach his life at all. Tristram begins with the moment of his conception in March 1718, when his mother interrupts his father at the critical instant to ask whether he has remembered to wind up the clock.
The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus is the spiritual autobiography that the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila wrote at the command of her confessors, so that they could judge whether the extraordinary graces she reported came from God. It follows her from childhood in Avila to the founding of the convent of St. Joseph in 1562, and in its middle chapters becomes a treatise on prayer.
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria gathers Janet's Harvard lectures into a clear account of dissociation, narrowed consciousness, fixed ideas, amnesia, anesthesia, motor symptoms, crises, and suggestibility. Janet stands close to Charcot but less theatrical; he is interested in how psychological functions fall apart, become dissociated, or continue automatically outside ordinary awareness.
The Metamorphosis is a novella in three parts about Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman in cloth who supports his parents and his seventeen-year-old sister Grete, and who wakes one morning in his room to find that he has been changed into a monstrous insect. Kafka tells the story plainly, in the third person and almost entirely from Gregor's point of view, never explaining the transformation and never letting it become a dream.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
The Moonstone, subtitled A Romance, tells the story of a great yellow diamond taken from India and the year of suspicion that follows its disappearance from an English country house. A Prologue, drawn from a family paper, describes the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when the officer John Herncastle seizes the jewel from Tipu Sultan's treasury, killing its guardians; one dying Indian warns that the Moonstone will have its vengeance.
The Nature of the Physical World is Arthur Eddington's account, for general readers, of what relativity, thermodynamics and quantum theory had done to the picture of the physical world, and of what that picture leaves room for in human experience. It is substantially the Gifford Lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh from January to March 1927, published in 1928 by Cambridge University Press and Macmillan.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
The Nicomachean Ethics asks what the human good is and how a life can be shaped toward it. Aristotle begins from the idea that every craft, inquiry and action aims at some good, and that the highest practical good is eudaimonia, often translated happiness or flourishing.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel, a moral fable told in the polished language of the London drawing room. In the studio of the painter Basil Hallward, the witty Lord Henry Wotton sees an unfinished portrait of an extraordinarily handsome young man and insists on meeting its subject.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience. At Gardencourt, the English estate of her uncle, Isabel meets her invalid cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her imaginatively and persuades his dying father to leave her a fortune so that she can live freely.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Problems of Philosophy is a short introduction to philosophy, chiefly to the theory of knowledge, written for a general reader. Russell opens by asking whether there is any knowledge so certain that no reasonable person could doubt it, and the fifteen chapters work toward a qualified answer.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a long essay in two parts asking why modern rational capitalism, with its disciplined, systematic pursuit of profit as a duty, arose first and most strongly in the Protestant lands of the West. Weber does not argue that Protestantism caused capitalism, and he says so explicitly; he argues that certain forms of Protestant belief helped produce an ethos, a moral attitude toward work and wealth, that fitted the needs of a new economic order.
Jung's Psychology of Dementia Praecox attempts to make psychotic speech and behavior psychologically intelligible. Working from the Burgholzli clinic, word-association studies, Bleuler's dementia praecox, and Freud's ideas about complexes, Jung argues that seemingly senseless symptoms may express emotionally charged complexes.
The Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
Cicero wrote his two dialogues on the state in the troubled 50s BC, when the Roman Republic was strained by the private power of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus. On the Commonwealth (De re publica), published in 51 BC, imitates Plato's Republic but asks what the best constitution is for a real people, and answers with Rome itself.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The Screwtape Letters is a book of thirty-one letters written by Screwtape, a senior devil in the bureaucracy of Hell, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter on his first assignment. Wormwood's charge is a young Englishman, never named and called only the patient, who lives with his mother at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. Its title comes from Jesus' words about Lazarus in John 11:4, 'This sickness is not unto death.' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's account of her first twenty-two years, written while she was a student at Radcliffe College. She begins at Ivy Green, the family home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, where she was born on June 27, 1880.
The Subjection of Women is John Stuart Mill's extended argument that the legal subordination of women to men in mid-Victorian Britain was wrong in principle and an obstacle to human improvement, and that it should give way to perfect equality before the law. Mill drafted it in 1860–1861, after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, and published it with Longmans in 1869.
The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory.
The Tempest opens with a ship breaking apart in a storm off a remote island. On shore, the magician Prospero tells his fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan.
The Trial follows Josef K., a respected chief clerk at a large bank in an unnamed city, from the morning of his thirtieth birthday, when two warders appear in his lodgings and tell him he is under arrest, to the eve of his thirty-first, when two men in frock coats lead him to a quarry and kill him. Neither K. nor the reader ever learns what he is accused of or what law he has broken.
The trial records of Joan of Arc are not a saint's life in the ordinary devotional sense. They are hostile legal documents that accidentally preserve one of the most vivid medieval voices.
The Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
The Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in London by Strahan and Cadell on 9 March 1776, asks what makes a nation rich and what policies help or hinder that growth. Smith's answer is that wealth is not a store of gold and silver but the annual produce of a nation's labour, and that it grows chiefly through the division of labour, the accumulation of capital and the freedom to trade.
The Wise Woman is George MacDonald's fairy-tale parable of two spoiled little girls in an odd country where everyone wants what he has not got. Princess Rosamond, whose name means Rose of the World, has been given everything she cried for, including a silver disc to stand in for the moon, and has grown into a raging, greedy child who beats her pets and has nearly killed her nurse.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Theodore Roosevelt's Autobiography, written at Sagamore Hill in 1913, is less a full life than a series of chapters on the work and convictions of a public man. A foreword dated 1 October 1913 calls for joining practical efficiency with lofty idealism.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Timaeus offers Plato's most elaborate cosmological account, framed by Socrates' wish to see the ideal city in motion and Critias's story of ancient Athens and Atlantis. Timaeus then delivers a likely story about the cosmos, not a demonstration with mathematical certainty.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
Twilight of the Idols is Nietzsche in compressed diagnostic form. Subtitled How to Philosophize with a Hammer, it tests inherited idols by sounding them for hollowness.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy New York physician still grieving his brilliant dead wife and disappointed that Catherine lacks her mother's beauty and charm.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell is a short book based on public lectures that Erwin Schrödinger gave at Trinity College Dublin in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life. During the luminous northern nights, he wanders the city and feels intimate with streets, houses and imagined lives while remaining isolated from actual human companionship.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Passages
- A Burnt-Out Case, Throughout
Querry describes his loss of desire, pleasure and belief, a condition he likens to the leper's loss of sensation.
- A Christmas Carol, Stave I
Scrooge attributes Marley's ghost to a disordered stomach, a period theory of apparitions and nightmares.
- A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, Opening model of neurons
The idealized all-or-none neuron creates a formal bridge between neurophysiology and logic.
- A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1938 thesis, relay circuit analysis
Boolean logic becomes an electrical design method, a key step toward machines that later model cognitive processes.
- A System of Logic, Book III: Of Induction, Book III, Ch. V
Discussion of volition, nerves and muscles in the production of bodily motion, and of the continuance of effects such as brain-fever after sunstroke.
- A Theologico-Political Treatise, Chapter II, Of Prophets
Revelation varying with each prophet's imagination and temperament, cheerful or melancholy.
- A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, sections 18-20
Berkeley argues that no one can explain how body could act on spirit to produce an idea, so material causes explain nothing about perception.
- A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, sections 43-44
Summary of the New Theory of Vision: distance is not seen directly but suggested by ideas of sight that have been joined with ideas of touch.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sect. 6
Introspective search for the self finds only perceptions; the mind compared to a theatre with no fixed stage; sleep and death as the absence of a perceiving self.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, Sect. 3–4
Reason as servant of the passions; calm versus violent passions; why strong emotion can override clear knowledge of one's interest.
- A Treatise on Insanity, Treatment chapters
The discussion of regimen, baths, restraint, and moral management captures the therapeutic hopes and limits of asylum reform.
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 2-3
Bodily weakness and sickly delicacy cultivated as feminine charms, contrasted with exercise and the healthy tone of nerves and muscles.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VII, Part I
The will's command over body and mind is known only by experience; self-command varies with health, sickness, time of day and fasting; a paralysed limb illustrates our ignorance of the mechanism.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part One, Chapter I
Bernard notes that the insane, having lost reason, no longer learn from experience, which he calls the prerogative of reason.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Two, Chapter I
The internal environment of warm-blooded animals and its protective mechanisms are described as the condition of their apparent independence from the outer world.
- An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, Opening chapters on the laws of thought
Boole frames symbolic logic as an inquiry into the operations of the mind, relevant to later computational models of cognition.
- As We May Think, Discussion of associative indexing
Bush's claim about mental association connects technology design to a theory of cognition.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, §§3, 6, 17, 19
Conscious thought steered by instinct and physiology; philosophy as involuntary autobiography; thoughts arriving unbidden; willing as a complex of feelings and commands.
- Body and Mind, Lecture I
Maudsley argues that mind must be studied through bodily organization and nervous function.
- Catiline's War and The Jugurthine War, Catiline's War, ch. XV
Catiline's guilty conscience: no rest waking or sleeping, pale complexion, haggard eyes, irregular gait.
- Catiline's War and The Jugurthine War, Catiline's War, ch. V
Catiline's bodily endurance of hunger, cold and want of sleep beyond belief.
- Ceremony, Opening section
Tayo's sleeplessness, nausea and flood of memories; his recollection of the VA hospital ward where he felt himself invisible.
- Christ Legends, Saint Veronica's Kerchief, sections III–IV and IX
The Emperor's disfiguring illness, the despair of his physicians and court, and his healing on seeing the kerchief.
- City of God, Book 1
He argues that bodily violation does not morally stain a person without consent of the will.
- Critique of Practical Reason, Book I, Chapter I, section 1 and Remark
Kant defines practical principles and contrasts a will pathologically affected by desire with one determined by reason alone.
- Critique of Practical Reason, Book I, Chapter III
The analysis of respect as a feeling produced by the moral law, which strikes down self-conceit and limits self-love.
- Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Deduction (A 98–130; B 129–169)
Synthesis of apprehension, reproduction and recognition; the unity of apperception as the condition of any coherent experience.
- Critique of Pure Reason, Paralogisms of Pure Reason (A 341–405; B 399–432)
Critique of rational psychology's claims that the soul is a simple, persisting, immaterial substance, including a response to Mendelssohn on the soul's gradual extinction.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, The Dream of Angus Og
Angus pines and refuses food for a year after a dream-woman stops visiting him; Fergne, physician of Conn, judges the sickness to be of the mind and identifies love as its cause.
- Cybernetics, Chapters on feedback and servomechanisms
Wiener's account of circular control gives a framework for reflexes, motor coordination, tremor, and homeostasis.
- De Anima, Earlier theories
De Anima gives this tag concrete force through the work matters to medicine because perception, touch, appetite, and bodily organization become the basis for thinking about life and mind
- Deliverance from Error (The Confessions of al-Ghazali), Sufism (the crisis at Baghdad)
Loss of speech, appetite and the ability to swallow; the physicians' verdict that the cause lies in the heart and in sadness.
- Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, Fundamental symptoms
Association, affect, ambivalence, and autism become organizing signs for the diagnosis.
- Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings, Destruction and Creation
The argument about breaking and rebuilding concepts is relevant to cognitive flexibility under uncertainty.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Gratuitous pains of gout, gravel, migraine, toothache and rheumatism, and spleen, melancholy and superstition as pains of the mind.
- Discourse on Method, Part IV
Methodical doubt including the possibility that waking experience is a dream; the conclusion that the thinking self is distinct from the body.
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Animal spirits, nerves, muscles and the brain explained mechanically; animals as automata; speech and reason as signs of a rational soul, with remarks on deaf people's sign language.
- Discourse on Method, Part VI
Health as the first good; the mind's dependence on bodily organs; hope that medicine could cure diseases of body and mind and the debility of age.
- Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, First Part, on sickness
Rousseau lists the diseases produced by inequalities of labour, diet and passion and argues that most of our ills are of our own making.
- Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion, Discourses, "On Anxiety (Solicitude)" (II.13)
Epictetus diagnoses the anxious man, pale before an audience, as wanting something not in his power.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Life of St. Francis, Ch. XVII
The stigmata at La Verna are the major medieval case of sanctity written onto the body.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Canticle of the Sun
Praise of bodily death gives end-of-life suffering a devotional vocabulary.
- Ecce Homo, Wise and clever chapters
Nietzsche links diet, climate, illness, recovery, and intellectual style.
- Effi Briest, Kessin chapters (Ch. 8–20)
Effi's night fears of the Chinese ghost and Innstetten's ambiguous refusal to reassure her.
- Elements of Chemistry, Part II, Sect. III
Light is necessary to the health of plants and of people, who decline in sedentary manufactures and crowded houses and improve in open-air labour.
- Enneads, Porphyry's arrangement
Enneads gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance is indirect but real: passions, embodiment, purification, attention, and the divided self make philosophy a therapy of perception
- Essays, Book I, Ch. XX, 'Of the Force of Imagination'
Sympathetic coughs and fevers, impotence induced and cured by belief, the merchant who responds to a mimed clyster, and other cases of suggestion acting on the body.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. XII, 'Apology for Raymond Sebond'
Sceptical attack on the reliability of the senses and of reason, with frequent appeal to illness, fever and madness as states that alter perception.
- Essays, Essay XXX, Of Regiment of Health
Self-observation as physic, gradual change, Celsus's alternation of fasting and full eating, waking and sleep; passions to avoid; choosing a physician of middle temper.
- Essays, Essay L, Of Studies
Exercises for bodily ills (bowling for the stone, walking for the stomach) as a model for studies prescribed for defects of the mind.
- Essays and Aphorisms, Parerga II, 'On Noise' (in the Hollingdale selection)
Schopenhauer's complaint that noise, especially the cracking of whips, interrupts and destroys thought.
- Essays and Aphorisms, On Human Nature, 'Government', 'Free-will and Fatalism' and 'Character' (stored text)
Character inherited from the father, innate and unalterable; intellectual differences grounded in brain and nervous system.
- Essays on Education in a Republic, Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic
Physical discipline for students: diet, abstinence from spirits, manual labour, sleep, silence, solitude and cleanliness, and the claim that these physical causes act on intellect and morals.
- Essays on Education in a Republic, Thoughts upon the Amusements and Punishments Proper for Schools, reasons 4, 9 and 10 against corporal punishment
Injuries to body and intellect from beating, a schoolmate's reported death after a whipping, fear debilitating the mind, and the analogy between dosing a remedy to a patient's excitability and fitting discipline to a child's temper.
- Essays, Moral and Political (selection), Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion
An excessive sensibility to fortune, with its piercing griefs, and the cultivation of taste as its remedy.
- Essays: First Series (Self-Reliance and Other Essays), II. Self-Reliance, early paragraphs on nonconformity
Emerson says he wants his life to be sound and sweet and not to need diet and bleeding, using the period's standard remedies as a figure for a life propped up from outside.
- Essays: First Series (Self-Reliance and Other Essays), VII. Prudence
Counsel on health, diet, sleep and the body as the lower but necessary art of living.
- Ethics, Part II, Props. XI–XIII and Note
The mind as idea of the body; the more a body is capable of many actions, the more its mind is capable of many perceptions.
- Ethics, Part III, Preface and Props. VI–XI
Programme of studying emotions naturalistically; conatus and the primary affects of desire, pleasure and pain.
- Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1, Third Series, paragraphs 279, 332 and 347
Physiological effects of voltaic, common and magneto-electricity: shocks, convulsions of a frog, sensations on the tongue and flashes before the eyes.
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Changelings, introduction
Yeats explains the belief that fairies carry off healthy children and leave sickly substitutes that pine away, and the folk tests used to detect them.
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Witches, Fairy Doctors, introduction
The fairy doctor's knowledge of herbs and spells, and the fairy blast or stroke that causes swellings or paralysis.
- First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, Opening functional description
The comparison of machine parts to organs provides a historically important bridge between engineering and bodily metaphor.
- Fragments, DK 117–118
The drunk man with a moist soul led by a boy; the dry soul as wisest.
- Fragments, DK 111
Sickness makes health pleasant and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. IV (1818) / Ch. 5 (1831)
Animation of the creature, Victor's nightmare of Elizabeth turning into his mother's corpse, flight, and months-long nervous fever nursed by Clerval.
- Galen: Selected Works, On the Natural Faculties, Books 2–3
Digestion, nutrition and bodily transformation are explained as ordered natural processes rather than chance.
- Galen: Selected Works, On the Passions and Errors of the Soul
Galen treats anger, error, self-knowledge and moral training as matters with therapeutic significance.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§142-228
The long period of despair under the example of Esau, with physical sensations he attributes to guilt.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§255-262
A spring illness he thought was consumption, his spiritual darkness during it, and his recovery in body and mind together.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 14, Hans
Hans tells Peter how his father held his mother to the fire and afterward slept in a fever with his hands pressed to his head.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 34, The Awakening
Raff wakes believing he is still on the dike in the flood, recognizes his wife, and asks after the baby.
- Heroides, Letter XXI (Cydippe to Acontius)
Cydippe describes her wasting, pallor and a fever that returns as her wedding approaches; the nurse guards her door and physicians cannot help.
- Hippocratic Writings, On the Sacred Disease 1–2
The writer rejects divine special status for epilepsy and argues that it has a natural cause like other diseases.
- Hippocratic Writings, On the Sacred Disease 14–17
The brain is presented as the organ through which people think, perceive, rejoice, grieve, become mad and suffer terrors.
- Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on the man born blind
Blindness becomes a layered figure for perception, ignorance, healing, and confession.
- Illustrations of the Logic of Science, The Fixation of Belief, III
Doubt is likened to the irritation of a nerve and reflex action, and belief to a nervous habit.
- Illustrations of the Logic of Science, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, I
An unclear idea in a young man's head is compared to an obstruction in an artery starving the brain.
- Illustrations of the Logic of Science, Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis, V
Hypothesis is linked to emotion, induction to habit and deduction to attention and nervous discharge.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Orestes, Menelaus scene
Orestes names his conscience as his sickness and describes his grief and the visions of the avenging goddesses.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XLIII
Bois-Guilbert falls in the lists and dies with no wound, flushed and then pallid, victim of his own passions.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 15, Herodian family violence
Herod's household murders and suspicions are narrated as political pathology, a non-clinical portrait of fear, rage and moral disorder.
- Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven), Chapter LXXIII
The pilgrims are poisoned with tea at a Daoist temple and saved by antidote pills from a bodhisattva; the chapter heading links hatred to illness.
- Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Hysteria material
Charcot treats hysteria as a neurological and clinical problem, not simply a moral failing or fraud.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letter 54
Seneca describes severe breathing attacks and his mental response to bodily crisis.
- Leviathan, Introduction
The body as clockwork (heart as spring, nerves as strings, joints as wheels) and the state as an artificial man.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VI, 'Of the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Motions'
Definitions of the passions as forms of appetite and aversion, including fear, grief, anxiety and the 'Panique Terror' of crowds.
- Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Verse paragraph 2
Remembered landscape gives sensations felt in the blood and heart and tranquil restoration, then a trance-like mood in which bodily motion seems suspended.
- Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Verse paragraph 5
He hopes his sister will have healing thoughts in solitude, fear, pain or grief, and speaks of his own genial spirits.
- Little Lord Fauntleroy, Chapter IX
The Earl's doctor finds his patient's health improving as the old man's interest in his grandson grows.
- Logical Writings on Binary Arithmetic and Universal Character, Binary arithmetic essays
The two-state symbolic system later invites comparison with digital models of neural and cognitive activity.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1
Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking and hand-washing observed by the Doctor and Gentlewoman.
- Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Opening chapters on causes and seats of mental disease
Rush links mental disorder to bodily and brain processes, marking a medicalizing account of mind.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation II
Identification of the self as a thinking thing whose existence is certain independent of any knowledge of the body.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Argument for the real distinction of mind and body, followed by the claim that the mind is not in the body as a pilot in a ship, as hunger, thirst and pain show.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Nerves compared to a cord whose pull at any point produces the same motion in the brain; the dropsical patient's thirst as a natural signal that harms the sick body.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Book I
Griesinger argues that mental diseases must be understood as diseases of the brain, while admitting the limits of pathology.
- Mere Christianity, Book IV, Ch. 10, "Nice People or New Men"
Lewis contrasts inherited temperament and upbringing with moral effort, arguing that a person with a difficult nervous constitution may be further along than an easy-tempered one.
- Notes from Underground, Part I, Chapter I
The narrator calls himself sick, suspects his liver, and declares that he will not consult a doctor out of spite.
- Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Note A
Lovelace explains the distinction between the Difference Engine's numerical table-making and the Analytical Engine's broader command of operations.
- Novum Organon Renovatum, Book I, Aphorisms CI-CIII
Life as a system of vital forces, irreducible to mechanical or chemical forces; digestion and the motion of the blood as examples.
- Novum Organon Renovatum, Book I, Aphorism CIV
Distinction between voluntary, reflex and instinctive motions in terms of sensations, ideas and actions.
- Novum Organon Renovatum, Book I, Aphorisms CV-CVI
Final causes in organized bodies, and disease as a state in which the vital forces do not attain their proper ends.
- Ode on a Grecian Urn, Stanza 3, lines 28-30
Human passion is set against the urn's carved love and described through bodily signs of satiety and fever.
- On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery, 1936 paper, definition of computing machines
The reduction of calculation to symbolic operations offers a formal ancestor for computational models of cognition.
- On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery, 1950 essay, objections about nervous systems and disability
Turing's survey of objections shows how embodiment and impairment enter debates about intelligence.
- On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay II
Guilt and bad conscience are traced through pain, debt, punishment, and internalized instinct.
- On the Making of Man, Creation and dignity
On the Making of Man gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens includes anatomy, generation, bodily organs, sex difference, mortality, resurrection, and the porous border between medicine and theology
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis), Chs. XI–XII
Tight and medium ligatures on the arm, as used in bloodletting, show arterial inflow and venous return; the fainting patient whose blood only drips is explained.
- On War, Book I, Ch. 5, Of Bodily Exertion in War
Frost, heat, thirst, hunger and fatigue as influences on judgment, and the commander's art of demanding extreme effort from troops.
- On War, Book I, Ch. 7–8, Friction and Concluding Remarks
Friction as the sum of danger, exertion and uncertainty; habituation compared to the pupil of the eye adapting to a dark room.
- Opticks, Book I, Part II, Prop. VII
Colours seen in dreams and by a madman, or by pressing or striking the eye, set aside as arising from causes other than light.
- Opticks, Book III, Queries 16 and 23–24
Pressure phosphenes and persistence of vision; vision and animal motion speculatively explained by vibrations in the nerves excited by the will.
- Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, Chapters on the Analytical Engine
The explanation of mechanical memory and operation offers a nineteenth-century source for later analogies between mechanism and thought.
- Pensees, Fragment 82, Section II
Imagination as the 'mistress of error', able to make men healthy or sick; the philosopher sweating on a plank above a precipice; cats, rats and a crushed coal that 'unhinge the reason'; physicians in cassocks and mules; diseases that spoil judgment.
- Personal Knowledge, Part Two, ch. 5 (Articulation)
A medical student in a course on X-ray diagnosis of pulmonary disease gradually learns to see what the radiologist describes.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. II, Ch. LXVII
Sick headache treated with hot mustard footbaths and plasters, cured on reading Lee's note; Grant's 'sad and depressed' feelings at the surrender.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 246a–254e
The charioteer and two horses as a model of the soul's internal conflict.
- Philosophical Investigations, Part I, §§243-246
How words for sensations are learned, with the example of a child who has hurt himself, and the question whether pain is private.
- Philosophical Investigations, Part I, §§258 and 293
The diary of a recurring sensation and the beetle in the box.
- Philosophical Investigations, Second part, section on seeing aspects
The duck-rabbit and the experience of an aspect suddenly changing, discussed with reference to psychology.
- Philosophy of Right, §§47–48 and notes
The body as the outward existence of the free person, which others may not treat as a mere thing or beast of burden.
- Physics and Philosophy, Chapter on the relation of quantum theory to other parts of natural science
Heisenberg discusses whether physics and chemistry suffice to explain living organisms.
- Physics and Philosophy, Chapter on philosophical ideas since Descartes
The Cartesian split between thinking and extended substance reconsidered after quantum observation.
- Poems: First, Second and Third Series, Third Series, Life XLIII (The Brain)
The brain is measured against sky, sea and God, an imaginative statement of the mind's capacity.
- Poetics, Chapter VI
The definition of tragedy ends with pity and fear accomplishing catharsis of such emotions, the phrase behind the medical and psychological readings.
- Poetics, Chapter IV
Aristotle explains why people delight in exact likenesses of things painful to see, such as the lowest animals and dead bodies: learning gives pleasure.
- Pollyanna, Chapter XV
Dr. Chilton says the child is better than any tonic and wishes he could prescribe her for his patients.
- Popular Scientific Lectures, The Fibres of Corti
Helmholtz's account of the cochlea as a set of resonators analysing sound, with the illustration of a deaf person 'hearing' through a piano.
- Popular Scientific Lectures, On Sensations of Orientation
Self-experiments on a rotating apparatus, a disc model of the semicircular canals, and credit to Goltz, Breuer and Crum Brown for the theory of the sense of balance.
- Popular Scientific Lectures, The Part Played by Accident in Invention and Discovery, near the end
Mach declines Lombroso's view that genius is a disease while noting that sensitive constitutions succumb readily to illness.
- Posterior Analytics and Physics, Posterior Analytics I.18 (81a–b)
Loss of any sense entails loss of a corresponding portion of knowledge, since universals are grasped by induction from perception.
- Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Lecture VI
Truth compared with health, wealth and strength as names for processes that are made in the course of experience.
- Principia, Definitions and laws
Principia gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is indirect: mechanics reshaped physiology, nerves, circulation, and later models of body and mind by making force and motion newly authoritative
- Science and Hypothesis, Part I, Ch. II, The Physical Continuum
Sensory thresholds in Fechner's experiments: weights of 10 and 11 grams, or 11 and 12, felt as equal though 10 and 12 are distinguished, and what this implies for the idea of magnitude.
- Science and Hypothesis, Part II, Ch. IV, Visual Space; Tactile and Motor Space
How retinal images, the muscular sensations of convergence and accommodation, and the body's movements together give rise to representative space.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. III, Ch. 6–7
Marianne's fever at Cleveland after walks in the wet; Mr Harris the apothecary attends, fears of infection send the Palmers' baby away, and Elinor nurses her through the crisis.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Devotions, opening meditations
Donne observes the onset of illness and turns bodily vulnerability into spiritual inquiry.
- Sermons on the Song of Songs, Early sermons on the kiss
The language of bodily intimacy becomes an account of spiritual desire and affective transformation.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book III (Wadi Ais, March 1917)
Ill with dysentery and fever and covered in boils, Lawrence lies in a tent for some ten days and thinks out the theory of guerrilla war.
- St. Patrick's Writings, Confessio X
The voice from Ireland is a central religious experience that later psychology might compare with conversion and vocation narratives.
- St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania, Hecker, Strasbourg dancing plague
Crowd dancing is routed toward chapels, masses, musicians, and civic management, a setting relevant to mass psychogenic illness and social stress.
- St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania, Hecker on Paracelsus
Paracelsus divides the disorder into kinds and treats some patients by coercive regimen, showing medicalization without modern therapeutic softness.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case
Jekyll describes his first dose, its physical agonies, and the sense of lightness, recklessness and freedom from conscience that followed.
- Structural Anthropology, Magic and Religion, The Sorcerer and His Magic
The career of Quesalid, the Zuni boy accused of sorcery who confesses and is spared, and the argument that magic is effective within a shared system of belief.
- Studies on Hysteria, Freud case histories
Freud turns symptom description into a search for hidden memories and conflicts.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 76, Art. 1
The intellectual soul as the form of the body and the single principle of nourishment, sensation, movement and understanding.
- Summa Theologica, I, QQ. 78–79
The powers of the soul: vegetative, external and internal senses (common sense, imagination, estimative power, memory) and intellect.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 11
Tom's guilty conscience disturbs his sleep and he talks in his sleep, alarming Sid.
- The Antichrist, Opening aphorisms
Nietzsche uses health, decadence, and instinct as evaluative language against Christian morality.
- The Art of War, Ch. VIII.12–14
Five dangerous faults of a general (recklessness, cowardice, hasty temper, sensitivity to shame, over-solicitude for his men), with commentators' examples of generals ruined by each.
- The Art of War, Ch. XI.23–28
Troops in desperate straits lose fear and fight to the death; Sun Tzu describes soldiers weeping on the day of battle and then fighting with the courage of legendary heroes.
- The Art of War, Book II
Roman soldiers made the weight of armour bearable by habituating their bodies to hardship; accustomed pains cease to be felt.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 1.28–1.47
Arjuna's physical and emotional collapse: trembling, dry mouth, burning skin, a reeling mind and refusal to fight.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 1, paras. 138-141
The seats of the faculties in brain, liver and heart, and the disagreement between Aristotle and the Galenic physicians.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 2, Thesis 2, paras. 336-345
Effects of sleep, wakefulness and insomnia; the passions as movements of the breath, with fear, anger, gloom and shame; the parents' imagination and the offspring.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 3, Thesis 1, paras. 690-733
Care of the newborn, breastfeeding and the wet-nurse, infant disorders including night-terrors, and the emotional regimen of childhood.
- The Chemical History of a Candle, Lecture VI
Account of the lungs, where blood and air are separated by a thin surface and carbon from food is converted to carbonic acid with the production of heat.
- The Chemical History of a Candle, Lecture VI
Daily carbon output by respiration in a man, a cow and a horse, and the exchange by which plants take up the carbonic acid animals exhale.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 5, Scene 1
The Abbess traces the husband's supposed madness to broken sleep, disturbed meals and barred recreation leading to fever and melancholy, and offers syrups, drugs and prayers.
- The Complete Poems, Song of Myself
The speaker's celebration of bodies, breath, touch, labor and sexuality makes embodiment central to democratic vision.
- The Complete Poems, I Sing the Body Electric
The poem treats the human body as spiritually charged and socially meaningful.
- The Complete Poems, Late poems
Whitman's later work reflects aging, bodily limitation and spiritual persistence.
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 3
External goods are shown unable to produce true happiness or secure identity.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 3–4
The fall against a window frame, the pain in the side, the strange taste in the mouth, and the first consultation with a celebrated doctor.
- The Descent of Man, Part I, Chs. 2-5
Darwin treats mental faculties, moral sense, and social instincts as continuous with animal life.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Apostles' Creed, articles on birth, death and resurrection
The creed moves through conception, birth, suffering, death, burial and bodily resurrection, offering a compact theology of embodied life.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Nicene Creed (325), article on the incarnation
The Son's descent and incarnation connect metaphysical claims about God to the healing and salvation of human life.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Chalcedonian Definition (451), two natures
Chalcedon's insistence that Christ is fully human protects the reality of embodied suffering from being treated as merely apparent.
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Principles chapters
Darwin makes emotional expression a biological phenomenon governed by habit, antithesis, and nervous discharge.
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Observation methods
Photographs, questionnaires, children, and animals show nineteenth-century methods for studying emotion.
- The Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto VIII, stanzas 40-41
Redcrosse is brought out of the dungeon pale, wasted and too weak to stand.
- The Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto X, stanzas 23-29
Coelia summons the leech Patience for a soul-diseased knight; diet, salves, Penance, Remorse and Repentance complete the cure.
- The Gay Science, Preface and convalescence frame
Nietzsche links philosophy, illness, recovery, gratitude, and the discipline of cheerfulness.
- The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Chapter 12, section VII
Animal spirits and spontaneous optimism as the basis of enterprise, with the comparison to a healthy man's disregard of death.
- The Golden Ass, Book 3
Lucius applies the wrong magical ointment and becomes a donkey while retaining human mind.
- The Golden Ass, Books 4–10
Lucius as ass suffers beating, hunger, overwork and repeated threat from human owners.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book I, ch. 58
Lucretia distinguishes the violated body from the guiltless mind and kills herself before her kin.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book II, ch. 32
Menenius Agrippa's fable of the limbs that starve the belly, with its account of food made into blood for the veins.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 2
The newspaper account of the inquest: Sir Charles's heart disease, changes of colour, breathlessness and nervous depression, facial distortion explained as usual in death from cardiac exhaustion, and a post-mortem confirming organic disease.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter I
Survey of external, internal sensory and organic stimuli as causes of dreams, including experiments on sleepers and the views of physicians and psychiatrists on dreams and insanity.
- The Journey of the Mind into God, Prologue at La Verna
The Journey of the Mind into God gives this tag concrete force through the work is not clinical, but its language of the mind, affection, illumination, ecstasy, and disciplined desire belongs to philosophy as therapy
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 64a–68b
Philosophy as practice for death: the soul's freeing from the body's distractions and diseases.
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. I, Chs. 1–4
The interrupted conception, the scattering of the animal spirits, and the association of ideas between the clock and the marriage bed.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapters XVIII-XX
Union and rapture described with attention to their bodily effects: loss of sensation, coldness, and the body lifted or held motionless.
- The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Symptom lectures
Anesthesia, paralysis, contracture, amnesia, and crises are treated as disturbances of function and synthesis.
- The Metamorphosis, Part I
Gregor's first attempts to control an unfamiliar body, and his injury on the door frame when his father forces him back.
- The Metaphysical Poets, Andrew Marvell, 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body'
Soul and Body each complain of imprisonment by the other, with images of bones, nerves and diseases.
- The Moonstone, Third Narrative, Chapter X
Jennings lays out his proposal with quotations from Carpenter and from Elliotson's Human Physiology on memory under intoxication.
- The Nature of the Physical World, Chapter XIII (Reality)
Eddington proposes that the stuff of the world is of a mental character, known directly only in consciousness.
- The Nature of the Physical World, Chapter XIV (Causation)
Discussion of indeterminism, the brain and free will.
- The New York Trilogy, The Locked Room
The narrator's fixation on Fanshawe turns literary stewardship into rivalry, envy and self-loss.
- The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2
Virtue arises from habituated action, with pleasure and pain as signs of character formation.
- The Odyssey, Books 19 and 23
Odysseus's scar is recognized by Eurycleia, and the marriage bed confirms identity, joining wound memory to bodily recognition.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part One, opening articles (c. Art. 7–16)
Brief description of the body's parts: the heat in the heart, circulation of the blood, the animal spirits formed in the brain and travelling through the nerves to move the muscles.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part One (c. Art. 30–34)
The soul joined to the whole body but exercising its functions chiefly in a small gland in the middle of the brain, which the spirits move and which in turn moves the spirits.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part Two (c. Art. 96–111)
Movements of blood and spirits, and changes of pulse, heat and digestion, in love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness; why love is good for health and sadness weakens the appetite.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part Two (c. Art. 112–135)
External signs of the passions: changes of colour, trembling, languor, fainting, laughter, tears, groans and sighs, each explained by the motion of blood and spirits.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter IV
Lord Henry reflects on studying Dorian by the experimental method and on psychology as a science of the passions.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter XX
Dorian's body, found beside the restored portrait, is withered and aged beyond recognition.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Selected poems on suicide and heartbreak
Several short lyrics use comic form to stage suicidal thought, romantic despair and the social performance of toughness.
- The Portable Faulkner, Light in August selections
Joe Christmas's alienation and the violence around racial identity invite discussion of trauma, heredity myths and social pathology.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Early Gardencourt chapters
Ralph's chronic illness shapes his observational life, his limited mobility and his imaginative investment in Isabel's freedom.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter II: The Functions of the Brain
Motor and sensory aphasia, cerebral localisation, lesion studies and the cases in which patients recognise and suffer from their speech errors.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter IV: Habit
Plasticity of nervous tissue, practical maxims for breaking bad habits, and the drunkard who excuses each lapse though his nerve cells register it.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter XI: Attention
The definition of attention and its opposite, the dazed scatter-brained state of distraction; discussion of effort and fatigue.
- The Problems of Philosophy, Chapter I
The table's appearance varying with light, position, colour-blindness and blue spectacles.
- The Problems of Philosophy, Chapter III
The physical and physiological causes of perception and the gap between physical space and the space of sense-data.
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Part Two, Ch. 5
Baxter's counsel of hard work, plain diet and cold baths as defenses against temptation and idleness.
- The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Comparative chapters
Jung compares dementia praecox with hysteria, dreams, and psychoanalytic mechanisms.
- The Quiet American, Watchtower episode
Fowler and Pyle trapped in danger reveal fear, pain and dependence beneath political disagreement.
- The Republic, Book 4
The tripartite soul divides reason, spirit and appetite and defines justice as inner order.
- The Republic, Book 3
Music and gymnastics train character, emotion and bodily discipline for guardians.
- The Republic and The Laws, Republic, Book VI (Dream of Scipio)
The body is mortal but the mind is the true self, divine and self-moving.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Horace, Satire 1.1
The attack on greed and dissatisfaction treats desire as an appetite that cannot find healthy measure.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Persius, Satire 3
The poem frames moral laziness and bad education through imagery of illness, treatment and the need for philosophical discipline.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 9-10
Chillingworth becomes Dimmesdale's physician and investigates his secret through bodily symptoms and psychological pressure.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 11-12
Dimmesdale's vigils, self-punishment and wasting health show guilt translated into bodily and mental suffering.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 23
The final scaffold confession and death present public truth as both spiritual release and bodily endpoint.
- The Screwtape Letters, Letters VIII-IX
The law of Undulation: humans as creatures of body and spirit pass through natural peaks and troughs of feeling, which tempters try to exploit during dry periods.
- The Screwtape Letters, Letter IV
Screwtape advises turning prayer toward the patient's own feelings and notes that bodily posture in prayer affects the soul.
- The Secret Garden, Early Misselthwaite chapters
Mary's sourness, poor appetite and lack of affection are linked to neglect, environment and bodily habits.
- The Secret Garden, Garden recovery chapters
Fresh air, exercise, food, friendship and belief become a child-centered therapeutic regimen.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, B
The analogy of the physician who knows that apparent health may hide illness, applied to the universality of unrecognised despair.
- The Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV, ch. 2
Cold and warm air act on the external fibres of the body, with the experiment on a sheep's tongue, and Montesquieu's inferences about vigour and sensibility.
- The Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV, ch. 12
Roman and English suicide compared; the English case attributed to a distemper of the body rather than to education.
- The Story of My Life, Part I, Chapter XIII
Learning to speak in 1890 by feeling the position of Sarah Fuller's tongue and lips.
- The Story of My Life, Part III, Chapter V
Keller's description of her dreams and how the senses she lacks appear in them.
- The Subjection of Women, Chapter I
Medical practitioners and physiologists know something of bodily differences, but few are psychologists and their views of women's minds are no better than common opinion.
- The Subjection of Women, Chapter III
The anatomical argument from the size of women's brains, and Mill's reply on proportion, quality and the circulation of blood through the brain.
- The Symposium, Eryximachus speech
A physician defines love as harmony and disorder in bodies, medicine, music, seasons and sacrifice.
- The Tempest, Act 3, Scene 3; Act 5, Scene 1
Ariel's harpy speech leaves the three men of sin distracted; Prospero restores them with solemn music, and Alonso says a madness held him.
- The Trial, Chapter 3 (In the Empty Courtroom; The Offices)
K. becomes weak and dizzy in the airless attic offices of the court and is half carried to the stairs, recovering in the open air.
- The Trial of Joan of Arc, Condemnation trial, repeated interrogations
The court repeatedly pressures Joan to define the voices, creating a hostile setting unlike any modern diagnostic encounter.
- The Vampyre, Aubrey's return to England
Aubrey suffers fever, terror and apparent mental disorder after Ruthven returns and the oath prevents disclosure.
- The Voyage of the Beagle, South America chapters
Darwin records illness, exposure, fatigue, and the bodily demands of collecting and travel.
- The Voyage of the Beagle, Galapagos chapters
Island observation becomes a training ground for later biological theory rather than a finished evolutionary argument.
- The Warden, Harding under attack
Harding's conscience and public shame disturb his peace, appetite and sense of vocation.
- The Waves, Childhood sections
The early voices establish distinct sensory and affective patterns, suggesting personality as rhythm before biography.
- The Waves, Later-life sections
Aging, memory and bodily change alter the voices' relation to desire, ambition and language.
- The Wealth of Nations, Book V, ch. i, Part III, Art. II
Mental torpor from repetitive work likened to mutilation, and public instruction compared to preventing a leprosy from spreading among the people.
- The Wise Woman (A Double Story), Chapter VII
Agnes in the bluish sphere loses all sense of time and is nursed and fed by the wise woman each night while she sleeps.
- The World as Will and Representation, Second Book, §§18–20
Identity of willing and bodily movement; pain and pleasure as immediate affections of the will; organs as objectified desires.
- Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter II
Building up a weak constitution by exercise and his account of training soul and spirit along with the body.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourses III–IV: Backworldsmen; The Despisers of the Body
Otherworldly belief traced to the weariness of the sick body; the ego as the instrument of a bodily Self; the body as 'a plurality with one sense'.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, Discourse LVII: The Convalescent
Zarathustra falls 'as one dead', lies seven days without eating, is fed and watched by his animals, and recovers to describe his 'great disgust at man'.
- Timaeus, The crafted cosmos
Timaeus gives this tag concrete force through timaeus is unusually rich for medical history because it links soul, body, marrow, organs, disease, diet, and psychic disorder inside a single cosmic anatomy
- Travels with My Aunt, Henry's retirement routines
Henry's dahlias and banking habits suggest emotional constriction, safe routine and underused vitality.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book I
Troilus is struck by love and displays classic lovesickness: pallor, secrecy, sighing, sleeplessness and obsessive thought.
- Twelve Angry Men, Opening deliberation
Heat, impatience and life-or-death stakes create a pressure environment for group decision-making.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Poems 1-5
The beloved's body is repeatedly fused with earth, fruit, hills and night, making desire a mind-body landscape.
- Twilight of the Idols, Problem of Socrates
Nietzsche reads Socratic rationalism through the language of decadence and symptom.
- Washington Square, Europe journey
Sloper attempts to cure Catherine's attachment through distance and pressure, treating emotion as a correctable error.
- We, Early records
D-503 praises rational happiness and describes regulated sex, time and transparent living as healthful social order.
- What Is Life?, Epilogue
The body as a mechanism obeying natural law, set against the direct experience of directing its motions, resolved in the identity of the self with universal consciousness.
- White Nights, Second night
The dreamer narrates his withdrawal into fantasy, revealing both self-protection and social deprivation.
- Wuthering Heights, Childhood at Wuthering Heights
Heathcliff's degradation, Catherine's wild attachment and Hindley's violence establish early trauma and attachment injury.
- Wuthering Heights, Catherine's illness and childbirth
Catherine's emotional crisis becomes feverish illness, delirium, childbirth and death.
Quotes
“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are”
“This perceiving, active being is what I call MIND, SPIRIT, SOUL, or MYSELF.”
“When the imagination, from any extraordinary ferment of the blood and spirits, acquires such a vivacity as disorders all its powers and faculties, there is no means of distinguishing betwixt truth and falshood”
“they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement”
Frequently cited
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”
“A man in health possesses more of it than one languishing with sickness. We are more master of our thoughts in the morning than in the evening: Fasting, than after a full meal”
“every one sees he would be the same PERSON with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions: but who would say it was the same MAN”
“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology”
“My arteries began beating so violently that I not only felt their motion, but even heard it, particularly that of the carotids, attended by a loud noise in my ears”
Frequently cited
“Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind”
“The mischief is in the heart, and has communicated itself to the whole organism; there is no hope unless the cause of his grievous sadness be arrested.”
“they are nothing in comparison of those which arise within ourselves, from the distempered condition of our mind and body”
“the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter”
“Such persons will look upon this body as a machine made by the hands of God, which is incomparably better arranged, and adequate to movements more admirable than is any machine of human invention”
“for the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in medicine they must be sought for”
“we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age”
Frequently cited
“I dare almost affirm that a state of reflection is a state against nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.”
Frequently cited
“I am not a man, I am dynamite”
“As for the passions, and studies of the mind; avoid envy, anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated”
“Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like”
“the very sight of another’s pain materially pains me, and I often usurp the sensations of another person”
“he found the same operation and effect that those do who have taken one indeed”
“when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech”
“in hatred too, which stands to anger like a chronic to an acute disease, a man may indulge with the greatest delight”
“The chief cause of intellectual diversity is to be found in the brain and nervous system”
“A kind rebuke, like fresh air in a fainting fit, is calculated to act upon a young mind with more effect, than stimulants of the greatest power”
“PROP. XIII. The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, in other words a certain mode of extension which actually exists, and nothing else”
“II. Pleasure is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection”
“PROP. XLII. Mirth cannot be excessive, but is always good; contrariwise, Melancholy is always bad”
“The sensation upon the tongue, and the flash before the eyes, which I at first obtained only in a feeble degree (56.), have been since exalted by more powerful apparatus, so as to become even disagreeable.”
“A man, when he gets drunk, is led by a beardless lad, tripping, knowing not where he steps, having his soul moist.”
“The dry soul is the wisest and best”
“This was the commencement of a nervous fever which confined me for several months”
“when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience”
“For the languor clings to me, for causes that do not appear; worn out, I find no help in the physician’s art.”
“The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief.”
Frequently cited
“My conscience; I know that I am guilty of a dreadful crime.”
Frequently cited
“Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.”
“For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life”
“For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body”
Frequently cited
“While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.”
“when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart”
“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast”
“Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine than the physician”
“Some men are so physically and morally constituted as to see everything through a highly-colored medium”
Frequently cited
“I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.”
Frequently cited
“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—a real thorough-going illness.”
“The human understanding resembles not a dry light, but admits a tincture of the will”
“That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
Frequently cited
“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”
“The young soldier cannot reach any of these different strata of danger without feeling that the light of reason does not move here in the same medium, that it is not refracted in the same manner as in speculative contemplation”
“By this comes to light for the inexperienced eye one of those things which put fetters in the dark, as it were, on the action of the mind, and wear out in secret the powers of the soul”
“Habit gives strength to the body in great exertion, to the mind in great danger, to the judgment against first impressions”
Frequently cited
“For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour.”
Frequently cited
“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”
“Imagination.--It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more deceptive that she is not always so”
“She makes men happy and sad, healthy and sick, rich and poor”
“We have another source of error in diseases. They spoil the judgment and the senses”
“I spent the night in bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning”
“When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache, but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured”
“Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one”
Frequently cited
“The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside.”
Frequently cited
“through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions”
“that little girl is better than a six-quart bottle of tonic any day”
“But the element of wonder never lies in the phenomenon or event observed; its place is in the person observing.”
“But induction is impossible for those who have not sense-perception.”
“Paracelsus divides the St. Vitus's dance into three kinds. First, that which arises from imagination (Vitista, Chorea imaginativa, aestimativa), by which the original Dancing Plague was to be understood”
“Our business here is only with that morbid sympathy by the aid of which the dancing mania of the Middle Ages grew into a real epidemic”
Frequently cited
“man is not truly one, but truly two.”
“For the soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, and local movement; and likewise of our understanding”
“For when the act of the imagination is hindered by a lesion of the corporeal organ, for instance in a case of frenzy; or when the act of the memory is hindered, as in the case of lethargy, we see that a man is hindered from actually understanding things of which he had a previous knowledge”
“The majority of men follow their passions, which are movements of the sensitive appetite, in which movements of the heavenly bodies can cooperate: but few are wise enough to resist these passions”
Frequently cited
“What is good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man”
“the whiche thinges thei overcame, with accustomyng the body to diseases, and with hardenyng it, to bee able to indure labour. And you knowe, how that in thinges accustomed, men suffer no grief”
“their studies wer, to prepare the body to diseases, and the minde not to feare perilles”
“Soldiers when in desperate straits lose the sense of fear. If there is no place of refuge, they will stand firm”
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones”
“But physicians still keep to the opinion that the brain is the chief seat of sentient life, and that each sense has its own distinct member whereby it manifests function.”
“the movement is for the benefit of the body, and the music is for the benefit of the mind.”
“For just as bad habits of thought supervene on intemperament of the body, so also a physical intemperament may be traced to habits of mind which are contrary to the ideal.”
Frequently cited
“Therefore in safeguarding the emotions the health of the mind and body are at the same time maintained.”
“Remember, too, that among the advantageous contributory factors in treatment is the help afforded by anything which exalts the sensitive and vital faculties : for instance, joyfulness.”
“So are we made dependent, not merely upon our fellow-creatures, but upon our fellow-existers, all Nature being tied together by the laws that make one part conduce to the good of another.”
“for there is a certain impetuosity of spirit and an alacrity implanted by nature in the hearts of all men, which is inflamed by a desire to meet the foe. This a general should endeavour not to repress, but to increase”
“Unquiet meals make ill digestions; Thereof the raging fire of fever bred, And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?”
Frequently cited
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”
Frequently cited
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes”
Frequently cited
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”
“one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten”
“But the body only has been violated, the mind is guiltless; death shall be my witness.”
“Thence it became apparent that the service of the belly was by no means a slothful one; that it did not so much receive nourishment as supply it”
“Sir Charles’s nervous system was strained to the breaking point.”
“I think that after all I must be overlooking some organic affection”
“from an unhappy association of ideas, which have no connection in nature”
Frequently cited
“Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions”
“The greatest of all is this: that he made man, and gave him the spirit, which shall live and never perish, though the flesh-frame rot to mould, or burn to ashes”
“consider your body only, not yourself, as mortal. For it is not your outward form which constitutes your being, but your mind”
Frequently cited
“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred”
“If I were in a wood, I could easily hear the Voice which came to me. It seemed to me to come from lips I should reverence. I believe it was sent me from God”
“generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”
“what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth”
“The act of will and the movement of the body are not two different things objectively known, which the bond of causality unites”
“Teeth, throat, and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire”
“Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body”
“For singing is for the convalescent; the sound ones may talk”
“The soul was first made by him—the elder to rule the younger; not in the order in which our wayward fancy has led us to describe them, but the soul first and afterwards the body”
Frequently cited
“That which does not kill me, makes me stronger”