“Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.”
“Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.”