Query, British Saying

[Baker, John]

        Here's an earlier, more literal use, c. 1886 (or possibly a year or two earlier):

        >>December 30, 1850.--The relation of thought to action filled my mind on
waking, and I found myself carried toward a bizarre formula, which seems
to have something of the night still clinging about it: _Action is but
coarsened thought_; thought become concrete, obscure, and unconscious.<<

        This is from Amiel's Journal (a translation of Journal Intime), by Henri Frederic Amiel, translated by Mary A. (Mrs. Humphrey) Ward (Project Gutenberg text), ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext05/8ajrn10.txt.  The translation does not seem to be dated, but cannot be earlier than 1882 (when the Journal Intime was first published) or later than 1886 (when the passage in question was quoted in an article in The Guardian).

John Baker