Date: 1771, 1776

"Adieu, ye lays, that fancy's flowers adorn, / The soft amusement of the vacant mind!"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1771

"A small stock of ideas is more easily managed, and sooner displayed than a great quantity crowded together."

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1773

"It is not enough, said Annesly, to put weapons into those hands which never have been taught the use of them; the reading we recommend to youth will store their minds with intelligence, if they attend to it properly; but to go a little farther, we must accustom them to apply it, we must teach th...

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1773

"But as their novelty at first delighted, their frequency at last subdued him; his mind began to accustom itself to the hurry of thoughtless amusement, and to feel a painful vacancy, when the bustle of the scene was at any time changed for solitude."

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1774

"It is enraptured by every striking form, it fills the soul with high enthusiasm, it sets the fancy on fire, it pushes it forward with impetuosity, renders all its conceptions glowing, and bestows a freedom and becoming negligence on its productions."

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1776

"But it is evident, that this creative faculty, the fancy, frequently lends her aid in promoting still nobler ends. From her exuberant stores most of those tropes and figures are extracted, which, when properly employed, have such a marvellous efficacy in rousing the passions, and by some secret,...

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1776

"Remembrance instantly succeeds sensation, insomuch that the memory becomes the sole repository of the knowledge received from sense; knowledge which, without this repository, would be as instantaneously lost as it is gotten, and could be of no service to the mind."

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: April, 1783

"When we talk of a storehouse of our ideas, we are only forming an imagination of something similar to an enclosed portion of space in which material objects are reposited. But who ever actually saw this storehouse, or can have any clear perception of it when he endeavours by thinking closely to ...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"As, however, his penetration could not but see that all this is absolutely incompatible with a spiritual substance which mind is, he, immediately without any interruption or preparation whatever, proceeds very quietly, though most effectually, to contradict what he has been assuming, and to anni...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"And yet in my own mind I am not sure but there may be such, an analogy between the nature of spirit and that of matter, as to admit of a receptacle of ideas."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)