Date: 1705

"It is not to be doubted but that these things, altho' purely material, contribute to the Beauty and Nicety of Wit, because the Soul, when it is enclos'd in the Body, depends on the Organs, and those, when well dispos'd, are of much greater Aid to it in the performance of its Duty. Suppose a Pain...

— Manley, Delarivier (c. 1670-1724)

Date: 1713, 1734

"It seems then, you will have our ideas, which alone are immediately perceived, to be pictures of external things."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1736, 1743

"Th' identick Shape thy Fancy would retain, / Engraven in eternal Characters / While Memory holds its Empire in the Brain."

— Wesley, Samuel, the Younger (1691-1739)

Date: August 27, 1751

"When a number of distinct images are collected by these erratick and hasty surveys, the fancy is busied in arranging them; and combines them into pleasing pictures with more resemblance to the realities of life as experience advances, and new observations rectify the former."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: August 27, 1751

"The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1754

"The scene of the mind, like a moving picture, must be governed with attention, that it may bring into our view the images we want, and as we want them. Otherwise ideas that are foreign to our actual train of thinking will frequently rush into our thoughts, and become objects of them whether we w...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"When they have really such ideas in their minds, they must remember too that figures and comparisons are varnish still. It must not be used to alter the intellectual picture, it must only serve to give a greater lustre, and to make it better seen."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: w. 1762-3, published 1950

"He considered the mind of man like a room, which is either made agreeable or the reverse by the pictures with which it is adorned."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"My imagination painted her in all the bloom of youth and beauty. I fancied her attended by the loves and graces, and I set out with the most pleasing expectations of seeing the conquest I had made."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1762

"[M]ake this dear-bought soul of mine / A monument of grace Divine"

— Wesley, John and Charles