Date: 1770

"Why should not our judgments concerning truth be acknowledged to result from a bias impressed upon the mind by its Creator, as well as our desire of self-preservation, our love of society, our resentment of injury, our joy in the possession of good?"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1773, 1894-1895

One may learn "her Lesson from within" and "There […] read the Characters imprest / Upon the Mind of ev'ry human Breast,-- / The native Laws prescrib'd to every Soul, / And Love, the One Fulfiller of the Whole."

— Byrom, John (1692-1763)

Date: 1774

"Because the impression is made quickly, it does not follow that it is strong: a susceptible memory, like a soft body, receives some impression at once, and because this impression is perceivable at once, we are at no pains to deepen it, we allow it to continue slight: when the memory is, as it ...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774

"Sometimes these perfections are united: the memory is of such a happy temperature as may be compared to wax, which receives the seal easily and strongly when it is melted, and immediately hardens and suffers it not to be effaced."

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774, rev. 1787, 1779 in English

"Soon as I close my eyes, here in this brain, where all my nerves are concentred, her dark eyes are imprinted. Here--I don't know how to describe it:--but if I shut my eyes, hers are immediately before me like a sea, like a precipice, and they occupy all the fibres of my head."

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)

Date: 1774, rev. 1787, 1779 in English

"A secret sympathy had attached her to him from their first acquaintance; and now, after so long an intimacy, after passing through so many different scenes, the impression was engraved on her mind for ever."

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)

Date: 1775

"To account for the idea of time, it appears to me to be sufficient to attend to a few well known facts, viz. that impressions made by external objects remain a certain space of time in the mind, that this time is different according to the strength, and other circumstances of the impression, and...

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

Date: September, 1781

"To think in this manner is to augment our existence, as instead of reckoning a third of our life mere waste, we habituate ourselves to attend to the result of our hours past in Sleep, and to recover out of the mass of thought produced during that period, very often amusement, and sometimes usefu...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"Has he been at work all night without being conscious of it. Have other spirits been making impressions on his sensorium. Are there faculties in the mind quite separate one from another, which, like the eyes of Argus, may some of them be awake while others are asleep, and is the great faculty of...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1783

Some philosophers "think, that the brains of old men, grown callous by length of time, are, like hard wax, equally tenacious of old impressions, and unsusceptible of new."

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)