Date: 1748, 1749

"I always use the word imagine, because I am of the opinion that everything is imagined, and that all the parts of the soul may be justly reduced to the imagination only, which forms them all; and thus the judgment, reason, and memory are not absolute faculties of the soul, but real modifications...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"If a person is said to have but little judgment with a strong imagination, this is as much to say, that the imagination being too much abandoned to itself, and almost constantly employed in looking at itself in the mirror of its sensations, has not sufficiently contracted the habit of examining ...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"The sun, the air, the water, the organization and form of bodies, are all rang'd in order in the eye, as in a looking-glass, which represents to the imagination the pictures of all the objects painted there, according to the laws of vision, which prevail amongst that numberless variety of partic...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1749

"Nature's bright Mirrour in thy Bosom shone"

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1749

"Which, among other Things, may serve as a Comment on that Saying of Æschines, that Drunkenness shews the Mind of a Man, as a Mirror reflects his Person."

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1750, 1770

"And, Morpheus, thus may thy mild Lethéan powers, / For ever hovering round my midnight hours, / Thro' Fancy's mirror wrap me in idéal joy."

— Hamilton, William Gerard (1729-1796)

Date: 1750

"A mind in wisdom old, in lenience young, / From fervent truth where every virtue sprung; / Where all was real, modest, plain, sincere; / Worth above show, and goodness unsevere: / View'd round and round, as lucid diamonds throw / Still as you turn them a revolving glow, / So did his mind reflect...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1751, 1777

"And, indeed, without such a correction of appearances, both in internal and external sentiment, men could never think or talk steadily on any subject; while their fluctuating situations produce a continual variation on objects, and throw them into such different and contrary lights and positions."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1751, 1777

"They [cruel ideas] still haunt his solitary hours, damp his most aspiring thoughts, and show him, even to himself, in the most contemptible and most odious colours imaginable."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1751

"His mind does not receive the impression of the moral world, in the same manner, as wax receives the impression of a seal. It does not reflect the image of it, in the same manner, as a mirror reflects its images: it has a peculiar cast and turn given to its conceptions, admirably ordered to exal...

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)