Date: 1754

"The human soul is so far from being furnished with forms and ideas to perceive all things by, or from being impregnated, I would rather say than printed over, with the seeds of universal knowledge, that we have no ideas till we receive passively the ideas of sensible qualities from without."

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

Date: 1754

"They are, if I may say so, of the mind's own growth, the elements of knowledge, more immediate, less relative, and less dependent than sensitive knowledge, as any man will be apt to think, who compares his ideas of remembering, recollecting, bare thought, and intenseness of thought, with those o...

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

Date: 1754

But when we enter into a serious and impartial detail concerning this knowledge, and analyse carefully what the great pretenders to it have given and give us daily for knowledge, we shall be obliged to confess, that the human intellect is rather a rank than a fertile soil, barren without due cult...

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

Date: February 1755

"See yon delicious woodbines rise / By oaks exalted to the skies, / So view in Harriot's matchless mind / Humility and greatness join'd."

— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Have you not sometimes seen an early flower / Open its bud, and spread its silken leaves, / To catch sweet airs, and odours to bestow; / Then, by the keen blast nipt, pull in its leaves, / And, tho' still living, die to scent and beauty! / Emblem of me: affliction, like a storm, / Hath kill'd th...

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Sadly he says, that pity is the best, / The noblest passion of the human breast: / For when its sacred streams the heart o'erflow, / In gushes pleasure with the tide of woe; / And when its waves retire, like those of Nile, / They leave behind them such a golden soil, / That there the virtues wit...

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: 1757

"Their root strikes deeper into the mind, and springs from the essential and universal properties of human nature."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1758, 1781

"'Tis hence the sev'ral Passions take their Rise, / The Seeds of Virtue, and the Roots of Vice; / Hence Notes peculiar or to Young, or Old, / Phlegmatic, sanguine, amorous, or cold!"

— Hawkins, William (1721-1801)

Date: 1759

"To enforce the observation of justice, therefore, nature has implanted in the human breast that consciousness of ill-desert, those terrors of merited punishment which attend upon its violation, as the great safe-guards of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and ...

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1759

"Nature, however, when she implanted the seeds of this irregularity in the human breast, seems, as upon all other occasions, to have intended the happiness and perfection of the species."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)