Date: 1776-1789

"Without that artificial help the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas entrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers: the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid o...

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776-1789

"Their secret gloom, the imagined residence of an invisible power, by presenting no distinct object of fear or worship, impressed the mind with a still deeper sense of religious horror; and the priests, rude and illiterate as they were, had been taught by experience the use of every artifi...

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776-1789

"The casual disputes that so frequently happened in their tumultuous parties of hunting or drinking were sufficient to inflame the minds of whole nations"

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776

"But the greatest happiness of the greatest number requires, that they should be not only imagined but proved: and this they shall now be, in so far as natural probability, aided by whatever support it may be thought to receive from the character of the narrator, can gain credence, for the indica...

— Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)

Date: 1776

"The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, who have made such a great progress in the sciences, were not actuated by supernatural causes, or any innate principles in their original formation; the mind is a mere blank, but capable of receiving such impressions as custom, education, or any other relative c...

— Gwynn, John (bap. 1713, d. 1786)

Date: 1776

"If you really then think that, every process, termed mental, in man, is in fact nothing more than so many distinct nervous vibrations, then I readily grant that matter may think, for undoubtedly every stretched cord, when touched, will vibrate; and I will farther grant, that a fiddle, in that se...

— Berington, Joseph (1743-1827)

Date: 1776-1789

"The emperor Maximus, who had advanced as far as Ravenna, to secure that important place, and to hasten the military preparations, beheld the event of the war in the more faithful mirror of reason and policy."

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776

"Being chosen by Vulcan, Neptune and Minerva, to give his judgment concerning their works, he blamed them all; Neptune for not making his bull with horns before his eyes; Minerva for building a house that could not be removed in case of bad neighbours; and Vulcan for making a man without a window...

— Noorthouck, John (1746?-1816)

Date: 1777

Women "may cultivate the rose of imagination, and the valuable fruits of morals and criticism; but the steeps of Parnassus few comparatively, have attempted to scale with success."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: December 10, 1776; 1777

"But I am persuaded, that scarce a poet is to be found, from Homer down to Dryden, who preserved a sound mind in a sound body, and continued practising his profession to the very last, whose later works are not as replete with the fire of imagination, as those which were produced in...

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)