Date: 1774

"Vanity is unquestionably the ruling passion in women; and it is much flattered by the attentions of a man who is generally esteemed by men; when his merit has received the stamp of their approbation, women make it current, that is to say, put him in fashion."

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1774

"I will study Demosthenes and Cicero, not to discover an old Athenian or Roman custom, nor to puzzle myself with the value of talents, mines, drachms, and sesterces, like the learned blockheads in us; but to observe their choice of words, their harmony of diction, their method, their distribution...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1774-1781

"When I am purified by the light of heaven my soul will become the mirrour of the world, in which I shall discern all abstruse secrets."

— Warton, Thomas, the younger (1728-1790)

Date: 1775

"Intellect, as has he [Aristotle] had said before, was in CAPACITY, after a certain manner, the several Objects intelligible; but was in ACTUALITY no one of them, until it first comprehended it--and that it was the same with the Mind or HUMAN UNDERSTANDIN...

— Harris, James (1709-1780)

Date: 1775-7

"It was this creature which confirmed me in the belief, that the partition betwixt instinct and reason was totally transparent; and that the animal and rational saw through very similar mirrors."

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: 1775

"I am rather inclined to think that, though the subject is beyond our comprehension at present, that man does not consist of two principles, so essentially different from one another as matter and spirit, which are always described as having not one common property, by means of which they can aff...

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

Date: 1775

"To assist the imagination, indeed, but by no means in any consistency with the notion of a nervous fluid, it had been conceived that ideas resembled characters drawn upon a tablet; and the language in which we generally speak of ideas, and their affections, is borrowed from this hypothesis."

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

Date: 1775

"But neither can any such tablet be found in the brain, nor any style, by which to make the characters upon it; and though some of the more simple phænomena of ideas, as their being more or less deeply impressed, their being retained a longer or or a shorter time, being capable of being revived a...

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

Date: 1775

"That vibrations corresponding to all the varieties of sensations and ideas that ever take place in any human, mind may take place in the same brain at the same time, can create no difficulty to any person who considers the capacity of the air itself to transmit different vibrations, witho...

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

Date: 1775

"That vibrations [in the air above London] which are nearly isochronous affect and modify one another, so as to become perfectly so, sufficiently corresponds to the phænomena of ideas, and therefore makes no objection to this doctrine."

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)