Date: 1764
"Such principles are parts of our constitution, no less than the power of thinking: reason can neither make nor destroy them; nor can it do any thing without them: it is like a telescope, which may help a man to see farther, who hath eyes; but without eyes, a telescope shows nothing at all."
preview | full record— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)
Date: 1768
"The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself and blackened; reduce them to their proper size and hue she overlooks them."
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1771
"Grace, that with tenderness and sense combin'd / To form that harmony of soul and face, / Where beauty shines the mirror of the mind."
preview | full record— Mason, William (1725-1797)
Date: 1772-1781
What availed the songs of a "mighty mind, / With inward light irradiate, mirror-like / Receiv'd, and to mankind with ray reflex / The sov'reign Planter's primal work display'd?"
preview | full record— Mason, William (1725-1797)
Date: 1782
"We now perceive every [idea], as it passes, through a small aperture separately, as in the camera obscura, and this we call time; but at the conclusion of this state we may probably exist in a manner quite different; the window may be thrown open, the whole prospect appear at one view, and all t...
preview | full record— Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787)
Date: 1785
"The shifts and turns, / The expedients and inventions multiform / To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms / Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win,-- / To arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, / And force them sit, till he has pencil'd off / ...
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1785
The mind may be "enlighten'd from above"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1785
"And in his [God's] ideas, as in a mirror, we perceive whatever we do perceive of the external world."
preview | full record— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)
Date: 1785
"Modern Philosophers, as well as the Peripatetics and Epicureans of old, have conceived, that external objects cannot be the immediate objects of our thought; that there must be some image of them in the mind itself, in which, as in a mirror, they are seen."
preview | full record— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)