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Date: 1769

"The first reverend sage who delivered himself on this mysterious subject, having stroked his grey beard, and hemmed thrice with great solemnity, declared that the soul was an animal; a second pronounced it to be the number three, or proportion; a third contended for the number seven, or harmony;...

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

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Date: 1769

"Pox on their philosophy! Instead of demonstrating the immortality of the soul, they have plainly proved the soul is a chimæra, a will o' the wisp, a bubble, a term, a word, a nothing!"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

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Date: September, 1770

"This double feeling is of various kinds and various degrees; some minds receiving a colour from the objects around them, like the effects of the sun beams playing thro' a prism; and others, like the cameleon, having no colours of their own, take just the colours of what chances to be nearest them."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

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Date: 1772

"My Brain's disturb'd; alas! alas! I rave; / What can I do? a poor forsaken Slave! / Like Birds, that spend their little idle Rage, / And, fruitless, mourn, indignant of their Cage, / From Thought to Thought, my fluttering Spirits rove, / Betray'd to Bondage, and, ah! lost to Love."

— Whyte, Samuel (1733-1811) [Editor]

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Date: 1773

"But was it made for nothing else beside / Passions to draw, and Reason to be Guide? / Was so much Art employ'd to drag and drive / Nothing within the Vehicle alive? / No seated Mind that claims the moving Pew, / Master of Passions, and of Reason too?"

— Byrom, John (1692-1763)

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Date: 1775

"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

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Date: 1775

"How like a wanton lamb that careless play'd, / The shepherd and the fold forgotten quite, / My vagrant soul, in search of vain delight, / Many long years from her true Shepherd stray'd!"

— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)

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Date: 1778

The heart like a bird to its nestling will fly, / And when by the weight of a parent its bending, / Yet wishes while constant to break and to die. / Like a bird in a snare, of its freedom bereft, / Still hoping and wishing releasement again, / 'Till clos'd in the cage the flutterer is left / To p...

— Robertson, James (fl.1768-1788)

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Date: 1782

"Pleasure, the rambling Bird! the painted Jay! / May snatch the richest seeds of Verse away; / Or Indolence, the worm that winds with art / Thro' the close texture of the cleanest heart, / May, if they haply have begun to shoot, / With partial mischief wound the sick'ning root; / Or Avarice, the ...

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

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Date: 1785

"BOSWELL. 'But, sir,'tis like walking up and down a hill; one man will naturally do the one better than the other. A hare will run up a hill best, from her fore-legs being short; a dog down.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, sir; that is from mechanical powers. If you make mind mechanical, you may argue in that ma...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.