Date: 1748, 1754
"Nature has therefore endued us with a MIDDLE FACULTY, wonderfully adapted to our MIXED State, which holds partly of Sense and partly of Reason, being strongly allied to the former, and the common Receptacle in which all the Notices that come from that quarter are treasured up, and yet greatly su...
preview | full record— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)
Date: 1748, 1754
"Into this common Storehouse are likewise carried all those Moral Images or Forms which are derived from our Moral Faculties of Perception, and there they often undergo new Changes and Appearances, by being mixed and wrought up with the Images and Forms of Sensible or Natural Thing."
preview | full record— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)
Date: 1733, 1748
Memory is a "Surprising storehouse! in whose narrow womb / All things, the past, the present, and to come, / Find ample space, and large and mighty room."
preview | full record— Pilkington, Laetitia (c. 1709-1750)
Date: 1748, 1749
"These are the methods, as far as I comprehend, that have filled the brain with ideas, for the reception of which nature has formed it."
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: November 10, 1750
"Is it possible that experience should produce error, and that the exemption of old people from the passions of youth, should be no better a privilege than to leave room for the love of money, which seems then to engross the whole soul, and to fill up the place of all the other passions!"
preview | full record— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)
Date: Tuesday, November 13, 1750
"Nothing seems to have been more universally dreaded by the ancients than orbity, or want of children; and, indeed, to a man who has survived all the companions of his youth, all who have participated his pleasures and his cares, have been engaged in the same events, and filled their minds with t...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, May 8, 1750
"I found in a country life a continual repetition of the same pleasures, which was not sufficient to fill up the mind for the present, or raise any expectations of the future; and I will confess to you, that I was impatient for a sight of the town, and filled my thoughts with the discoveries whic...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 7, 1750
"It ought, therefore, to be the care of those who wish to pass the last hours with comfort, to lay up such a treasure of pleasing ideas, as shall support the expenses of that time, which is to depend wholly upon the fund already acquired."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750
"The miser always imagines that there is a certain sum that will fill his heart to the brim; and every ambitious man, like king Pyrrhus, has an acquisition in his thoughts that is to terminate his labours, after which he shall pass the rest of his life in ease or gaiety, in repose or devotion."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, April 3, 1750
"He must fly from himself, either because he feels a tediousness in life from the equipoise of an empty mind, which, having no tendency to one motion more than another, but as it is impelled by some external power, must always have recourse to foreign objects; or he must be afraid of the intrusio...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)