Date: 1732

"Thoughts crowd on Thoughts, as Alps on Alps arise, / And Worlds of Wonder open to my Eyes."

— Mitchell, Joseph (c. 1684-1738)

Date: 1732

"You must know, said he, that the mind of man may be fitly compared to a piece of land. What stubbing, ploughing, digging, and harrowing is to the one, that thinking, reflecting, examining is to the other."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1734 [1735?]

"Deaf to Advice, or taking Wrong for Right, / They boldly blunder on in Reason's Spite; / And under clearer Light's obscure Pretence / Live the Antipodes of common Sense."

— Paget, Thomas Catesby, Lord Paget (1689-1742)

Date: 1736, 1737, 1759, 1744, 1771, 1773

"Female youth, left to weak woman's care" are "Strangers to reason and reflection made, / Left to their passions, and by them betrayed; / Untaught the noble end of glorious truth, / Bred to deceive even from earliest youth; / Unused to books, nor virtue taught to prize; / Whose mind, a savage was...

— Ingram, Anne [née Howard; other married name Douglas], Viscountess Irwin (c. 1696-1764)

Date: 1737, 1743

"It is not so much the being exempt from Faults, as the having overcome them, that is an Advantage to us; it being with the Follies of the Mind as with the Weeds of a Field, which, if destroyed and consumed upon the place of their Birth, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung the...

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1740

"To the instructed Man [Ideas of Sensation] afford a vast Quantity of Materials to exercise Knowledge on, but without being taught that [end page 26] Knowledge to apply them to artificial Purposes, they would signify no more to us, besides assisting the Instincts to take Care of that Body they we...

— Philalethes [pseud.]

Date: 1741

"I [the mind] did but step out, on some weighty affairs, / To visit last night, my good friends in the stars, / When, before I was got half as high as the moon, / You despatched Pain and Languor to hurry me down; / Vi & Armis they seized me, in midst of my flight, / And shut me in caverns as dark...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1741

"Yet all Persons are under some Obligation to improve their own Understanding, otherwise it will be a barren Desart, or a Forest overgrown grown with Weeds and Brambles."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"Their Understandings are hereby cooped up in narrow Bounds, so that they never look abroad into other Provinces of the intellectual World, which are more beautiful perhaps and more fruitful than their own."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1742

"While o'er my limbs Sleep's soft dominion spread, / What though my soul fantastic measures trod / O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom / Of pathless woods; or, down the craggy steep / Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool; / Or scaled the cliff; or danced on hollow winds, / W...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)