Date: 1751

"We first consider the nature of that act of the mind, which is termed belief; of which the immediate foundation is the testimony of our senses."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1756

"Many Things have been said, and very well undoubtedly, on the Subjection in which we should preserve our Bodies to the Government of our Understanding; but enough has not been said upon the Restraint which our bodily Necessities ought to lay on the extravagant Sublimities, and excentrick Rovings...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1757

"This in the mean time is obvious, that the empire of all religious faith over the understanding is wavering and uncertain, subject to every variety of humour, and dependent on the present incidents, which strike the imagination."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1770

"Thus far we have endeavoured to distinguish and ascertain the separate provinces of Reason and Common Sense. Their connection and mutual dependence, and the extent of their respective jurisdictions, we now proceed more particularly to investigate."

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1770

"But this faculty [Reason] has been much perverted, often to vile, and often to insignificant purposes; sometimes chained like a slave or malefactor, and sometimes soaring in forbidden and unknown regions."

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1770

"When Reason invades the rights of Common Sense, and presumes to arraign that authority by which she herself acts, nonsense and confusion must of necessity ensue; science will soon come to have neither head nor tail, beginning nor end; philosophy will grow contemptible; and its adherents, far fro...

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1773

"The grand Contrivance why so well equip / With strength of Passions, rul'd by Reason's Whip?"

— Byrom, John (1692-1763)

Date: 1774

"While awake, and in health, this busy principle [the imagination] cannot much delude us: it may build castles in the air, and raise a thousand phantoms before us; but we have every one of the senses alive, to bear testimony to its falsehood."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1780-85; in French, 36 vols. 1749-1788

"Is it difficult to perceive that our ideas originate from our senses alone; that the objects we regard as real existences, are those concerning which the senses uniformly give the same testimony."

— Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de (1707-1788)