Date: 1740

"If any thing could excuse that desperate Extravagance of Love, that almost frantick Passion of Lee's Alexander the Great, it must have been when Mrs. Bracegirdle was his Statira: As when she acted Millamant all the Faults, Follies, and Affectations of that agreeable Tyrant were venially melted d...

— Cibber, Colley (1671-1757)

Date: 1741, 1742, 1755

"Which they explained by a Bottle's being filled with Sea Water, that swimming there a while, on the Bottle's breaking, flowed in again, and mingled with the common Mass."

— Warburton, William (1698-1779)

Date: 1741

"Whatsoever, saith he, old Time with his huge Drag-Net, has convey'd down to us along the Stream of Ages, whether it be Shells or Shell-Fish, Jewels or Pebbles, Sticks or Straws, Sea-Weeds or Mud, these are the Ancients, these are the Fathers. The Case is much the same with the memorial Possessio...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"So for Instance, in Children; they perceive and forget a hundred Things in an Hour; the Brain is so soft that it receives immediately all Impressions like Water or liquid Mud, and retains scarce any of them: All the Traces, Forms or Images which are drawn there, are immediately effaced or closed...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1742

"The soul receives a tincture from the imagination."

— Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), and James Moor (bap. 1712, d. 1779)

Date: 1742

"How, then, shall you get this perpetual living fountain within you, and not a dead cistern?"

— Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), and James Moor (bap. 1712, d. 1779)

Date: 1742, 1777

"Human minds are smaller streams, which, arising at first from the ocean [of Divintity], seek still, amid all wanderings, to return to it, and to lose themselves in that immensity of perfection"

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1742, 1777

"As a stream necessarily follows the several inclinations of the ground, on which it runs; so are the ignorant and thoughtless part of mankind actuated by their natural propensities"

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748

"The Soul is created in a State of moral Rectitude, but receives its vicious Tinctures from the Body, and is warped into its perverse and crooked Disposition by the Influence of the Senses"

— Anonymous

Date: 1748, 1749

"Hurried with incessant rapidity by the vortex of blood and animal spirits, one undulation makes an impression, which is immediately effaced by another; the soul pursues it, but often in vain: she must wait to bewail the loss of what she did not quickly lay hold of; and thus it is that the imagin...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)