Date: 1767

"On the other hand, the too liberal use of IMAGERY even in Poetry (besides that obscurity which it occasions to the ordinary class of Readers, as well as that fatigue which the Imagination experiences from its excessive glare) so disgusts the mind with the perpetual labour of tracing relations an...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1763, 1767

"The guardian genius of his dawning thought, / Who wide disclos'd to wisdom's sacred ray / The eager inlets of his ample mind, / And pour'd upon each opening mental cell, / The virtue-forming scientific beam / With letter'd and religious radiance fill'd, / The fair expanses of his princely soul, ...

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1767

"Imagination is that faculty whereby the mind not only reflects on its own operations, but which assembles the various ideas conveyed to the understanding by the canal of sensation, and treasured up in the repository of the memory, compounding or disjoining them at pleasure; and which, by its pla...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1768

"No man cares to have his virtues the sport of contingencies--or one man may be generous, as another man is puissant--'sed non, quo ad banc'--or be it as it may--for there is no regular reasoning upon the ebbs and flows of our humours; they may depend upon the same causes, for ought I know, which...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw--and 'tis thou who lifts him up to Heaven--eternal fountain of our feelings!--'tis here I trace thee--and this is thy divinity which stirs within...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1769

"[T]he generosity of the Dairo, instead of exciting the least emotion of gratitude in Taycho's own breast, acted only as a golden key to unlock all the sluices of his virulence and abuse."

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1769

"After a weak mind has been duly prepared, and turned as it were, by opening a sluice or torrent of high-sounding words, the greater the contradiction proposed the stronger impression it makes, because it increases the puzzle, and lays fast hold on the admiration; depositing the small proportion ...

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

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)

Date: 1771

"He thinks nothing more absurd than the common notion of Instruction, as if Science were to be poured into the Mind, like water into a cistern, that passively waits to receive all that comes."

— Harris, James (1709-1780)

Date: 1771

"Now as our Feet in vain venture to walk upon the River, till the Frost bind the Current, and harden the yielding Surface; so does the SOUL in vain seek to exert its higher Powers, the Powers I mean of REASON and INTELLECT, till IMAGINATION first fix the fluency of SENSE, and thus provide ...

— Harris, James (1709-1780)