Date: 1781, 1791

"Could I thus stamp with guilt, sensations sprung / From thought most delicate"?

— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)

Date: 1781, 1791

"Or when the burnish'd car by Phoebus roll'd, / Darts more intense it's rays of liquid gold, / Beneath some ivy-fringed cave reclined, / Fancy's bright visions rushing on thy mind, / With spirits bland, nursed by the genial powers, / Soothest with melodious notes the sultry hours!"

— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)

Date: 1781

"But as a Bow that's always bent / Hath soon its force elastic spent; / So, lest the over-burthen'd brain / (Which can't too great a weight sustain) / Should not so much rich food digest, / 'Tis sometimes good to give it rest."

— Keate, George (1729-1797)

Date: 1781, second ed. 1787

"This schematism of our understanding in regard to phenomena and their mere form, is an art, hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true modes of action we shall only with difficulty discover and unveil."

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1781, second ed. 1787

"Thus much only can we say: 'The image is a product of the empirical faculty of the productive imagination--the schema of sensuous conceptions (of figures in space, for example) is a product, and, as it were, a monogram of the pure imagination a priori, whereby and according to which images first...

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: September, 1781

"To think in this manner is to augment our existence, as instead of reckoning a third of our life mere waste, we habituate ourselves to attend to the result of our hours past in Sleep, and to recover out of the mass of thought produced during that period, very often amusement, and sometimes usefu...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1781, second ed. 1787

"They learned that reason only perceives that which it produces after its own design; that it must not be content to follow, as it were, in the leading-strings of nature, but must proceed in advance with principles of judgement according to unvarying laws, and compel nature to reply its questions."

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1781

"The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1781

"He [Young] plays, indeed, only on the surface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the mind, and therefore the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1781

"Blest be the gracious Power, who taught mankind / To stamp a lasting image of the mind!"

— Crabbe, George (1754-1832)