Date: w. 1755, 1777

"She [Nature] employs it [spiritual substance] as a kind of paste or clay; modifies it into a variety of forms and existences; dissolves after a time each modification, and from its substance erects a new form."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1777

"She saw something like just drawing in the dark shades of his pencil, though the lines seemed a good deal exaggerated: she reflected, she doubted; but, after settling a balance in her mind, the found her own scale preponderate."

— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)

Date: 1777

"The eyes were the index of the mind--his had said--Good heavens! what had they not said?"

— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)

Date: 1777

"The minds of the negroes are contracted; because slavery destroys all the springs of the soul."

— Raynal, Guillaume Thomas (1713-1796)

Date: 1777

"At present in my brain there floats / A thousand parti-colored motes; / From which, if time would but permit, / I might sift some sparks of wit."

— Savage, Mary (fl. 1763-1777)

Date: 1778

" In thee, by art, the demon stands confest, / But nature on thy soul has stamped the god."

— Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770)

Date: 1778

Where is a stock of ideas stored?

— Caulfield (fl. 1778)

Date: 1767, 1778

Science may "bid the soul her own rich funds employ, / Increase her treasures, and her wealth enjoy."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: March, 1778

"What that power is by which the conscious spirit governs and directs various mental faculties, is, it must be confessed, utterly inexplicable as long as our souls are enclosed in material frames. While a watch is shut up in its case, we cannot see how the operations of its curious machinery are ...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: March, 1778

"And my similitude between a watch in its case, and the soul in its material frame, will, I persuade myself, be agreeable to all my readers, whose dispositions are mild, and like better to be pleased with what they read, than to attack it."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)