Date: April, 1783

"If impressions are made upon some substance in the mind, may not forgetfulness of them be only that the perceptive faculty of the soul is turned to other objects, while these still remain ready to be perceived whenever the 'mind's eye,' glances upon them?"

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"An Hypochondriack is subject to forgetfulness, which may be owing to another cause; that there is a darkness in his mind, or that its perceptive eye is injured and weak at times."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"Or it may be thus: his ideas hide themselves like birds in gloomy weather; but in warm sunshine they spring forth gay and airy."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"Let an Hypochondriack then have his park well stocked. Let him get as many agreeable ideas into his mind as he can; and though there may in wintery days seem: a total vacancy, yet when summer glows benignant, and the time of singing of birds is come, he will be delighted with gay colours and enc...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"How is it that ideas ripen in the mind, so that a man shall go to bed with a very imperfect possession of what he has laboured to get by heart, and shall awake in the morning able to repeat it with distinctness and facility?"

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"Has he been at work all night without being conscious of it. Have other spirits been making impressions on his sensorium. Are there faculties in the mind quite separate one from another, which, like the eyes of Argus, may some of them be awake while others are asleep, and is the great faculty of...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"What are we doing while we are endeavouring to recollect an idea which we have forgotten? What faculty is then exerted? How is it exerted? Nothing can be more wildly mysterious. A learned and ingenious physician gave me a very pretty similitude as a slight explanation of it. Said he 'You are lik...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"Shakespeare makes Macbeth solemnly but hopelessly ask the physician if he has any remedy to wear out direful traces from the brain."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: December 10, 1782; 1783

"Besides those minute differences in things which are frequently not observed at all, and when they are make little impression, there are in all considerable objects great characteristic distinctions, which press strongly on the senses, and therefore fix the imagination."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: December 10, 1782; 1783

"It may be remarked, that the impression which is left on our mind, even of things which are familiar to us, is seldom more than their general effect; beyond which we do not look in recognising such objects."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)