Date: 1742

"What satisfaction, when he looks within, to find the most turbulent passions tuned to just harmony and concord, and every jarring sound banished from this enchanting music!"

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1754

"He will learn to transfer the Numbers of Poetry to the Harmony of the Mind, and of well-governed Passions."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1754

"For, being now destitute of that Counter-poise which held them at a due pitch, they grow turbulent, peevish, and revengeful, the Cause of constant Restlessness and Torment, sometimes flying out into a wild delirious Joy, at other times settling into a deep splenetic Grief. The Concert between Re...

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"As the string of a violin or harpsichord trembles and vibrates, so the fibres or strings of the brain struck by the undulating rays of sound, are excited to return or repeat the words that touched them."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: Tuesday, November 20, 1750

"Yet, if we consider the conduct of those sententious philosophers, it will often be found, that they repeat these aphorisms, merely because they have somewhere heard them, because they have nothing else to say, or because they think veneration gained by such appearances of wisdom, but that no id...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1751, 1777

"He must here, therefore, depart from his private and particular situation, and must chuse a point of view, common to him with others: He must move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and symphony."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1751

"Another Source of mutual Misapprehension on this Subject hath been 'the Introduction of metaphorical Expressions instead of proper ones.' Nothing is so common among the Writers on Morality, as 'the Harmony of Virtue'—'the Proportion of Virtue.'"

— Brown, John (1715-1766)

Date: Saturday, January 25, 1752

"Whatever may be the native vigour of the mind, she can never form many combinations from few ideas, as many changes cannot be rung upon a few bells."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1757

"We have on such occasions found, if I am not much mistaken, the temper of our minds in a tenor very remote from that which attends the presence of positive pleasure; we have found them in a state of much sobriety, impressed with a sense of awe, in a sort of tranquillity shadowed with horror"

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1758

"But when, in Parties of Conversation, she glows by the Beams of Reason, then command her [the soul] to speak from Inspiration and utter the Oracles of Justice [like a Grasshopper]."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)