Date: w. 1762-3, published 1950

"He considered the mind of man like a room, which is either made agreeable or the reverse by the pictures with which it is adorned."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1764

Perception is "a kind of drama, wherein some things are performed behind the scenes, others are represented to the mind in different scenes, one succeeding the another"

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Date: 1765

"O ye pure inmates of the gentle breast, / Truth, Freedom, Love, O where is your abode?"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1766

"Curse not the king, yea, no not in thy thought, / Nor in thy closet curse the rich for ought"

— Nicol, Alexander (bap. 1703)

Date: 1766

"Her breast is like a cabinet of goud, / Wherein the richest jewels are bestow'd"

— Nicol, Alexander (bap. 1703)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Formerly my mind was quite a lodging-house for all ideas who chose to put up there, so that it was at the mercy of accident, for I had no fixed mind of my own. Now my mind is a house where, though the street rooms and the upper floors are open to strangers, yet there is always a settled family i...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Only this more. The ideas--my lodgers--are of all sorts. Some, gentlemen of the law, who pay me a great deal more than others. Divines of all sorts have been with me, and have ever disturbed me. When I first took up house, Presbyterian ministers used to make me melancholy with dreary tones. Meth...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1767

"Imagination therefore being that faculty which lays the foundation of all our knowledge, by collecting and treasuring up in the repository of the memory those materials on which Judgment is afterwards to work, and being peculiarly adapted to the gay, delightful, vacant season of childhood and yo...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1767

"He has nothing to do but to give scope to the excursions of this faculty, which, by its active and creative power, exploring every recess of thought, will supply an inexhaustible variety of striking incidents."

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1767

"Nature supplies the materials of his compositions; his senses are the under-workmen, while Imagination, like a masterly Architect, superintends and directs the whole. Or, to speak more properly, Imagination both supplies the materials, and executes the work, since it calls into being 'things tha...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)