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: 1783

Epicurus "fancied, that an infinite multitude of subtle images; some flowing from bodies, some formed in the air of their own accord, and others made up of different things variously combined, are always moving up and down around us: and that these images, being of extreme fineness, penetrate our...

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: April, 1783

"He gives a curious system of the instrument of Memory, which he says is the last or inner ventricle of the brain, whereas the first or outer ventricles are the instruments of perception or thought. He affirms that, according as you hurt one or other of thole instruments, you destroy either of th...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: April, 1783

"And we must be content to rest upon the surface without straining to pierce into causes which are hidden from us, and which have hitherto mocked the attempts of impatient philosophers. We should resolve to wait till a longer fathom line is granted us, and then we shall be able to sound depths wh...

— 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

"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: 1783

"Now, when an author has brought us, or is attempting to bring us, into this state; if he multiplies words unnecessarily, if he decks the Sublime object which he presents to us, round and round, with glittering ornaments; nay, if he throws in any one decoration that sinks in the least below the c...

— Blair, Hugh (1718-1800)

Date: 1783

"It changes the key in a moment; relaxes and brings down the mind; and shews us a writer perfectly at his ease, while he is personating some other, who is supposed to be under the torment of agitation."

— Blair, Hugh (1718-1800)

Date: 1783

"The want of air and exercise, with interrupted digestion, unhinges the bodily frame: and the mind, long and violently exerted in one direction, like a bow long bent, loses its elasticity, and, unable to recover itself, remains stupidly fixed in the same distorted posture"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)