Date: w. 1740, 1748

"Thirsting for Knowledge, but to know the right, / Thro' judgment's optick guide th' illusive sight, / To let in rays on Reason's darkling cell, / And Prejudice's lagging mists dispel."

— Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797)

Date: 1751

"His mind does not receive the impression of the moral world, in the same manner, as wax receives the impression of a seal. It does not reflect the image of it, in the same manner, as a mirror reflects its images: it has a peculiar cast and turn given to its conceptions, admirably ordered to exal...

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1759

"Unfortunately this moral looking-glass is not always a very good one. Common looking-glasses, it is said, are extremely deceitful, and by the glare which they throw over the face, conceal from the partial eyes of the person many deformities which are obvious to every body besides. But there is n...

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1759

"Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments; and it is here that he first views the propriet...

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1760-7

"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"[I]n the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better still for [the biographer];--for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that of red hot iron,--must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of ...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"But this, as I said above, is not the case of the inhabitants of this earth;--our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood; so that if we would come to the specifick characters of them, we must go some other way to work."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"[A]n illustration is no argument,--nor do I maintain the wiping of a looking-glass clean, to be a syllogism;--but you all, may it please your worships, see the better for it,--so that the main good these things do, is only to clarify the understanding, previous to the application of the argument...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

Ideas "follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1764

"Such principles are parts of our constitution, no less than the power of thinking: reason can neither make nor destroy them; nor can it do any thing without them: it is like a telescope, which may help a man to see farther, who hath eyes; but without eyes, a telescope shows nothing at all."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)