Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"My friend seemed to blush for his countrymen, assuring me that those whom I saw running away, were only a parcel of musical blockheads, whose passion was merely for sounds, and whose heads were as empty as a fiddle case; those who remain behind, says he, are the true Religious; they make use of ...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)

"A vast stock of ideas are treasured up in the memory, which it easily produces on various occasions."

— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)

Date: w. 1764, 1953

"My mind is like an air-pump which receives and ejects ideas with wonderful facility."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1767

His existence is now at last in no danger of comminution, but then his powers are absolutely gone and quite evaporated. In a word, he is as dry and empty as a beer barrel after it has been some time set a-broach to a drunken mob at a general election."

— Campbell, Archibald (bap. 1724, d. 1780)

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

"Others however are more remote, and lie far beyond the reach of ordinary faculties; coming only within the verge of those few persons, whose minds are capacious enough to contain that prodigious croud of ideas, which an extensive observation and experience supply; whose understandings are penetr...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1767

"A Poet, on the other hand, who is possessed of original Genius, feels in the strongest manner every impression made upon the mind, by the influence of external objects on the senses, or by reflection on those ideas which are treasured up in the repository of the memory, and is consequently quali...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1767

"Thus the Poet, having by the force of Imagination formed lively images of the objects he proposes to describe, thinks only of expressing his ideas in smooth and harmonious numbers; the Painter, having the same vivid conception of every object, is wholly intent on exhibiting a representation of t...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1767

"Imagination is that faculty whereby the mind not only reflects on its own operations, but which assembles the various ideas conveyed to the understanding by the canal of sensation, and treasured up in the repository of the memory, compounding or disjoining them at pleasure; and which, by its pla...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1771

"He thinks nothing more absurd than the common notion of Instruction, as if Science were to be poured into the Mind, like water into a cistern, that passively waits to receive all that comes."

— Harris, James (1709-1780)