Date: 1779, 1781

"He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1780

"There meet together, adultery, avarice, perjury, and every other vice; the soul is overwhelmed beneath them, and justice, modesty, and virtue are no more: bereft of these, the mind becomes dry and barren, or only teems with savage and brutal extravagance."

— Francklin, Thomas (1721–1784); Lucian (b.c. 125, d. after 180)

Date: 1781

"In his 'Night Thoughts' he has exhibited a very wide display of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of every hue and of every odour."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1782

"If therefore the gloomy hemisphere of fact intrude a mournful prospect on the eye, at least we may travel the regions of imagination, where fancy's mirror can present clearer sunshine."

— Dorset, Michael (fl. 1775-1782)

Date: 1782

"Were I poetically turned--what a glorious field for fancy flights--such as the blue-eyed Goddess with her flying carr--her doves and sparrows, &c. &c.--Alas! my imagination is as barren as the desert sands of Arabia."

— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)

Date: April, 1783

"Let an Hypochondriack then have his park well stocked. Let him get as many agreeable ideas into his mind as he can; and though there may in wintery days seem: a total vacancy, yet when summer glows benignant, and the time of singing of birds is come, he will be delighted with gay colours and enc...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1783

"Elegant speculations are sometimes found to float on the surface of the mind, while bad passions possess the interior regions of the heart."

— Blair, Hugh (1718-1800)

Date: 1784

"The truth is, a depth of cunning that enables them to over-reach, conceal, deceive, is the only province of the mind left for them, as slaves, to occupy."

— Ramsay, James (1733-1789)

Date: 1784

"The minds of these, our fellow-creatures, that are now drowned in ignorance, being thus opened and improved, the pale of reason would be enlarged; Christianity would receive new strength; liberty new subjects."

— Ramsay, James (1733-1789)

Date: 1785

"In later ages, Des Cartes was the first that pointed out the road we ought to take in those dark regions [of the mind]."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)