Date: 1734

"If I but close my eyes, strange images / In thousand forms and thousand colours rise, / Stars, rainbows, moons, green dragons, bears and ghosts, / An endless medley rush upon the stage, / And dance and riot wild in reason's court / Above control."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1733-4

"Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; / Reason's comparing balance rules the whole."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1735, 1792

"Around their queen attendant spirits watch, / Each rising thought with prompt observance catch, / The tidings of internal passion spread, / And thro' each part the swift contagion shed"

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)

Date: 1737

"As in the greater World, aspiring Flame, / Earth, Water, Air, make the material Frame: / And thro' the Members a commanding Soul / Infus'd, directs the Motion of the Whole: / So 'tis in Man, the lesser World: the Case / Is Clay, unactive, and an earthly Mass: / But the Blood's Streams the ruli...

— Baker, Henry (1698-1774)

Date: October, 1739

"Teach me to cool my passion's fires, / Make me the judge of my desires / The master of my heart."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1738, 1739

"For tho' right Reason should her Beams display, / And dart new Lustre on our clouded Way; / Unless Philosophy, with antient Strength, / Support her Empire to Life's utmost Length; / Unless, in Passion's Spite, we dare be free, / (What Few have been, and Few will ever be) / That pristine Turn, th...

— Bancks, John (1709-1751)

Date: 1739

"Base Fear, the Laziness of Lust, gross Appetites, / These are the Ladders, and the groveling Footstool, / From whence the Tyrant rises on our Wrongs, / Secure and scepter'd in the Soul's Servility."

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)

Date: 1739

"I am all / That's left to calm, to sooth his troubled Soul, / To Penitence, to Virtue; and perhaps / Restore the better Empire o'er his Mind, / True Seat of all Dominion."

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)

Date: January 1739

"The attention is on the stretch; the posture of the mind is uneasy; and the spirits being diverted from their natural course, are not governed in their movements by the same laws, at least not to the same degree, as when they flow in their usual channel."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1740

"But notwithstanding the empire of the imagination, there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently together, and makes the one, upon its appearance, introduce the other."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)