Date: 1762

"Ils sont sourds, en effet, à la voix intérieure qui leur crie d’un ton difficile à méconnaître: Une machine ne pense point, il n’y a ni mouvement, ni figure qui produise la réflexion: quelque chose en toi cherche à briser les liens qui le compriment; l’espace n’est pas ta mesure, l’univers entie...

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"However, I found their conversation more vulgar than I could have expected from personages of such distinction: if these, thought I to myself, be Princes, they are the most stupid Princes I have ever conversed with: yet still I continued to venerate their dress; for dress has a kind of mechanica...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

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

"The power which the mind evidently has of moving the various parts of the body by nerves inserted in the muscles is truly wonderful, seeing the mind neither knows the muscles to be moved, nor the machinery, by which the motion in it is to be produced: so that it is as if a musician should always...

— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)

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

"When actual thought is suspended, there may remain some secret power of thinking resulting from the constitution of the soul, which will exert itself when the obstruction is removed. As a bow when bent has a disposition to straiten itself again, or a clock to strike, though the hammer be held ba...

— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)

Date: 1764

"In the arts and sciences which have least connection with the mind, its faculties are the engines which we must employ; and the better we understand their nature and use, their defects and disorders, the more skilfully we shall apply them, and with the greater success."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Date: w. 1764, 1953

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

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1765

"That is, a sentient or thinking being is not a mechanical thing like a watch or a mill: one cannot conceive of sizes and shapes and motions combining mechanically to produce something which thinks, and senses too, in a mass where [formerly] there was nothing of the kind--something which would li...

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: w. prior to April 1770; 1785, 1837, 1875

"The wise look further, and the wise can see / The hands of Sawney actuating thee; / The clock-work of thy conscience turns about, / Just as his mandates wind thee in and out."

— Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770)

Date: 1771

"He observed, that her ladyship's brain was a perfect mill for projects; and that she and Tabby had certainly engaged in some secret treaty, the nature of which he could not comprehend"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1772, 1788

"Roast Beef quantum suff. and take tantum Red Port, / They steel the main-spring of the Heart."

— Stevens, George Alexander (1710?-1784)