Date: 1761

"Our General amidst the Noise of War, / Has a Soul tun'd to all the softer Passions."

— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"It must, it must surely be, that this jarring discordant life is but the prelude to some future harmony; the soul attuned to virtue here, shall go from hence to fill up the universal choir where Tien presides in person, where there shall be no tyrants to frown, no shackles to bind, nor no whips ...

— 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: 1768

"Why does my pulse beat languid as I write this? and what made La Fleur, whose heart seem'd only to be tuned to joy, to pass the back of his hand twice across his eyes, as the woman stood and told it?"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1769

"The first reverend sage who delivered himself on this mysterious subject, having stroked his grey beard, and hemmed thrice with great solemnity, declared that the soul was an animal; a second pronounced it to be the number three, or proportion; a third contended for the number seven, or harmony;...

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1775

"[T]here may be a farther difference in the constitution of the nerves belonging to the different senses, or there may be so many circumstances that affect or modify their vibrations, that they may be as distinguishable from one another, as different human voices sounding the same note; and proba...

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

Date: 1776

"If you really then think that, every process, termed mental, in man, is in fact nothing more than so many distinct nervous vibrations, then I readily grant that matter may think, for undoubtedly every stretched cord, when touched, will vibrate; and I will farther grant, that a fiddle, in that se...

— Berington, Joseph (1743-1827)

Date: 1777

"When his reason returned, it settled into a melancholy, which time has soothed, not extinguished, which indeed seems to have become the habitual tone of his mind."

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1777, 1810

"When thus, by prospect, and by thought, / My mind to harmony is wrought; / Already conscious of the rising strain, / The path to Knighton I regain."

— Stockdale, Percival (1736-1811)

Date: April, 1778

"The sound of the mind we hear; but what it is we cannot tell. The music which it utters, its melody, its harmony, its discord, its variety of notes, have been written by Shakespeare with a wonderful degree of perfection, so as to be themselves to every cultivated reader. We have even gamuts and ...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)