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Date: 1709, 1810

"Yet the silly wand'ring mind, / Loth to be too much confin'd, / Roves and takes her daily tours, / Coasting round the narrow shores, / Narrow shores of flesh and sense, / Picking shells and pebbles thence: / Or she sits at fancy's door, / Calling shapes and shadows to her, / Foreign visits still...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

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Date: 1712

"Quick, as a darted Beam of Light, they [the spirits] go, / Thro' diff'rent Paths to diff'rent Organs flow, / Whence they reflect as swiftly to the Brain, / To give it Pleasure, or to give it Pain."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

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Date: 1712

"Which by her secret uncontested Nod / Her Messengers the Spirits sends abroad, / Thro' ev'ry nervous Pass, and ev'ry vital Road. / To fetch from ev'ry distant Part a Train, / Of outward Objects to enrich the Brain."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

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Date: 1712

"And tho' these Spirits, which obsequious go, / Know not the Paths, thro' which they ready flow, / Nor can our Mind instruct them in their Way, / Of all their Roads as ignorant, as they; / Yet seldom erring they attain their End, / And reach that single Part, which we intend."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

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Date: 1712

"How Spirits, which for Sense and Motion serve, / Unguided find the perforated Nerve. / Thro' ev'ry dark Recess pursue their Flight, / Unconscious of the Road and void of Sight, / Yet certain of the End still guide their Motions right."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

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Date: 1741

"I [the mind] did but step out, on some weighty affairs, / To visit last night, my good friends in the stars, / When, before I was got half as high as the moon, / You despatched Pain and Languor to hurry me down; / Vi & Armis they seized me, in midst of my flight, / And shut me in caverns as dark...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

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Date: 1744

"Commanding, with omnipotence of thought, / Creations new in Fancy's field to rise! / Souls, that can grasp whate'er the Almighty made, / And wander wild through things impossible!"

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: August 27, 1751

"The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: 1752

"Upon the whole, however, she past a miserable and sleepless Night, her gentle Mind torn and distracted with various and contending Passions, distressed with Doubts, and wandring in a kind of Twilight, which presented her only Objects of different Degrees of Horrour, and where black Despair close...

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

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Date: 1754

"This is the great intellectual province, wherein our minds range with much freedom, and often with exorbitant licence, in the pursuit of real or imaginary science."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.