Date: 1751, 1777

"They [cruel ideas] still haunt his solitary hours, damp his most aspiring thoughts, and show him, even to himself, in the most contemptible and most odious colours imaginable."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1751

"If the brain, or some part of it, were not in a manner the fountain of sensation and motion, and more peculiarly the seat of the mind than the other bowels or members of the body; why should a slight inflammation of its membranes cause madness, or a small compression of it produce a palsy or apo...

— Whytt, Robert (1714-1766)

Date: 1751

"In this particular case, we must either suppose, that the impressions, made by the stars on the retina, are suffocated and lost in those stronger ones made by the illuminated atmosphere, so as never to reach the sensorium in order to excite any idea in the mind, or that if they do reach the sens...

— Whytt, Robert (1714-1766)

Date: 1754, 1762

"While private resentment was boiling in his sullen, unsociable mind, he heard the nation resound with complaints against the duke; and he met with the remonstrance of the commons, in which his enemy was represented as the cause of every national grievance, and as the great enemy of the public."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1759

"Our sense of the horror and dreadful atrocity of such conduct, the delight which we take in hearing that it was properly punished, the indignation which we feel when it escapes this due retaliation, our whole sense and feeling, in short, of its ill desert, of the propriety and fitness of inflict...

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1762

"It is accordingly observed by Longinus, in his treatise of the Sublime, that the proper time for metaphor, is when the passions are so swelled as to hurry on like a torrent."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1762

"A tide of connected perceptions, glides gently into the mind, and produceth no perturbation. An object on the other hand breaking in unexpectedly, sounds an alarm, rouses the mind out of its calm state, and directs its whole attention upon the object, which, if agreeable, becomes doubly so."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1762

"The world we inhabit is replete with things not less remarkable for their variety than their number. These, unfolded by the wonderful mechanism of external sense, furnish the mind with many perceptions, which, joined with ideas of memory, of imagination, and of reflection, form a complete train ...

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1766

"They suppose the same domineering pride and ingratitude to be the basis of his character; but they are also willing to believe, that his brain has received a sensible shock, and that his judgment, set afloat, is carried to every side, as it is pushed by the current of his humours and of his pass...

— Hume, David (1711-1776); with Rousseau, d'Alembert, and Walpole

Date: 1767

His existence is now at last in no danger of comminution, but then his powers are absolutely gone and quite evaporated. In a word, he is as dry and empty as a beer barrel after it has been some time set a-broach to a drunken mob at a general election."

— Campbell, Archibald (bap. 1724, d. 1780)