Date: 1703, 1718

"Guilt's infernal Gloom, and horrid Night" may "O'erwhelm [Man's] Intellectual Sight"

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1712

"When Man with Reason dignify'd is born, / No Images his naked Mind adorn: / No Sciences or Arts enrich his Brain, / Nor Fancy yet displays her pictur'd Train."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1712

"Our Intellectual, like the Body's Eye, / Whilst in the Womb, no Object can descry; / Yet is dispos'd to entertain the Light, / And judge of Things when offer'd to the Sight."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1712

"The Learned, who with Anatomic Art / Dissect the Mind, and thinking Substance part, / And various Pow'rs and Faculties assert; / Perhaps by such Abstraction of the Mind / Divide the Things, that are in Nature joyn'd."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1718

"Black Guilt involves the World in horrid Night, / And clouds our Intellectual Sight."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1747

The soul may let in "the baneful poison of repeated sin" as the snuff-taker does snuff

— Teft, Elizabeth (fl. 1741-7)

Date: 1760-7

"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

Wit and judgment "in this world never go together; inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west.--So, says Locke,--so are farting and hickuping, say I."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"[A]n illustration is no argument,--nor do I maintain the wiping of a looking-glass clean, to be a syllogism;--but you all, may it please your worships, see the better for it,--so that the main good these things do, is only to clarify the understanding, previous to the application of the argument...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

The "conscience of a man, by long habits of sin, might (as the scripture assures it may) insensibly become hard;--and, like some tender parts of his body, by much stress and continual hard usage, lose, by degrees, that nice sense and perception with which God and nature endow'd it"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)