Date: Friday, April 21, 1727

"For though it is generally believed that few Statesmen are much afflicted with this terrible Inmate; yet, upon a careful Inspection of human Nature, I find it to be a vulgar Error; and am fully satisfied that, notwithstanding the outward placid Behaviour and smiling Aspect of t...

— Caleb d'Anvers [pseud. for Nicholas Amhurst, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke, and William Pulteney, Earl of Bath]

Date: 1704-5; 1731

"If a man's Body be under confinement, or he be impotent in his Limbs, he is then deprived of his bodily Liberty: And for the same Reason, if his Mind be blinded by sottish Errors, and his Reason over-ruled by violent Passions; is not This likewise plainly as great a Slavery and as ...

— Clarke, Samuel (1675-1729)

Date: January 1739

"The attention is on the stretch; the posture of the mind is uneasy; and the spirits being diverted from their natural course, are not governed in their movements by the same laws, at least not to the same degree, as when they flow in their usual channel."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1742

"The mind, unexercised, finds every delight insipid and loathsome; and ere yet the body, full of noxious humours, feels the torment of its multiplied diseases, your nobler part is sensible of the invading poison, and seeks in vain to relieve its anxiety by new pleasures, which still augment the f...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: November 6, 1746

"She [Desdemona] saw, as the truly valuable Part of the Sex do, Othello's Visage in his Mind; she was too innocent and resigned to be guarded against the Wiles of envious and designing Men; and thus, while basking in the Sunshine of Love, and sporting in the Splendor of its divine Emanations, she...

— Horsley, William (attrib.)

Date: 1748, 1754

"In this Light, the Administration itself, nay, every Act of it, becomes an Object of Affection, the Evil disappears, or is converted into a Balm which both heals and nourishes the Mind."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1754

"[I]t may be said of most Men, that their intellectual Organs are as much shut up and secluded from proper Nourishment and Exercise in that little Circle to which they are confined, as the bodily Organs are in the Womb."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Such is the chaos, such the rapid and continual succession of our ideas; they drive one another successively, as one wave impels another; so that it the imagination does not employ a part of its muscles, poised as it were in an equilibrium upon the strings of the brain, so as to sustain itself s...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: Saturday March 24, 1750

"Those who have proceeded so far as to appeal to the tribunal of succeeding times, are not likely to be cured of their infatuation; but all endeavours ought to be used for the prevention of a disease, for which, when it has attained its height, perhaps no remedy will be found in the gardens of ph...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, February 12, 1751

"There are many diseases both of the body and mind, which it is far easier to prevent than to cure, and therefore I hope you will think me employed in an office not useless either to learning or virtue, if I describe the symptoms of an intellectual malady, which, though at first it seizes only th...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)