Date: 1741

"So for Instance, in Children; they perceive and forget a hundred Things in an Hour; the Brain is so soft that it receives immediately all Impressions like Water or liquid Mud, and retains scarce any of them: All the Traces, Forms or Images which are drawn there, are immediately effaced or closed...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1742

"God beholds all souls bare, and stripped of these corporeal vessels, bark, and filth."

— Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), and James Moor (bap. 1712, d. 1779)

Date: 1742, 1777

"The heart, mean while, is empty of all enjoyment: And the mind, unsupported by its proper objects, sinks into the deepest sorrow and dejection."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1742, 1777

"With what resources is [the mind] endowed to fill so immense a void, and supply the place of all thy bodily senses and faculties?"

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1743, 1746

"What most diverted these torments, which kept him awake many nights and days successively, was the review of those treasures of science reposited in his memory."

— Burton, William (1703-1753)

Date: 1748, 1777

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1754

"The Mind still pushing onwards and increasing its Stock of Ideas, ascends from those to an higher Species of Objects, viz. the Order and Mutual Relations of Minds to each other, their reciprocal Affections, Characters, Actions, and various Aspects."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1754

"Nature has therefore endued us with a MIDDLE FACULTY, wonderfully adapted to our MIXED State, which holds partly of Sense and partly of Reason, being strongly allied to the former, and the common Receptacle in which all the Notices that come from that quarter are treasured up, and yet greatly su...

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1754

"Into this common Storehouse are likewise carried all those Moral Images or Forms which are derived from our Moral Faculties of Perception, and there they often undergo new Changes and Appearances, by being mixed and wrought up with the Images and Forms of Sensible or Natural Thing."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"These are the methods, as far as I comprehend, that have filled the brain with ideas, for the reception of which nature has formed it."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)