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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)

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Date: 1755

"Where beams of warm imagination play, / The memory's soft figures melt away"

— Pope [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

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Date: 1765

"The best Way to prove the Clearness of our Mind is by shewing its Faults; as when a Stream discovers the Dirt at the Bottom, it convinces us of the Transparency and Purity of the Water."

— Anonymous

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Date: 1769

"The first reverend sage who delivered himself on this mysterious subject, having stroked his grey beard, and hemmed thrice with great solemnity, declared that the soul was an animal; a second pronounced it to be the number three, or proportion; a third contended for the number seven, or harmony;...

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

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Date: 1788

There are those "whom the traffic of their race / Has robb'd of every human grace; / Whose harden'd souls no more retain / Impressions Nature stamp'd in vain; / All that distinguishes their kind, / For ever blotted from their mind; / As streams, that once the landscape gave / Reflected o...

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

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