Date: 1753

"The knowledge of good is form'd in our souls, as the seeds are in the ground; there is a time when they lie conceal'd, a time when they spring forth, and a time when they bear fruit"

— Du Bosc, Jacques (d. 1660)

Date: 1754

"The human soul is so far from being furnished with forms and ideas to perceive all things by, or from being impregnated, I would rather say than printed over, with the seeds of universal knowledge, that we have no ideas till we receive passively the ideas of sensible qualities from without."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"They are, if I may say so, of the mind's own growth, the elements of knowledge, more immediate, less relative, and less dependent than sensitive knowledge, as any man will be apt to think, who compares his ideas of remembering, recollecting, bare thought, and intenseness of thought, with those o...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

But when we enter into a serious and impartial detail concerning this knowledge, and analyse carefully what the great pretenders to it have given and give us daily for knowledge, we shall be obliged to confess, that the human intellect is rather a rank than a fertile soil, barren without due cult...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1755

"I remember upon my having a Fit of Illness, my Mother, who was apprehensive of my Death, and consequently, thro' excessive Fondness, us'd all Means to prevent it that lay within her Power, sent me to Thorly, in Hertfordshire, the Seat of Dr. Hales, an eminent Physician and Relation, with a Desig...

— Charke [née Cibber; other married name Sacheverell], Charlotte [alias Mr Brown] (1713-1760)

Date: 1757

"Their root strikes deeper into the mind, and springs from the essential and universal properties of human nature."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1759

"To enforce the observation of justice, therefore, nature has implanted in the human breast that consciousness of ill-desert, those terrors of merited punishment which attend upon its violation, as the great safe-guards of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and ...

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1759

"Nature, however, when she implanted the seeds of this irregularity in the human breast, seems, as upon all other occasions, to have intended the happiness and perfection of the species."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1759

"The mind of a man of Genius is a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysium, and fertile as Tempe"

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"That is, let not great Examples, or Authorities, browbeat thy Reason into too great a diffidence of thyself: Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)