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Date: 1742

"Warnings point out our danger; gnomons, time: / As these are useless when the sun is set; / So those, but when more glorious Reason shines. / Reason should judge in all; in Reason's eye, / That sedentary shadow travels hard."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1742

"Through chinks, styled organs, dim Life peeps at light; / Death bursts the' involving cloud, and all is day; / All eye, all ear, the disembodied power."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1743

"Night is fair Virtue's immemorial friend; / The conscious Moon, through every distant age,/ Has held a lamp to Wisdom, and let fall / On Contemplation's eye her purging ray."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1743

"I'll range the plenteous intellectual field; / And gather every thought of sovereign power, / To chase the moral maladies of man; / Thoughts which may bear transplanting to the skies, / Though natives of this coarse penurious soil; / Nor wholly wither there, where seraphs sing, / Refined, exalte...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"But beyond / This energy of truth, whose dictates bind / Assenting reason, the benignant sire, / To deck the honour'd paths of just and good, / Has added bright imagination's rays."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

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Date: 1745

"That lies veiled from the eyes of our mind; and the great God hath not thought fit to throw so much light upon it, as to satisfy the anxious and inquisitive desires the soul hath to know it."

— Mason, John (1706-1763)

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Date: Saturday, April 14, 1750

"[W]e are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude; but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity,...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: 1751, 1777

"Virtue, placed at such a distance, is like a fixed star, which, though to the eye of reason, it may appear as luminous as the sun in his meridian, is so infinitely removed, as to affect the senses, neither with light nor heat."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

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Date: 1759

"Beware of Self-deceit, that wily cheat, / Which blinds bright Intellect with vain Conceit; / Conceit sees Nothing in its real Light, / All Things alike delude its cheated Sight."

— Marriott, Thomas (d. 1766)

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Date: 1765

"Let those, whose arts to fatal paths betray, / The soul with passion's gloom tempestuous blind, / And snatch from Reason's ken th'auspicious ray / Truth darts from Heaven to guide th'exploring mind."

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

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