Date: 1725

"Rais'd on the noble prospect of the mind, / From that proud eminence they view mankind"

— Pitt, Christopher (1699-1748)

Date: 1726

"I know in descriptions of this nature the scenes are generally supposed to grow out of the author's imagination, and if they are not charming in all their parts, the reader never imputes it to the want of sun or soil, but to the barrenness of invention"

— Addison, Joseph (1672-1719)

Date: 1728 (1733)

"Shall he shut up all the Avenues of his Body, by which External Objects have access to affect his Mind ? And shall he rob the Mind her self of all Thought and Reflection?"

— Campbell, Archibald (1691-1756)

Date: 1732

"Thoughts crowd on Thoughts, as Alps on Alps arise, / And Worlds of Wonder open to my Eyes."

— Mitchell, Joseph (c. 1684-1738)

Date: 1732

"You must know, said he, that the mind of man may be fitly compared to a piece of land. What stubbing, ploughing, digging, and harrowing is to the one, that thinking, reflecting, examining is to the other."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1734 [1735?]

"Deaf to Advice, or taking Wrong for Right, / They boldly blunder on in Reason's Spite; / And under clearer Light's obscure Pretence / Live the Antipodes of common Sense."

— Paget, Thomas Catesby, Lord Paget (1689-1742)

Date: 1736, 1737, 1759, 1744, 1771, 1773

"Female youth, left to weak woman's care" are "Strangers to reason and reflection made, / Left to their passions, and by them betrayed; / Untaught the noble end of glorious truth, / Bred to deceive even from earliest youth; / Unused to books, nor virtue taught to prize; / Whose mind, a savage was...

— Ingram, Anne [née Howard; other married name Douglas], Viscountess Irwin (c. 1696-1764)

Date: 1737, 1743

"It is not so much the being exempt from Faults, as the having overcome them, that is an Advantage to us; it being with the Follies of the Mind as with the Weeds of a Field, which, if destroyed and consumed upon the place of their Birth, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung the...

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1740

"To the instructed Man [Ideas of Sensation] afford a vast Quantity of Materials to exercise Knowledge on, but without being taught that [end page 26] Knowledge to apply them to artificial Purposes, they would signify no more to us, besides assisting the Instincts to take Care of that Body they we...

— Philalethes [pseud.]

Date: 1741

"I [the mind] did but step out, on some weighty affairs, / To visit last night, my good friends in the stars, / When, before I was got half as high as the moon, / You despatched Pain and Languor to hurry me down; / Vi & Armis they seized me, in midst of my flight, / And shut me in caverns as dark...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)