Date: 1743

"Though grey our heads, our thoughts and aims are green; / Like damaged clocks, whose hand and bell dissent; / Folly sings six, while Nature points at twelve."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Passion's fierce illapse / Rouzes the mind's whole fabric; with supplies / Of daily impulse keeps the elastic powers / Intensely poiz'd, and polishes anew / By that collision all the fine machine: / Else rust would rise, and foulness, by degrees / Incumbering, choak at last what heaven design'd ...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1751

"If any Man hath found out a Kind of Motive which doth not affect himself, he hath made a deeper Investigation into the 'Springs, Weights, and Balances' of the human Heart, than I can pretend to."

— Brown, John (1715-1766)

Date: 1762

"Ils sont sourds, en effet, à la voix intérieure qui leur crie d’un ton difficile à méconnaître: Une machine ne pense point, il n’y a ni mouvement, ni figure qui produise la réflexion: quelque chose en toi cherche à briser les liens qui le compriment; l’espace n’est pas ta mesure, l’univers entie...

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)

Date: 1763 (repr. 1776); 1794 (repr. 1799)

"When actual thought is suspended, there may remain some secret power of thinking resulting from the constitution of the soul, which will exert itself when the obstruction is removed. As a bow when bent has a disposition to straiten itself again, or a clock to strike, though the hammer be held ba...

— Doddridge, Philip (1702-1751)

Date: 1774

"A multitude of ideas, collected by such an imagination, form a confused chaos, in which inconsistent conceptions are often mixt, conceptions so unsuitable and disproportioned, that they can no more be combined into one regular work, than a number of wheels taken from different watches, can be un...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1777

"She saw something like just drawing in the dark shades of his pencil, though the lines seemed a good deal exaggerated: she reflected, she doubted; but, after settling a balance in her mind, the found her own scale preponderate."

— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)

Date: March, 1778

"What that power is by which the conscious spirit governs and directs various mental faculties, is, it must be confessed, utterly inexplicable as long as our souls are enclosed in material frames. While a watch is shut up in its case, we cannot see how the operations of its curious machinery are ...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: March, 1778

"And my similitude between a watch in its case, and the soul in its material frame, will, I persuade myself, be agreeable to all my readers, whose dispositions are mild, and like better to be pleased with what they read, than to attack it."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1785

"BOSWELL. 'But, sir,'tis like walking up and down a hill; one man will naturally do the one better than the other. A hare will run up a hill best, from her fore-legs being short; a dog down.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, sir; that is from mechanical powers. If you make mind mechanical, you may argue in that ma...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)