Date: 1731

"Cou'd Reason's Force / Tear the unlicens'd Image from my Heart, / Or, patient, leave to Time, th'unhasten'd Means, / To bless my fierce Desires; Who knows what Chance, / Or Death, or Thought, or Woman's changeful Will, / Or my own conquer'd Wishes, may produce."

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)

Date: 1733

"May not the sentient Principle have its Seat in some Place in the Brain, where the Nerves terminate, like the Musician shut up in his Organ-Room? May not the infinite Windings, Convolutions, and Complications of the Beginning of the Nerves which constitute the Brain, serve to d...

— Cheyne, George (1671-1743)

Date: 1734, 1735

"The Mind, in peaceful Solitude, has Room / To range in Thought, and ramble far from home."

— Barber, Mary (c.1685-1755)

Date: 1733-4

"Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; / Reason's comparing balance rules the whole."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1734

"I'm in a raging storm, / Where seas and skies are blended, while my soul / Like some light worthless chip of floating cork / Is tost from wave to wave."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1735, 1763

"'Midst foreign objects not employ'd to roam, / Thought, sadly active, still corrodes at home."

— Melmoth, William, the younger (bap. 1710, d. 1799)

Date: 1737

"As Years advance, th'abated Soul in most / Sinks to low Ebb, in second Childhood lost; / And feeble Age, dishonouring our Kind, / Robs all the Treasures of the wasted Mind"

— Hughes, Jabez (1685-1731)

Date: January 1739

"The vividness of the first conception diffuses itself along the relations, and is convey'd, as by so many pipes or canals, to every idea that has any communication with the primary one."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: January 1739

"The attention is on the stretch; the posture of the mind is uneasy; and the spirits being diverted from their natural course, are not governed in their movements by the same laws, at least not to the same degree, as when they flow in their usual channel."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1741

"There are are some Persons who complain they cannot remember divine or human Discourses which they hear, when in Truth their Thoughts are wandering half the Time, or they hear with such coldness and Indifferency and a trifling Temper of Spirit, that it is no wonder the Things which are read or s...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)