"Wit, you know, is the unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other." (Samuel Johnson, "The Rambler", 1750)
"Beauty has in art the same foundation as does truth in philosophy. What is the truth? The conformity of our judgements with beings. What is the beauty of imitation? The conformity of the image with the thing." (Denis Diderot, "Entretiens sur le fils naturel", 1757)
"Every man, as the Stoics used to say, is first and principally recommended to his own care; and every man is certainly, in every respect, fitter and abler to take care of himself than of any other person. Every man feels his own pleasures and his own pains more sensibly than those of other people. The former are the original sensations; the latter the reflected or sympathetic images of those sensations. The former may be said to be the substance; the latter the shadow." (Adam Smith, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", 1759)
"Things which do not now exist in the mind itself, can only be perceived, remembered, or imagined, by means of the ideas or images in the mind, which are the immediate objects of perception, remembrance, and imagination." (Thomas Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles", 1764)
"Whoever wishes to extend this law [of continuity] to the real must justify his inferences by a law other than that, the suspicion remaining that he took images for things." (Abraham G Kästner, "Anfangsgründe der Analysis des Unendlichen" ["Beginnings of the Analysis of the Infinite"], 1766)
"Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing." (Joshua Reynolds, "Discourses on Art", 1769)
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