Faith & Spirit Quote by Irving Babbitt

Strain first, think later: Babbitt is skewering a peculiarly modern piety that treats motion as morality. “Act strenuously” lands like a commandment, then he twists the knife with “would appear to be our faith” - not his creed, but the age’s. The phrase is politely acidic, the kind of underlined understatement critics use when they’re pointing at a crowd and letting it indict itself. What follows, “right thinking will take care of itself,” is even more damning because it mimics the optimism of self-help and progress talk: if we just keep doing things - building, reforming, crusading - the ideas will somehow come out correct.

The intent is not anti-action. It’s anti-automatic virtue. Babbitt’s subtext is that action untethered from discipline or moral scrutiny doesn’t drift toward truth; it rationalizes itself after the fact. People become busy and then hire their principles as PR. The line reads like a diagnosis of a culture drunk on “strenuous life” rhetoric (Roosevelt-era vigor, industrial acceleration, social reform movements with a missionary pulse) where energy substitutes for judgment and sincerity stands in for self-knowledge.

As a critic associated with “New Humanism,” Babbitt was pushing back against romantic faith in impulse and against progressive confidence that history’s momentum guarantees ethical outcomes. He’s warning that activism, nationalism, even philanthropy can become a kind of moral laundering: act hard, feel righteous, let the brain catch up. The quote works because it exposes a psychological loophole - and does it with a calm, surgical irony that makes the loophole feel embarrassingly familiar.