Faith & Spirit Quote by George Meredith

Meredith nails the particular humiliation of wanting the world to click into place and getting, instead, a mouthful of grit. The line turns on a sensual mismatch: the soul is "hot", flushed with appetite for certainty, while the answer is "dusty", dry, stale, secondhand. It is less an abstract complaint than a physical gag reflex. You can feel the thirst, then the disappointment.

The intent is to puncture the Victorian confidence that life can be neatly categorized and moralized into clean lessons. Meredith, a novelist of social intelligence rather than sermonizing, knows that certainty often arrives as a kind of dead matter: doctrine, platitude, explanation after the fact. "Dusty" carries the smell of old rooms and archived opinions; it suggests answers that have been sitting around too long, preserved because they are safe, not because they are true.

Subtext: the craving for certainty is the real danger. The soul, "hot" for it, is already overheated - primed to accept whatever cools the anxiety. Meredith implies that our most intense need is precisely what makes us easiest to fool, and that the answers we reach for tend to be the ones least capable of nourishing us.

Context matters: late-19th-century Britain is awash in scientific upheaval, religious doubt, and social flux. Meredith writes from a moment when old certainties are still being sold, briskly, but their taste has changed. The sentence works because it refuses to comfort. It diagnoses a modern condition: the sharper the desire for finality, the more likely you are to be fed something that was never meant to live.