Daily Inspiration Quote by William Kingdon Clifford

Clifford smuggles a moral argument into a piece of elegant Victorian imagery: belief as air. You don’t merely hold convictions, you inhale them. The metaphor is doing two jobs at once. First, it makes tradition feel infrastructural rather than ornamental - a medium that lets ordinary life happen amid “various and complex circumstances.” Second, it quietly warns that if belief is atmosphere, it can be polluted. Bad epistemology isn’t just a private quirk; it’s a public health problem.

That’s the specific intent, and it fits Clifford’s broader crusade against credulity in an era drunk on progress and haunted by religious certainty. Writing as a mathematician-philosopher, he treats knowledge as something built collectively over time, not discovered by solitary intuition. “Labours and struggles” is pointed: our inherited concepts were paid for, sometimes violently, by people who argued, failed, revised, and fought for intellectual tools we now use without noticing. The line flatters modern readers only to saddle them with debt.

Subtext: this inheritance is conditional. You can’t claim the oxygen of your forefathers’ work while refusing the responsibility to keep it breathable. Clifford is setting up a social ethics of belief: what you accept on flimsy evidence doesn’t stay in your head; it thickens the air everyone else must live in. In late-19th-century Britain - Darwin in the background, empire in the foreground, science professionalizing fast - that’s a cultural stake, not an abstract one. He’s arguing that rationality is a civic utility, and tradition is only as noble as the maintenance it receives.