Daily Inspiration Quote by John Locke

Locke is doing something sly here: he smuggles a moral psychology into the language of measurement, the very domain that 17th-century thinkers were treating as the gold standard of truth. An “excellent man” is “like precious metal” not because he shines, but because he can be trusted to keep his properties under pressure. Gold doesn’t decide to become lighter because the room is cold or the crowd is watching. It holds steady. In Locke’s world, where knowledge is built from careful observation and reliable testimony, that steadiness is an ethical requirement as much as a personal virtue.

Then comes the villain, rendered not as a romantic monster but as bad instrumentation: “like the beams of a balance,” twitching up and down. The metaphor lands because a balance beam is supposed to be the arbiter of fairness. If it keeps tilting, the problem isn’t just that it’s wrong; it’s that it can be made to say anything. Locke’s subtext is political as well as personal. England had just lived through civil war, regicide, Restoration, and revolution - a long demonstration of what happens when allegiance, doctrine, and “principle” become opportunistic.

There’s a hard-edged cynicism in calling vice “varying.” The villain isn’t defined by a single sin but by volatility: he adjusts his weight to the moment. Locke is praising integrity as consistency over time, the kind of character that makes contracts meaningful, laws enforceable, and liberty something sturdier than a slogan.