Daily Inspiration Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler lands the insult with velvet gloves: your senses and passions are not badges of glory but assistive devices. The line is a quiet reversal of the Enlightenment-era mood that treated feeling and perception as windows into truth or engines of authentic selfhood. For Butler, they’re prosthetics bolted onto a flawed creature - “a supply to the imperfection of our nature” - and the phrasing matters. “Supply” sounds like provisioning an army, not celebrating a soul. You don’t “need” supplies unless you’re limited.

The subtext is theological but also psychological. Butler isn’t denying that passions and sensory life are real or powerful; he’s demoting them. They’re remedies for deficiency, not authorities. That’s a strategic move in the moral debates of his time: if passions are compensations, they can’t be allowed to rule. They become clues about human dependence, not arguments for human sovereignty. In a culture increasingly tempted by self-sufficiency - reason as master, desire as destiny - Butler insists on a hierarchy: “higher orders of creatures” don’t require these crutches. The implication is that angels (or God) don’t need hunger, pleasure, fear, or even sensory mediation to know the good; humans do, because we’re built for struggle and correction.

Rhetorically, the sentence performs its own discipline. It’s measured, categorical, slightly chilly - an Anglican moralist doing pastoral work with philosophical precision. He makes humility feel like plain anthropology: if your inner life is a toolkit, not a throne, then ethics becomes the art of using it properly, not worshipping it.