Justice & Law Quote by George Ripley

Ripley’s sentence reads like chemistry, but it moves like a jailbreak plan. The “Second Work” is the giveaway: this isn’t casual lab talk, it’s procedural scripture - a promised method for liberation. “Extract our Air and our Fire” sounds technical, yet it’s also moral theater. Air and fire are the lively, animating principles; “phlegm water” is the sluggish solvent. The twist is that the dull, watery medium becomes the gentle tool of rescue. Ripley is selling a counterintuitive ethic: you don’t free what’s vital through brute force, you coax it out with the right conditions.

The phrase “infernal prison” does heavy subtextual lifting. Whatever is being purified is imagined as trapped in hell, bound up in matter, corruption, or constraint. Extraction becomes redemption. That religious pressure is important in the broader 19th-century reform atmosphere Ripley inhabited, where political activism often borrowed spiritual language and vice versa. Even when the subject is “spirits” in an alchemical sense, the word can’t help but carry human overtones: wasted “Spirits” are wasted lives, wasted energy, squandered potential.

The pitch is also pragmatic: “more naturally and easily,” “less losse.” He argues for efficiency not as cold calculation but as a humane choice. The “former way” is implied to be harsher, more damaging, maybe faster but wasteful. In activist terms, it’s the difference between coercion and cultivation: change that burns people out versus change that preserves the very spirit you claim to be saving.