Creativity Quote by John Trumbull

The couplet mocks the human habit of boasting special vision, the pretense of seeing what evidence cannot support. To discern the undiscernible would require optics sharper than nature allows, a sly way of saying the claim is self-delusion or rhetorical trickery. The archaism I ween underscores a playful, skeptical tone: the speaker concedes the point only in a hypothetical sense, knowing it cannot be met.

John Trumbull, a leading figure among the Hartford Wits and an heir to Enlightenment wit, trained his satire on pedantry, zealotry, and political cant. Across works like M Fingal and The Progress of Dulness, he lampoons those who mistake ideology for insight and noise for knowledge. The vocabulary of optics draws on the period’s fascination with telescopes and microscopes, instruments that extended sight while also teaching humility about what can be known. If vision needs ever sharper lenses to grasp a claim, perhaps the object is not there at all, or perhaps the seer is merely magnifying his own assumptions.

The line also skewers a familiar dynamic of public life in the revolutionary era: partisans declared they could detect hidden plots, secret motives, and inevitable outcomes, then used those invisible certainties to justify action. Trumbull exposes the performative confidence behind such pronouncements. When someone insists he can see what is not to be seen, he asks the audience to trade judgment for credulity. Satire answers by restoring common sense: if the thing exists, show it; if not, stop pretending superior perception proves the case.

Modern ears may hear a second echo in the word optics, now associated with image and spin. That contemporary meaning only sharpens the jest. Whether in scholarship, theology, or politics, the temptation to conjure invisible proofs remains, and Trumbull’s couplet smiles at it, defending an empirical modesty that refuses to mistake wish or fear for sight.