"Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible"
About this Quote
“Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible” is Sheridan doing what great playwrights do: smuggling social critique into a line that sounds like plain common sense. The sentence is a trap. It borrows the calm authority of “certainly” and the tidy logic of a syllogism, then uses that logic to blow up a favorite moral cudgel of polite society: calling something “unnatural” when what they really mean is “unapproved.”
In Sheridan’s theatrical world, “unnatural” is less a description of nature than a verdict handed down by manners, class interest, and inherited prejudice. By reducing the category to the physical - the only real boundary is impossibility - he exposes how slippery the word becomes in public debate. If it can happen, it belongs to nature. Everything else is just social theater: reputations managed, desires denied, and “virtue” performed on cue.
The subtext is sharper than the phrasing. Sheridan isn’t arguing that all choices are wise or harmless; he’s arguing that the moral panic around “unnatural” behavior is often a rhetorical shortcut, a way to make disgust sound like principle. It’s also a very stage-ready line: it flips the audience’s assumptions with a clean reversal and invites laughter at the expense of self-serious moralizers.
Context matters: late 18th-century Britain loved to police taste while indulging hypocrisy. Sheridan, writing comedies of manners, understood that “nature” was frequently invoked to keep people in their place. His line doesn’t just defend human variety; it indicts the social machinery that pretends its preferences are laws of the universe.
In Sheridan’s theatrical world, “unnatural” is less a description of nature than a verdict handed down by manners, class interest, and inherited prejudice. By reducing the category to the physical - the only real boundary is impossibility - he exposes how slippery the word becomes in public debate. If it can happen, it belongs to nature. Everything else is just social theater: reputations managed, desires denied, and “virtue” performed on cue.
The subtext is sharper than the phrasing. Sheridan isn’t arguing that all choices are wise or harmless; he’s arguing that the moral panic around “unnatural” behavior is often a rhetorical shortcut, a way to make disgust sound like principle. It’s also a very stage-ready line: it flips the audience’s assumptions with a clean reversal and invites laughter at the expense of self-serious moralizers.
Context matters: late 18th-century Britain loved to police taste while indulging hypocrisy. Sheridan, writing comedies of manners, understood that “nature” was frequently invoked to keep people in their place. His line doesn’t just defend human variety; it indicts the social machinery that pretends its preferences are laws of the universe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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