Daily Inspiration Quote by William Warburton

Warburton is warning you about a particular kind of mental weather: the bright, gusty confidence that arrives when imagination starts issuing executive orders and judgment gets demoted to intern. Coming from an 18th-century critic-bishop famous for his combative certainty, the line is less a gentle reminder than a disciplinary note. In an age trying to crown “reason” as the proper sovereign of public life, “enthusiasm” was a loaded word, often aimed at religious zealots, political agitators, and anyone suspected of confusing private revelation with public truth.

The sentence works because it refuses to treat enthusiasm as purely emotional. “Temper of the mind” frames it as a disposition, almost a pathology of cognition, not a fleeting mood. Warburton’s key move is the verb: imagination has “got the better” of judgment. That phrase implies a contest with winners and losers, suggesting the mind is an arena where faculties wrestle for control. The subtext is anxious: left unchecked, imaginative force doesn’t merely embellish reality; it overrules it.

There’s also a critic’s self-portrait buried here. Warburton is defending the critic’s job as boundary enforcement: to keep taste, belief, and politics from being driven by narrative intoxication. The intent isn’t to ban imagination but to subordinate it, insisting that creativity without restraint turns conviction into self-flattery and certainty into spectacle. It’s a warning about how persuasion happens when a story feels truer than the facts that should police it.