Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Astell skewers self-certainty with a scalpel, not a hammer. “Every Body” sounds broad and almost genial, but it’s a trap: she’s pointing at a human reflex so common it passes for reason. The line turns on the phrase “so good an Opinion,” which reads like a compliment until you hear the sting. What we call “understanding” is often just vanity dressed up as judgment, and Astell knows that the most stubborn error isn’t ignorance - it’s confidence.

The subtext is social before it’s philosophical. Astell was writing in a culture that treated “good understanding” as a credential unevenly distributed by class and, especially, gender. Women were routinely told they lacked the rational equipment for serious thought, even as men congratulated themselves on being natural authorities. Her move is sly: instead of pleading for women’s capacity in abstract terms, she exposes the mechanism by which men (and everyone else) mistake self-regard for truth. If everyone thinks their own way is best, then “common sense” is less a shared standard than a popularity contest inside one skull.

The sentence also anticipates modern arguments about bias without sounding like a lab report. It’s a miniature theory of why debate fails: not because people lack arguments, but because they’re emotionally invested in their own cognitive prestige. Astell isn’t merely warning against arrogance; she’s indicting a whole social order built on the assumption that confidence equals competence.