"He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars"
About this Quote
Blake swings a scalpel at the grandiose moral language that powerful people love to hide behind. "General Good" is his name for the fog machine: a big, glowing abstraction that makes cruelty look like virtue and turns coercion into "policy". The line is a warning about how easily benevolence becomes a costume. Scoundrels don it to justify harm ("for your own good"), hypocrites to launder reputations, flatterers to stay close to whoever controls the definition of virtue.
The counter-move is almost stubbornly practical: "Minute Particulars". Blake insists that real care lives at human scale, in attention so specific it risks inconvenience. Doing good means knowing who, what, where, and how; it means consequences you can point to, not principles you can recite. Subtext: if your goodness can’t survive contact with details - with names, bodies, time, money, and tradeoffs - it’s probably not goodness, it’s branding.
His last clause drags this ethical claim into aesthetics and knowledge. Art and science, he says, aren’t built from slogans; they’re built from disciplined particulars: pigment and line, observation and measurement, craft and method. That’s Blake the visionary refusing vague spirituality and vague rationalism alike. Written in an era of revolutions, empire, and industrial management, the quote reads like an anti-bureaucratic manifesto: beware moral abstractions that scale upward while responsibility trickles down. The world is changed, if at all, by the kind of attention that can’t be mass-produced.
The counter-move is almost stubbornly practical: "Minute Particulars". Blake insists that real care lives at human scale, in attention so specific it risks inconvenience. Doing good means knowing who, what, where, and how; it means consequences you can point to, not principles you can recite. Subtext: if your goodness can’t survive contact with details - with names, bodies, time, money, and tradeoffs - it’s probably not goodness, it’s branding.
His last clause drags this ethical claim into aesthetics and knowledge. Art and science, he says, aren’t built from slogans; they’re built from disciplined particulars: pigment and line, observation and measurement, craft and method. That’s Blake the visionary refusing vague spirituality and vague rationalism alike. Written in an era of revolutions, empire, and industrial management, the quote reads like an anti-bureaucratic manifesto: beware moral abstractions that scale upward while responsibility trickles down. The world is changed, if at all, by the kind of attention that can’t be mass-produced.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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