"How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism"
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Reason doesn’t arrive like a syllabus; it arrives like a spark. Bulwer-Lytton’s line flatters the reader into an uncomfortable confession: many of our “rational” lives begin not with slow discipline but with the seduction of style. The phrase “attracted to reason” is slyly romantic, treating logic as an object of desire rather than a duty. That’s the trick: he frames thinking as something we fall for, then quietly suggests we’re often wooed by rhetoric more than truth.
The engine here is “some dazzling aphorism.” An aphorism is compact, portable, repeatable - a mental meme before the internet. Bulwer-Lytton implies that a well-turned sentence can recruit us into the habits of inference: “to think, to draw conclusions,” almost as if reasoning is a chain reaction triggered by a single flare. Subtext: our intellectual awakenings are frequently aesthetic. We like the snap of a maxim, the feeling of instant clarity, the moral extracted “from the follies of life” as if experience were raw material waiting to be refined into wisdom.
As a nineteenth-century politician-novelist, Bulwer-Lytton knew public life ran on verbal electricity. In an era of speeches, salons, and serialized prose, a “dazzling” line could travel farther than an argument, shaping what counted as common sense. The intent isn’t to sneer at aphorisms; it’s to diagnose their power. We don’t merely learn ideas - we learn the pleasure of sounding right, and that pleasure is often the real entry point to reason.
The engine here is “some dazzling aphorism.” An aphorism is compact, portable, repeatable - a mental meme before the internet. Bulwer-Lytton implies that a well-turned sentence can recruit us into the habits of inference: “to think, to draw conclusions,” almost as if reasoning is a chain reaction triggered by a single flare. Subtext: our intellectual awakenings are frequently aesthetic. We like the snap of a maxim, the feeling of instant clarity, the moral extracted “from the follies of life” as if experience were raw material waiting to be refined into wisdom.
As a nineteenth-century politician-novelist, Bulwer-Lytton knew public life ran on verbal electricity. In an era of speeches, salons, and serialized prose, a “dazzling” line could travel farther than an argument, shaping what counted as common sense. The intent isn’t to sneer at aphorisms; it’s to diagnose their power. We don’t merely learn ideas - we learn the pleasure of sounding right, and that pleasure is often the real entry point to reason.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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