"I consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher sentiments"
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Nothing is “low” here in the class sense. Wills is drawing a moral boundary that dodges rank, income, and even education-as-status, then plants the flag in character: ignorance, vice, meanness. The line works because it sounds like a democrat’s refusal to sneer at the poor while still reserving the right to judge. It’s an ethical reframe disguised as magnanimity.
As a mid-19th-century scientist, Wills is speaking from an era drunk on classification: of species, of races, of temperaments, of “faculties.” His phrasing borrows from that mental furniture. “Animal propensities” versus “higher sentiments” echoes the Victorian habit of mapping the human psyche like a hierarchy of organs - the animal below, the refined above. That pseudo-anatomy of virtue is doing rhetorical labor: it converts moral failure into something like a natural imbalance, a dominance of baser drives. It’s a warning, but also an explanation that flatters the speaker’s cohort as the people who have supposedly mastered themselves.
The subtext is paternal and policing. By defining lowness as what happens when the “animal” wins, he implies that social order depends on cultivating the “higher” - restraint, sympathy, conscience. It’s sympathy with teeth: compassion for people regardless of station, paired with a readiness to label certain behaviors as beneath civilized life. In a century anxious about urban poverty, crime, and “degeneration,” that distinction lets a humane self-image coexist with moral surveillance.
As a mid-19th-century scientist, Wills is speaking from an era drunk on classification: of species, of races, of temperaments, of “faculties.” His phrasing borrows from that mental furniture. “Animal propensities” versus “higher sentiments” echoes the Victorian habit of mapping the human psyche like a hierarchy of organs - the animal below, the refined above. That pseudo-anatomy of virtue is doing rhetorical labor: it converts moral failure into something like a natural imbalance, a dominance of baser drives. It’s a warning, but also an explanation that flatters the speaker’s cohort as the people who have supposedly mastered themselves.
The subtext is paternal and policing. By defining lowness as what happens when the “animal” wins, he implies that social order depends on cultivating the “higher” - restraint, sympathy, conscience. It’s sympathy with teeth: compassion for people regardless of station, paired with a readiness to label certain behaviors as beneath civilized life. In a century anxious about urban poverty, crime, and “degeneration,” that distinction lets a humane self-image coexist with moral surveillance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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