Wisdom Quote by William Drummond

Drummond slips a whole worldview into a tidy piece of self-surveillance. "I study myself" isn’t a self-help mantra; it’s a Renaissance-era power move, treating the self as both laboratory and scripture. The phrasing matters: "more than any other subject" turns inwardness into discipline, not indulgence. He’s claiming that the most consequential knowledge project isn’t astronomy or theology or court politics, but the messy, private machinery of his own mind and body.

The hinge is the doublet: "my metaphysic, and my physic". Metaphysics is the big-game hunt for first principles; physic (in the older sense of medicine) is the practical craft of keeping a body functioning. Drummond welds them together. The subtext is that understanding who you are isn’t just philosophical speculation; it’s a survival tactic. In a culture where religion, social rank, and emerging science competed to define reality, he locates authority in introspection. The self becomes the one text you can’t outsource to priests, professors, or princes.

There’s also a sly humility baked in. He doesn’t say he understands himself, only that he studies himself. That verb leaves room for failure, revision, relapse. It’s a portrait of a writer-intellectual building an ethics and a therapy out of attention: if the world is unstable, you start by auditing your own motives, appetites, and contradictions. In that sense, it reads startlingly modern: the inner life as both cosmology and clinic.