Justice & Law Quote by Richard Whately

Whately’s line is a neat little act of intellectual sabotage: it takes a supposedly objective science metaphor and flips it to indict the way we flatter ourselves about judgment. Optics, in reality, clarifies what’s near. Human perception does the opposite. The closest “objects” - our motives, our habits, our immediate loyalties - blur into a fog of rationalization, while distant events and strangers become crisp, easy to categorize, and safe to condemn.

The specific intent is corrective. Whately, a cleric and logician writing in an age newly drunk on “reason,” is warning that the mind is not a neutral instrument. It’s an advocate. We don’t misread life because we lack information; we misread it because proximity recruits our vanity and our interests. The friend’s small betrayal becomes “complicated.” Our own petty cruelty becomes “a bad day.” Meanwhile a public figure’s error is rendered in high-definition morality: guilty, hypocrite, case closed.

Subtext: humility isn’t a virtue here so much as a technology - a tool for better thinking. If the near field is where vision fails, then self-knowledge requires artificial distance: scrutiny, confession, argument, the discomfort of letting other people describe you. The line also carries a political edge. “Human transactions” gestures beyond private life to public affairs; citizens judge institutions and opponents with confident clarity while missing the distortions created by their own class, party, or church. It works because it makes the reader complicit: you feel the sting precisely where you’re least equipped to see it.