Daily Inspiration Quote by Anthony Collins

Equality, Collins suggests, isn’t something you can simply vote into existence. The line cuts against a comforting fiction: that if we just make our desires symmetrical enough - if we “render things equal to the will” - reality will cooperate. Collins is arguing for a harder standard: things are only equal when they are equal in themselves, not when they’ve been rhetorically flattened to fit a preference.

The phrasing is telling. “Render” implies manufacture, a kind of cosmetic leveling that can be imposed by language, law, or sheer insistence. “To the will” flags the psychological motive: we don’t merely misjudge; we bend judgment toward what we want to be true. Collins, writing in early Enlightenment England, is pushing back on a world where authority and tradition often dressed up as natural order, and where religious and political claims routinely asked to be accepted because they were useful, stabilizing, or pious. His broader deist, rationalist posture prized clear reasoning over inherited dogma; this sentence is a miniature manifesto for intellectual honesty.

The subtext is also an early warning about category errors: treating different things as “equal” for convenience, then pretending the equivalence is intrinsic. That applies to theology (declaring mysteries “the same” as truths), politics (equating legitimacy with power), and everyday cognition (confusing fairness with sameness). Collins isn’t rejecting equality as a moral project; he’s insisting that moral aims can’t replace accurate description. If you start by forcing equivalence, you end up defending your will, not the world.