Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Alexander

Alexander’s tone here is doing a very particular kind of philosophical housekeeping: he pauses mid-argument to “prevent misunderstanding,” then quietly smuggles in a claim about value. The sentence is less about “contemplated objects” than about safeguarding the legitimacy of contemplation itself in a culture (and an academic climate) prone to treating pleasure as either a moral suspect or a mere byproduct.

The doubled language - “contemplated objects” versus “objects of contemplation” - signals a distinction with stakes. Alexander wants to ensure that when we talk about an object as suitable for contemplation (a painting, a theorem, a metaphysical category), we don’t reduce the experience to a cold, detached inspection. Contemplation isn’t just an instrument for knowing; it carries its own reward. That small “of course” is the rhetorical tell: he’s asserting something he expects the attentive reader to grant, while also nudging skeptics to accept it as obvious.

Context matters. Alexander, a major figure in British idealist and emergent realist debates, is writing in an era fascinated by psychology, evolution, and the mechanization of modern life. Against the pull toward utility and bare function, he positions contemplation as intrinsically satisfying - not because it’s escapist, but because the mind’s attentive relation to the world is itself a mode of flourishing. The subtext is a defense of “higher” enjoyment that refuses to apologize for being pleasurable, and refuses to concede that pleasure must be crude to be real.