"Meditation is the soul's perspective glass"
About this Quote
Meditation, for Feltham, is not incense and serenity; it is optics. Calling it the soul's perspective glass yanks the practice out of the purely devotional and into the practical world of instruments, calibration, and deliberate looking. A "perspective glass" in Feltham's 17th-century milieu evokes the early modern fascination with lenses: telescopes and optical devices that promised new truth by correcting human sight. The metaphor flatters meditation as a technology of inner perception, implying that the soul already contains meaning but lacks the right apparatus to see it clearly.
The intent is quietly corrective. Feltham was a moral essayist writing in an age where distraction had its own name (vanity) and attention was treated as a form of character. By framing meditation as a lens, he suggests our default view is distorted by proximity: ego, appetite, and urgency make everything look larger than it is. Meditation does not invent virtue; it re-scales the world, shrinking irritations, enlarging consequences, restoring proportion. That is subtext with bite: the problem isn't ignorance, it's mismeasurement.
It also smuggles in a Protestant-adjacent pragmatism. A tool is for use, not for display. Feltham isn't selling mysticism; he's selling mental discipline as moral hygiene. The line works because it compresses an entire ethical program into a single image: if your life feels out of focus, don't curse the world. Adjust the lens.
The intent is quietly corrective. Feltham was a moral essayist writing in an age where distraction had its own name (vanity) and attention was treated as a form of character. By framing meditation as a lens, he suggests our default view is distorted by proximity: ego, appetite, and urgency make everything look larger than it is. Meditation does not invent virtue; it re-scales the world, shrinking irritations, enlarging consequences, restoring proportion. That is subtext with bite: the problem isn't ignorance, it's mismeasurement.
It also smuggles in a Protestant-adjacent pragmatism. A tool is for use, not for display. Feltham isn't selling mysticism; he's selling mental discipline as moral hygiene. The line works because it compresses an entire ethical program into a single image: if your life feels out of focus, don't curse the world. Adjust the lens.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meditation |
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