Wit & Attitude Quote by Archibald Alexander

Nature gets the last laugh here, and Archibald Alexander is borrowing that laugh to make a stern theological point. The line turns “Nature” into a deliberate author, not a neutral backdrop. If she “makes a fool,” it isn’t an accident of biology or a random misfire of circumstance; it’s purposeful. That premise matters in a clergy context: Alexander is writing in an era when Protestant thinkers were wrestling with Enlightenment confidence in reason and the rising urge to treat the world as a machine. His sentence is a rebuke to the idea that human folly can be explained away as mere error in the system.

The subtext is moral, not scientific. “Fool” isn’t just someone who lacks information; it’s the Biblical fool, the person whose pride, vanity, or stubbornness makes them resistant to wisdom. By insisting nature “means it,” Alexander implies that folly functions as a kind of providential object lesson: arrogance produces consequences that are not glitches but disclosures. The world, in this framing, is arranged to expose the limits of self-importance.

The phrasing also weaponizes certainty. “Never” and “any” shut the door on ambiguity, and the punchy turn from “blunders” to “fool” shifts from mechanics to character. It’s memorable because it’s slightly unsettling: if foolishness is intended, then the fool isn’t merely unlucky. He’s being used. That’s Alexander’s quiet provocation - humility isn’t optional, it’s built into the grain of things.