Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Astell’s line is a small theological grenade lobbed into a culture that treated hierarchy as common sense. By insisting that “none of God’s creatures” are “in their own nature contemptible,” she doesn’t merely defend insects; she attacks the human habit of calling some lives disposable and then baptizing that contempt as “natural.” The phrasing matters: “absolutely consider’d” sounds like a philosopher’s caveat, a reminder that our judgments are usually relative, social, and self-serving. Strip away status, utility to us, and fashion, and the creature remains part of a divine economy that exceeds human taste.

The fly and “poorest insect” work as tactical examples. They’re deliberately low on the sympathy ladder, the kind of life you swat without thinking. If even that life has “Use and Vertue,” then contempt becomes not only rude but intellectually lazy: a failure of perception. Astell is smuggling in an ethics of attention. Look longer; you’ll find purpose where you assumed none. That’s the moral muscle behind the sentence.

Context sharpens the edge. Astell wrote in an England where women, the poor, and the socially “mean” were routinely framed as lesser by nature. Her broader feminist project argued that women’s supposed inferiority was manufactured by education and custom, not ordained. Here, natural theology becomes a back door into social critique: if God doesn’t create contemptible beings, then a society that treats certain people as contemptible is accusing creation itself of error.