Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Love Peacock

Peacock’s line lands like a smug toast from the head of the table: so “obvious” it dares you to disagree, so totalizing (“solely and exclusively”) it turns certainty into a punchline. As a satirist, he’s not offering a worldview; he’s ventriloquizing one. The sentence mimics the confident cadence of natural theology and Enlightenment-era common sense, the kind of armchair logic that treats human convenience as proof of cosmic design. By overplaying the absolutism, Peacock exposes how easily “common sense” becomes a moral alibi.

The intent is to caricature a particular English mindset in the early 19th century: empirically curious but ethically complacent, surrounded by expanding industry and empire, eager to narrate dominion as destiny. “Created” does heavy ideological lifting here. It smuggles in a providential framework that makes exploitation feel like obedience, not choice. If animals are manufactured for us, then slaughter, labor, and experimentation aren’t ethical questions; they’re just logistics.

The subtext is less about animals than about humans: the quote mocks our need to place ourselves at the center of every story, then congratulate ourselves for the symmetry. Peacock’s irony also targets the rhetoric of obviousness itself, a classic tool of power. Declare something self-evident and you don’t have to argue it; you only have to shame dissent as irrational. Read that way, the line anticipates modern debates about food systems and animal rights: not because Peacock is campaigning for compassion, but because he’s diagnosing the way grand justifications get built out of lazy certainties.