Faith & Spirit Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft

Purpose, for Wollstonecraft, is less a lifestyle tip than a survival technology. “Tranquilizing” is a jolting verb: it implies the mind is not naturally calm, that it thrashes under pressure and needs something firm enough to steady it. In the late 18th century, that pressure wasn’t abstract. It was economic precarity, social constraint, and the relentless gendered assumption that women’s thoughts should be ornamental rather than directed. A “steady purpose” becomes a form of resistance: not loud rebellion, but the disciplined insistence that one’s inner life can be organized around chosen aims rather than imposed roles.

The line’s power comes from its carefully fused moral and visual rhetoric. “A point” is geometry and navigation; it’s the fixed star that stops you from drifting. Then she makes the soul an intellect with an “eye,” refusing the period’s neat separation of reason (male-coded) and feeling (female-coded). The subtext is pointed: give a person nothing to aim at and you don’t get innocence, you get agitation, dependency, and susceptibility to manipulation. Give them a purpose and you get composure, because attention has somewhere to go.

Wollstonecraft is also quietly revising the era’s idea of tranquility. This isn’t serenity as passivity or obedience; it’s calm as focus, the kind produced by agency. The sentence reads like self-command, but it’s really a political argument in miniature: a society that denies people meaningful purposes manufactures anxious minds, then blames them for the symptoms.