Daily Inspiration Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler’s phrasing lands like a scholastic syllogism dressed up as a bedroom observation: sex is not merely pleasure or companionship but an act with built-in teleology. “One of the aims” quietly concedes plurality, yet it also reasserts hierarchy. Procreation is named first and defined with meticulous redundancy (“creation by reproduction”), as if he’s shoring up a contested premise. The subtext is unmistakably mid-century: modernity is loosening the link between sex and childbearing, and Adler is trying to stitch it back together with philosophical thread.

The kicker is his metaphysical flourish: the child as “an image of itself, of the union.” That’s a Thomistic move, less biology than ontology. He’s not arguing that a baby resembles its parents in the genetic sense; he’s claiming that the couple’s unity becomes legible, almost incarnate, in a third person. The rhetoric turns reproduction into representation: the union produces a symbol of the union. It’s a seductive reframing because it sanctifies the messy, contingent facts of family life into a coherent story about meaning.

Context matters: Adler was a leading popularizer of classical philosophy and natural-law moral reasoning, a thinker comfortable treating human acts as purposive rather than purely expressive. In an era moving toward contraception, sexual liberation, and the idea of sex as self-actualization, this line reads as a counter-program: not prudish exactly, but insistent that intimacy has public, generational consequences. The charm and the provocation are the same: he makes procreation sound less like obligation and more like a philosophical completion of the couple’s claim to be “one.”