Life & Wisdom Quote by William Godwin

Godwin is doing something sly: he’s flattering humanity while quietly drafting a political brief. Calling reason our “prerogative” doesn’t just praise the mind; it smuggles in a standard by which every institution can be tried and, if necessary, convicted. If reason is the trait that “eminently distinguished” us, then any social order that runs on superstition, inherited rank, or coerced obedience isn’t merely unjust; it’s unnatural in the only sense that matters to an Enlightenment radical.

The phrasing has courtroom confidence. “Prerogatives” and “consists” give the sentence an air of settled fact, as if the argument has already been won and we’re just recording the verdict. That calmness is strategic. Godwin, writing in the long shadow of the French Revolution and Britain’s anxious backlash against radical ideas, needed a moral foundation sturdier than passion. Reason becomes both shield and weapon: a way to defend reform against charges of chaos, and a way to attack monarchy, church authority, and punitive law as systems that treat adults like livestock.

The subtext is an anthropology of politics. If people are reasoning creatures, they’re educable, improvable, and capable of self-government. That implies a duty to widen access to knowledge and a suspicion of any power that depends on keeping citizens credulous. Godwin isn’t just celebrating rationality; he’s insisting that to deny people the conditions to use it is to deny their humanity.