Life & Wisdom Quote by Augustus Hare

Hare slips a quiet blade into moral certainty: most people, he argues, aren’t steady heroes or consistent villains because they’re not primarily guided by “principle” at all. They’re guided by impulse - mood, appetite, fear, vanity, fatigue, the social weather of a room. It’s a demotion of character as Victorian culture liked to flatter it: less granite, more sand. The line works because it isn’t an uplifting humanist shrug or a misanthropic sneer. It’s a recalibration. If action is largely impulsive, then our moral judgments are often overconfident readings of underexamined moments.

The subtext is aimed at two popular fantasies at once: the fantasy of the pure-hearted person who will reliably do the right thing, and the fantasy of the irredeemable scoundrel whose every move confirms our condemnation. Hare’s “neither so good nor so bad” is a warning against narrative thinking - the habit of turning people into stable types so the world feels legible. Impulse is messier and, importantly, situational. It suggests that context is a co-author of behavior, which makes moral accounting harder but also more honest.

As a late-19th-century writer steeped in observation and biography, Hare is also defending a certain charitable realism: judge less from a single act, praise less from a single gesture, and design your expectations around human inconsistency. The consequence isn’t moral relativism; it’s moral humility with better predictive power.