Life & Wisdom Quote by Francis W. Newman

Newman cuts against the Victorian urge to sanitize human nature without sliding into a cheap, grim view of it. His core move is grammatical: he defines the "active part of man" not as reason, conscience, or aspiration, but as instincts - plural, uneven, and inescapable. That choice demotes the era's favorite self-flattery (we are mainly rational, mainly improving) and replaces it with a psychology that feels startlingly modern: behavior is driven by forces that vary in tempo and temperature, "gentle and continuous" as well as "violent and short."

The subtext is tactical tolerance. By insisting that instincts can be "baser" and still "necessary", Newman refuses the easy moral bookkeeping of his time, where "higher" faculties were supposed to conquer "lower" ones. He doesn't romanticize the animal; he normalizes it. "Necessary" does heavy lifting here, implying that even the impulses we condemn have functions: survival, self-defense, ambition, desire, the protective aggression that keeps a body and a society intact. It's an argument for moral realism over moral theater.

Context matters: a 19th-century writer watching faith, science, and social order renegotiate their boundaries. Before Freud made the unconscious fashionable and before Darwin fully rewired public talk about instinct, Newman is already sketching a map of human motivation that makes room for contradiction. The line reads like a quiet rebuke to reformers and preachers alike: you can discipline instincts, but you can't govern as if they don't exist.