Life & Mortality Quote by James Thomson

A mill is supposed to turn grain into flour - nourishment, purpose, payoff. Thomson’s image keeps the machinery but strips away the comfort. The world “rolls round forever,” not as a grand clockwork of Providence but as an industrial churn that “grinds out” everything indiscriminately: “death and life and good and ill.” The verb choice matters. “Grinds” is tactile, violent, unromantic; it suggests friction, noise, and waste. Nothing here is curated for human meaning. It’s processed.

The line’s emotional force comes from how it refuses the usual bargain of 18th-century moral poetry, where suffering is redeemed by design. Thomson stages the universe as a system without management: “no purpose, heart or mind or will.” That four-part negation is a rhetorical pile-on, like someone slamming successive doors. Purpose (teleology), heart (sentiment), mind (reason), will (agency) - he denies every route by which we typically smuggle in consolation.

As a musician, Thomson writes with an ear for cadence and repetition: “round,” “forever,” “mill” create a circular, hypnotic rhythm that mimics the turning wheel. The quote reads like a refrain you can’t stop hearing, which is the point: despair here isn’t a sudden revelation; it’s an ongoing soundtrack.

Contextually, this sits in a period when Enlightenment confidence and religious certainty were both under pressure. The subtext is almost modern: if the cosmos is indifferent, then meaning isn’t discovered, it’s made - and that’s a harsher freedom than it first appears.