"There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience"
About this Quote
Gerould isn’t offering comfort; she’s stripping away an excuse. “No morality by instinct” is a direct shot at the sentimental idea that goodness bubbles up naturally if you just “follow your heart.” In her frame, instinct is raw equipment - useful for survival, disastrous as an ethical compass. The line’s severity is the point: it refuses the easy romance of innate virtue and replaces it with an unglamorous demand for mental discipline.
The second sentence expands the indictment from individuals to society. “No social salvation” reads like a rebuke to reform movements that rely on vibes, purity, or charismatic outrage. Salvation is a loaded word, and she wields it ironically: people want collective redemption without the tedious work of thinking, arguing, revising premises. Gerould insists that progress isn’t a mood; it’s a method.
The hinge phrase is “taking thought,” which isn’t mere contemplation but the willingness to interrogate one’s own motives and inherited beliefs. Then she gets even sharper: “mastery of logic” and its “application…to human experience.” Logic here isn’t math-class formalism; it’s a civic technology, a way to test claims against reality, to catch self-serving rationalizations before they become policy. The subtext is that moral instincts are easily hijacked - by tribal loyalty, panic, propaganda, even fashionable compassion. Her antidote is rigorous thinking trained on lived consequences.
Contextually, a writer coming of age in the early 20th century watched mass persuasion scale up (advertising, war rhetoric, political spectacle). This quote reads like an early warning: without cultivated reasoning, “morality” becomes another instinctive stampede, and social “salvation” becomes a slogan.
The second sentence expands the indictment from individuals to society. “No social salvation” reads like a rebuke to reform movements that rely on vibes, purity, or charismatic outrage. Salvation is a loaded word, and she wields it ironically: people want collective redemption without the tedious work of thinking, arguing, revising premises. Gerould insists that progress isn’t a mood; it’s a method.
The hinge phrase is “taking thought,” which isn’t mere contemplation but the willingness to interrogate one’s own motives and inherited beliefs. Then she gets even sharper: “mastery of logic” and its “application…to human experience.” Logic here isn’t math-class formalism; it’s a civic technology, a way to test claims against reality, to catch self-serving rationalizations before they become policy. The subtext is that moral instincts are easily hijacked - by tribal loyalty, panic, propaganda, even fashionable compassion. Her antidote is rigorous thinking trained on lived consequences.
Contextually, a writer coming of age in the early 20th century watched mass persuasion scale up (advertising, war rhetoric, political spectacle). This quote reads like an early warning: without cultivated reasoning, “morality” becomes another instinctive stampede, and social “salvation” becomes a slogan.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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