Daily Inspiration Quote by Ethan A. Hitchcock

An old-fashioned scolding, yes, but also a soldier’s field manual for the mind. Hitchcock isn’t merely praising honesty; he’s warning about a specific hazard: once you detach from "truth and nature", you don’t just make a mistake, you become vulnerable to a kind of intellectual stampede. The key phrase is "hold themselves absolutely" - a demand for discipline, not casual sincerity. He’s talking about posture under pressure, the way an officer must keep orientation when noise, rumor, and adrenaline try to rewrite the map.

The rhetoric leans on absolutes ("immovable foundation", "alone") because the enemy he’s naming is drift: "misapprehensions" that start small, then metastasize into "mere dreams and fictions". That pairing is telling. "Dreams" are private and seductive; "fictions" are social and contagious. Hitchcock is describing self-deception and group delusion as adjacent threats, the kind that can turn strategy into fantasy and moral certainty into error.

Context matters: Hitchcock lived through a 19th-century America saturated with revivalism, utopian experiments, and an explosion of pamphlet argument - a culture where conviction often substituted for verification. As a military man (and later a thinker drawn to metaphysical questions), he’s trying to erect a guardrail: you can explore ideas, but you anchor yourself in what resists wishful thinking - evidence, observation, the stubborn grain of the real.

The subtext is almost modern: reality isn’t just out there; it’s something you can be "carried away" from. And once you are, you won’t feel lost. You’ll feel inspired.