Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Willis

Willis is doing more than cataloging human variation; he is drawing a moral map and labeling it “science.” In this blunt sentence, the 17th-century physician folds reproduction, class virtue, and gender policing into a single theory of mental capacity. “Ingenuity or wit” reads like an early-modern proxy for what we’d now call intelligence, but Willis frames it as fragile stock: something you can dilute through the wrong parents, the wrong timing, the wrong habits.

The intent is diagnostic and disciplinary. By tying a child’s cognitive “want” to aged parents, adolescents, “drunkards,” and “soft or effeminate men,” Willis converts social anxieties into bodily causation. The subtext is unmistakable: weakness is contagious, heredity is judgment, and masculinity is an intellectual prerequisite. “Soft” and “effeminate” aren’t clinical descriptors; they’re cultural verdicts. He’s reinforcing a hierarchy where self-control, sobriety, and normative manhood become not just virtues but biological advantages.

Context matters: Willis helped found neurology in a period when medicine still leaned heavily on humoral theory, “temperaments,” and the idea that moral behavior shaped the body. This is proto-eugenic thinking before the vocabulary existed, a worldview that naturalizes prejudice by routing it through the womb. The line works rhetorically because it masquerades as impartial observation while quietly legislating who counts as fully rational. It’s a reminder that early science often didn’t merely describe society’s values; it engineered them into “facts.”