"To all the rest of his Absurdities, (for vice is always unreasonable,) he adds one more, who expects that Vertue from another which he won't practise himself"

Mary Astell exposes hypocrisy as a compounding fault: vice is already irrational, but it grows more absurd when the vicious person demands from others the very virtue they refuse to enact. Reason, for Astell, aligns with moral consistency. To abandon virtue is to abandon reason; to lecture others while persisting in one’s own failures offends both logic and justice. Such an expectation treats morality as a weapon for governing others rather than as a rule for governing oneself.

She is also diagnosing a social pattern, especially within the gendered norms of her time. Men frequently insisted on women’s chastity, constancy, and modesty while excusing their own libertinism, volatility, and pride. Astell’s irony is sharp: the more one indulges in vice, the less entitled one is to demand virtue. Moral authority cannot be borrowed from status or custom; it arises from self-command. The person who will not practice what he prescribes undermines the very standard he invokes.

There is a psychological insight here as well. Expecting virtue from others without self-application often masks self-love and self-deception. It is easier to police another’s conduct than to reform one’s own. But this asymmetry corrodes trust and communal life. A moral order sustained by example becomes a regime of surveillance and resentment when example is absent. The hypocrite’s commands are performative, not formative: they aim at control, not goodness.

Astell quietly proposes the remedy: begin with self-rule. Virtue is not a slogan but a habit; only those who practice it can credibly recommend it. Practice not only legitimizes counsel; it clarifies understanding. One does not truly know patience, temperance, or fidelity except by living them. Demanding what one has not learned to embody is therefore not only unjust; it is unintelligible.

Her sentence ultimately calls for integrity: a unity between reason, action, and expectation. To require from another what one refuses to do oneself is to confess both moral failure and intellectual incoherence. Virtue, to be authoritative, must be reciprocal, exemplified, and shared.