Daily Inspiration Quote by Anthony Collins

Collins is quietly detonating the cozy idea that moral choice is a special, free-floating power. By pairing “willing or preferring” with “judging,” he drags ethics into the same mental machinery as belief. You don’t choose the good the way a sovereign picks a menu item; you incline toward it the way you assent to what seems true. The line’s force comes from its symmetry: good/evil map onto will the way truth/falsehood map onto intellect. That isn’t poetic balance for its own sake; it’s an argument disguised as grammar.

The intent is polemical. Collins, a leading English freethinker, is writing in an early Enlightenment moment when moral responsibility was being used to police heterodoxy, and “free will” often served as theology’s escape hatch. If willing tracks perceived good as reliably as judging tracks perceived truth, then condemning someone for choosing “wrong” starts to look like condemning them for believing “wrong.” The subtext is a challenge to punitive moralism: if our preferences follow what appears good to us, blame should shift from metaphysical guilt to the conditions that shape appearances - education, habit, social pressure, self-interest.

Context matters here. In a culture battling over determinism, divine foreknowledge, and the authority of the church, Collins is arguing for a naturalized psychology: motives have causes, and the will is not exempt. He’s not abolishing ethics; he’s relocating it. Moral improvement becomes less about issuing commandments and more about changing minds - because, on his view, the will follows the verdict.