Daily Inspiration Quote by Irving Babbitt

Babbitt lands his point with a politely sharpened knife: if you go looking in Aristotle for uplift and verbal fireworks, you will be disappointed, and that disappointment is the lesson. “Excellence of substance” is his loaded phrase. He’s insisting that Aristotle’s authority doesn’t come from rhetorical grandeur, spiritual fervor, or the kind of elevated diction that signals cultural prestige. It comes from the hard, unglamorous work of definition, classification, and argument. In other words: the intellect, not the incense.

The sting is in the clause “perilously near jargon.” Babbitt is not merely calling Aristotle dry. He’s warning that serious thought can acquire the texture of a professional dialect, language that feels less like literature and more like a toolkit. That “perilously” matters: jargon is both a symptom of precision and a failure of communication, the moment when exact terms stop clarifying and start fencing people out. Babbitt’s ambivalence captures a modern anxiety before it became a cliche: that expertise can curdle into obscurity, and that obscurity can masquerade as depth.

Contextually, this fits Babbitt’s broader fight with the romantic habit of equating greatness with “the grand style” - the idea that moral or intellectual authority must arrive dressed in thunder. He’s re-centering classical sobriety against modern taste for glamour. The subtext is a rebuke to readers who want philosophy to feel like literature: if you demand lyrical altitude, you’ll miss what Aristotle is doing on the ground, where ideas either hold up or they don’t.