Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Blackmore

Blackmore reaches for the most persuasive piece of everyday technology in early modern life: the watch. Not the cathedral clock or the sundial, but the intimate object you carry, consult, and trust. That choice is the point. By anchoring “the invention of the mind” in something you literally “own,” he turns abstract arguments about design into a domestic certainty. You don’t need a philosopher’s training to grasp that a watch implies a watchmaker; your pocket already contains the evidence.

The syntax does quiet ideological work. “Though for a single motion ’tis designed” first concedes simplicity: even a device built to do one basic thing still demands intelligence. Then he escalates: “with greater thought… various springs, for various motions wrought.” The subtext is a trap for the skeptic. If you grant design for the simple mechanism, you’re nudged toward conceding an even stronger case for complex systems. Blackmore is constructing a ladder of inference from mundane craftsmanship to cosmic authorship.

Context matters: Blackmore is writing in the long shadow of the Scientific Revolution, when mechanism could feel like a threat to providence. He co-opts the mechanical imagination instead of fighting it. Springs and motions aren’t proofs against God; they’re his best metaphor. The poem’s intent is apologetic, but its method is modern: persuasion via a consumer object, a proto-argument from engineering. In a culture newly enchanted by instruments, Blackmore insists that wonder still points past the machine, not away from it.