Prudence

Prudence is a personified virtue who serves as the Duke of Newcastle’s friend, teacher, and advocate. In the dispute with Fortune, she tries to turn accusation into reconciliation: her preference for peace and measured judgment distinguishes her from the more blunt Honesty, while her advice also shapes the Duchess’s response to the disorder of the Blazing-World.

Identity and Role

The narrative gives Prudence a place in the Duke’s moral education and adult conduct. Honesty says that she sent him to Prudence for instruction in wisdom and in the rules of temperance, patience, and justice. Prudence is therefore not merely a courtroom ally: she represents disciplined judgment, placed alongside the other virtues and qualities that, in Honesty’s account, prepare the Duke for honourable action.

Prudence and Honesty travel with the Duchess and the Empress into the Blazing-World to take part in the effort to settle the Duke’s longstanding quarrel with Fortune. They are described as somewhat like spirits because they are immaterial, although their actions are corporeal. This qualification makes Prudence both an allegorical figure and an active participant in the narrative’s embodied, imagined world.

The Attempt to Reconcile the Duke and Fortune

The Duke chooses Prudence and Honesty to plead his cause. Fortune, after much persuasion, chooses Folly and Rashness as her advocates; the parties eventually agree that Truth should judge. Prudence speaks first on the Duke’s behalf, explicitly disavowing any claim to divinity and presenting herself as a humble supplicant. Her object, she says, is not to make further wounds but to heal those already made, and she proposes an agreement between Fortune and the Duke as an offering of peace.

Her speech sets the terms of her character. Instead of attempting to defeat Fortune through denunciation, Prudence asks for an end to the conflict. The appeal is also strategic: it seeks a settlement before the hearing becomes another contest of pride. But the intervention does not control the room. Honesty interrupts Prudence as she goes forward, insisting that the case be stated plainly rather than rhetorically or flatteringly. Prudence’s moderation thus meets a sharper, less restrained form of truth-telling even within her own side.

The Duke, Honesty, and Fortune

Honesty’s account complements Prudence’s peace-making appeal by explaining the Duke’s history and conduct. She describes herself as his foster-mother, says she formed his friendship with Gratitude, Charity, and Generosity, and recounts sending him to Prudence for instruction. The Duke’s later conduct, in this telling, reflects both women’s counsel: Honesty commanded him not to flatter Fortune, while Prudence advised him not to despise her favours. He followed both, remaining respectful without surrendering his honour, honesty, or conscience.

The reconciliation attempt fails. Fortune considers Honesty’s speech rude and departs without waiting for Truth’s judgment, leaving the Empress and Duchess distressed. Honesty then rebukes the Duchess for wanting Fortune’s favour, while the Empress reproaches Honesty for lacking Prudence’s discretion. Prudence smiles at the comparison. The moment makes her virtue relational: sound judgment does not replace honesty, but is needed to guide it when candour becomes socially damaging or indiscreet. The spirits promise to try again to reconcile Fortune and the Duke, but no settlement is achieved in this episode.

Judgment, Matter, and Knowledge

Prudence’s name also resonates with the philosophical discussions conducted by the Empress. In addressing the Ape-men, the Empress rejects their competing attempts to identify nature’s first ingredients through chemical experiments. She argues that nature is one infinite, self-moving body, divided into restless parts whose compositions and divisions produce continual change; particular substances such as fire cannot disclose a universal principle. The passage places judgment in rational and sensitive perception rather than in a single experimental procedure.

In the conversations with the Immaterial Spirits, the same concern with the limits of claims about knowledge appears in a different form. The Spirits say that incorporeal beings receive motion through corporeal vehicles, that created spirits do not possess universal knowledge, and that natural lives, forms, and matter cannot be separated into independent worlds. These arguments are not spoken by Prudence herself, but they give a philosophical context to the virtue she embodies: careful judgment must attend to the conditions and limits of what can be known, rather than confusing a partial account with complete truth.

Counsel on Government

After the failed hearing, the Duchess returns to her own world, but the Empress asks her for advice before she leaves. The Empress fears that disputes among the Bear-men, Fish-men, Fly-men, Ape-men, Worm-men, Satyrs, and Spider-men will grow into rebellion and ruin the government. The Duchess recommends restoring the earlier order: one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language. She also advises dissolving the learned societies, arguing that intellectual rivalry and attachment to opinions can turn school disputes into faction and, ultimately, civil conflict.

Prudence is not named as the author of this political advice; it belongs to the Duchess. Yet the episode’s contrast between Prudence’s plea for peace and the destructive consequences of unchecked contention clarifies the wider moral and political stakes attached to her character. Her counsel in the hearing seeks to end a personal enmity without humiliating either side, while her earlier role in the Duke’s education represents the restraint needed to keep principle from hardening into needless conflict.