Wit and judgment

Wit and judgment are treated as paired faculties that should illuminate and correct one another, not as mutually exclusive gifts. The narrator builds that claim through comic analogy, mock scholarship, and a challenge to the authority of solemn opinion: the very effort to separate the faculties, he argues, mistakes a loud and dignified assertion for a demonstrated truth.

The Disputed Relationship

The debate opens with Agalastes conceding that the book may contain wit, while denying that it contains any judgment. Triptolemus and Phutatorius join him, presenting the two faculties as operations so different that they cannot go together. The narrator counters by turning their contrast into a deliberately bodily joke: if wit and judgment are as separate as farting and hiccuping, the comparison proves little beyond the fact that they are distinct. Difference does not establish incompatibility.

The narrator is careful to distinguish illustration from proof. Didius, cast as a great church lawyer, invokes a code on farting and exposing fallacies to maintain that an illustration is no argument. The narrator grants the formal point rather than pretending that his joke settles the case. Its purpose, he says, is to clear the understanding of motes that might obstruct the argument to come. The comic detour thus performs the very service he claims for wit: it loosens a reader’s grip on an inherited formulation so judgment can examine it afresh.

Faculties in Their Proper Measure

The narrator extends the argument from individuals to peoples and climates. On a warmer, more luxuriant island, where ambition, pride, envy, lust, and other passions demand governance, the heights of wit and depths of judgment are said to be proportioned to the scale of human necessities. Their supply is not presented as uniform: as the air changes between hot and cold, wet and dry, intellectual life fluctuates too. For close to half a century, wit or judgment may seem scarce; then the sluices break open, and the country excels in writing, fighting, and other ventures.

These historical variations lead to a theological qualification. Wit and judgment are figured as two lights dispensed in exact weight and measure by infinite wisdom, sufficient to guide people through their obscurity. The narrator then reveals that his preceding prayer for an abundant outpouring of intellectual gifts was also a calculated preface: a flattering overture meant to quiet and engage his readers. His account therefore refuses to present intellectual abundance as something that can simply be summoned by wishing for it. The faculties are gifts, unevenly visible across time, and even a prayer for them can be folded into the work of persuasion.

The Chair as a Model of the Mind

To make the relation tangible, the narrator points to the two knobs on the back of the chair on which he is sitting. Wit and judgment are like these ornaments: they crown the structure and are fitted to answer one another. Removing either knob produces a ridiculous asymmetry, likened to a sow with one ear. The absent ornament is made conspicuous by the one left behind; a single faculty cannot compensate for the other but instead calls attention to its lack.

The chair analogy sharpens the argument from complementarity into a claim about use. A person might even prefer a chair with neither knob to one with only one, because the isolated ornament serves no purpose except to advertise what is missing. Likewise, neither wit nor judgment alone constitutes an adequate intellectual whole. The analogy does not prove that every instance of cleverness is wise, or that good judgment is always witty. It shows why the simple opposition between them is an impoverished way of thinking: each is most intelligible as part of a fitting pair.

Locke, Authority, and Reputation

The narrator traces the opposing doctrine to a supposed error by Locke. Despite his reputation for seeing through false sounds, Locke is said to have accepted a deep, solemn, and widely repeated accusation against wits without examining the facts. Great wigs, grave faces, and the force of a general cry helped make the claim persuasive; instead of testing it coolly, the philosopher took it for granted and joined in.

That mistake, the narrator says, became the Magna Charta of stupidity. Its authority rests less on proof than on the prestige of the person associated with it and the outward signs of gravity that accompany it. The mockery is not directed indiscriminately at wigs or long beards: those are excused unless deliberately cultivated to sustain an imposture. The target is the conversion of appearance and solemn consensus into intellectual credentials.

This dispute also turns on reputation. Because wit and judgment are prized, difficult to obtain, and consequential for public standing, people wish to possess both—or at least to be thought masters of one or the other. The narrator’s comic, self-conscious preface asks readers to distrust that performance of wisdom without simply taking his own side on trust. Its central distinction remains practical: wit can clear the way and enliven thought, but judgment must assess what the wit has actually established; neither faculty reaches its proper purpose by pretending the other is dispensable.