“The measure of heaven itself is but the measure of our present appetites and concoctions”

“The measure of heaven itself is but the measure of our present appetites and concoctions” is a maxim about the bodily limits of thought. It makes the heavens no exception to human perspective: what people take as the measure of ultimate reality is conditioned by the appetites and humours through which they perceive it.

Context and Argument

The narrator introduces the saying while praising the Pythagoreans for their practice of getting out of the body in order to think well. He immediately qualifies that ideal: no one thinks rightly while confined within the body, because congenial humours blind judgment and bodily constitution draws people aside in different directions. The bishop and the narrator have each been diverted, though by opposing conditions—one by a fibre that is too lax, the other by one too tense.

The maxim follows as the culmination of this argument. Reason, the narrator says, is half Sense; the supposed scale of heaven is therefore not independent of embodied perception but limited by present appetite and bodily concoction. The claim does not merely expose individual bias. It makes physical condition part of the instrument by which a person judges, so that abstract reasoning cannot simply be separated from the body that sustains it.

Meaning and Narrative Use

The phrase compresses a large cosmological claim into a deliberately material vocabulary. “Heaven” suggests the highest possible standard, while “appetites and concoctions” brings that standard down to immediate desire and the body’s humoral processes. The contrast gives the sentence its force: even what seems universal may reflect the contingent constitution of the person who measures it.

The passage also puts the maxim into a comic exchange. After the narrator asks which of the two disputants is more in the wrong, a woman answers that he is, for disturbing a whole family so early. The lofty discussion of reason, bodily humours, and heaven thus meets an ordinary judgment grounded in the disruption at hand. The contrast enacts the maxim’s point: judgment takes its measure from the position and circumstances of the person making it.