Chapter XX: Book II: Of the Use of Things (2)

Pope's letter was forwarded to Racine by Ramsay, who accompanied it with a second letter of his own, in which he again dwelt on his friend's continuous and disinterested adherence to romanism. "I am assured that a princess who admired his works, wished, when she ruled over England, to induce him not to abandon, but to dissimulate his religion. She was desirous of procuring him considerable appointments, and promised that the customary oaths should be dispensed with. He refused these offers with immoveable firmness. Such a sacrifice was not the act of a sceptic or a deist."[803] Ramsay does not say that he received the anecdote from Pope, but he was writing in concert with him, and on his behalf, and there is a strong presumption that the poet had sanctioned the fable. To dispense with the customary oaths would have been a breach of the act of settlement, and the assertion of the power would have cost Anne her crown, and Pope his office. This immense and abortive sacrifice was to have been made in the interests of a man whom the queen had never seen, who was politically insignificant, and whose moderate wants she could have supplied from her private purse. The ludicrous invention, which could only pass current with a foreigner ignorant of the English constitution, was a magnified version of Lord Oxford's hollow talk. "He used often," said Pope, "to express his concern for my continuing incapable of a place, which I could not make myself capable of without giving a great deal of pain to my parents, such pain, indeed, as I would not have given to either of them for all the places he could have bestowed upon me."[804] Lord Oxford, who trusted chiefly to duplicity and petty artifices for obtaining support, was accustomed to amuse every one who came near him with hopes, and evade their fulfilment by paltry excuses. His cheap lamentation that Pope was disqualified for an office is a sad downfall from the magnanimous offer of the Queen to provide him with a place in defiance of law, and at the risk of her throne. If the anecdote had been true, Ramsay's inference that Pope was an orthodox romanist would have been wrong. His reason for not "making himself capable of a place" was the pain his abjuration of romanism would have given his parents. He did not pretend to plead conscience.

The system of philosophy set forth in the poem is now to be considered. Few persons could have been less qualified than Bolingbroke and Pope to write on natural religion. The desultory superficial investigations of Bolingbroke were under the dominion of his passions, and Pope had barely thought upon the subject at all. They both took for their motto a sentence from Foster, a dissenting minister,--"Where mystery begins religion ends,"[805]--and it did not occur to them that no mystery could be greater than the first article of their own deistical creed,--the necessary existence of God. Atheism magnifies the mystery, which is an inherent ingredient in every system, religious or infidel. The least reflection forces this fact upon the mind, and the blindness of Pope and Bolingbroke to a truth which met them at the threshold of their speculations, and recurred at every turn, is not an unjust measure of their general incapacity for religious philosophy.

The Essay on Man was framed on the old and obvious division of ethics, which treated of man in his relation to God, his fellow-creatures, and himself. Pope, who thought it presumption to study God,[806] passed over the first of the three heads, and substituted an epistle on man in relation to the universe. The leading arguments in this opening epistle were taken from the Théodicée of Leibnitz, the Moralists of Shaftesbury, and the Origin of Evil, by Archbishop King. The poet had read the essay of Shaftesbury, and had possibly looked into King; but of Leibnitz he was entirely ignorant. In reply to the charge of having adopted the alleged fatalism of the illustrious German, he wrote to Warburton, Feb. 2, 1739, "It cannot be unpleasant to you to know that I never in my life read a line of Leibnitz, nor understood there was such a term as pre-established harmony till I found it in M. Crousaz's book." Bolingbroke had instructed Pope that Leibnitz was "one of the vainest and most chimerical men that ever got a name in philosophy, and that he was so often unintelligible that no man ought to believe he understood himself."[807] Naturally Pope had not the least suspicion that some of the principal tenets instilled into him by his "guide" were filched without acknowledgment from this vain, chimerical, unintelligible man.

The optimism of Leibnitz has been a thousand times misrepresented, not because his Théodicée is obscure, but because the scoffers had never read the system they decried. He was supposed to have maintained that our little globe, taken separately, was the best which could be conceived, and that all the trials and crimes of men were in their own independent nature a good. Voltaire was among the ignorant, and to refute the doctrine that everything was good, he concocted a licentious tale, in which everything is vice, injustice, and misery. His satire has a double flaw. He gives a false representation of human life, and of the optimism of Leibnitz. The world of Leibnitz is not our earth in its present state, but the universe, unlimited in extent, and eternal in duration. The final purpose of the Deity in his stupendous scheme is the best that can be, and the means are the best for their end. The fitness of the several parts can only be estimated in their relation to the whole, and the whole is not creation at any moment of time, but the evolution of the universe from everlasting to everlasting. It would be folly to judge the evils of the hour in their isolation, when they are incidents in an illimitable plan, and have reference to the greatest ultimate good. To show in detail how all the evils we experience are subservient to the best conceivable scheme of the universe, would require that we should know the infinite design of God, that we should be able to picture the infinity of other possible worlds, and to institute a comparison between these infinite infinities. A morsel of flesh, or a splinter of bone, bears an immeasurably larger proportion to our frame than our existing globe to the existing universe, which is itself but a link in the eternal chain, and yet a person ignorant of the human structure would in vain attempt to explain the purpose and fitness of some diminutive fragment of man.[808]

Leibnitz took for granted, in their greatest latitude, the power, wisdom, and goodness of God. Upon this supposition, Hume, personating the character of a sceptic, allowed that there "might, perhaps, be a plausible solution of the ill phenomena." But the sceptic objects that "the Deity is known to us solely in his productions, that the universe shows only a particular degree of wisdom and goodness, and that we can never be authorised to infer a further degree of these attributes, which would be adding something to the attributes of the cause beyond what appears in the effects."[809] The objection would be sound if the whole series of effects were unfolded to our view. They extend, on the contrary, indefinitely beyond our capacity to follow them, and the question is, whether the defects appertain to the attributes of God, or whether the appearance of imperfection is the consequence of our ignorance. The answer is not doubtful. There is superabundant proof that our globe is framed upon a plan in which animals and things have a mutual dependence. Our globe itself, again, is a portion of a larger system, and we have an irresistible conviction that the boundless universe is the work of one Author, and that a definite purpose pervades the whole. With this first fact we couple a second, that the appropriateness of the details in a complicated contrivance cannot be understood, unless we comprehend the general principle of the contrivance, and the relation of its parts. The optimism of Leibnitz is the only just inference from these facts. A speck of creation is submitted to our examination, and the evidences of power, wisdom, and goodness are vast and overwhelming. Other parts seem defective, as inevitably happens when our knowledge is miserably inadequate; and, in accordance with experience, we conclude that our enormous ignorance is at fault, and not that the superlative workman is inconsistent. The explanation of the optimist is rational, while that of the sceptic involves a gratuitous contradiction, and is wild, improbable, and unsupported.

Hume's spokesman enforces his view by an instance which was the favourite argument of Bolingbroke. "A more impartial distribution of rewards and punishments," says the sceptic, in allusion to a future state, "must proceed from a greater regard to justice and equity."[810] Admit that the justice of God's government on earth is, in a single instance, imperfect, and it follows that the argument for the perfection of His attributes is at an end. The fallacy is in the assumed fact, that a greater regard would be shown to equity, if rewards in this life were exactly proportioned to merits. The chief purpose of the present life is clearly not happiness but excellence. The characters of good men are disciplined and purified here to fit them for happiness hereafter, and the trials which best prepare them for eternal felicity cannot be a deviation from equity. "Every branch," says our Lord, "that beareth fruit, my father purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit,"[811] which is a stronger evidence of fatherly care than an injurious distribution of rewards and punishments on the sceptical plan. Physical evils become a blessing when they are the lasting corrective of sin.

The moral evil itself can in part be explained. The mind and body of human beings, and the world in which we live, have been fixed for us by the Creator. The will alone is free, and it is the will which really constitutes the man. Without freedom of will there could be no morality, any more than a tree is moral when it flourishes, and immoral when it withers. Freedom pre-supposes a power to do wrong, and without this liberty there could be no individual worth. The frailty of man grows out of his supremacy. Warburton denied that there was any force in the explanation, since if "God had only brought those creatures into being who would not have abused their freedom, evil had been prevented without intrenching upon free will."[812] Two principles are here assumed to be indisputable, neither of which are self-evident, or capable of proof. Warburton supposes it to be intuitively certain that a picked race of moral agents, who must be limited in their perfections because they are inferior to God, may all be gifted with an infallible power of defying sin, which for aught we know may be impossible. A christian divine must admit that some of the angels fell, and for anything we can tell the steadfast angels might have sinned without the warning example of their apostate brethren. Warburton further supposes it to be intuitively certain, that if perchance there may be a hierarchy too lofty to have ever erred, the non-existence of the multitudinous lesser beings would be preferable to their existence with an admixture of evil, which is not the sentiment raised in human minds by the contemplation of the living creatures of our globe. On the contrary, the deepest philosophers and simplest peasants are alike lost in admiration at the spectacle, and feel impotent to rise to a fitting height of love and praise. As the latent premises of Warburton are not manifest facts, he has failed to make good his position, that to all appearance God could have framed a better world from which every semblance of evil might have been excluded. The moral nature of man goes far to account for the evil of man, and for his present probation. The comparative innocence of children is lovely, but it is innocence which has not been tried, and when it is tested it fails. The innocence of saints is the innocence which has passed through the terrible experience of sin, which knows the degradation of iniquity, which has fought against it and triumphed, and hence it is the second and acquired innocence which endures. The innocence of Adam in Paradise may have resembled the inexperience of the child, and the only road to permanent victory may be through defeat. Heaven itself may be a place of temptation unless an energy of conquering will has been first developed, and we have grown strong by an inherent homage to righteousness. In our world, at least, felicity is not the securest situation for untried virtue. This is enough to justify to our understandings the state of man upon earth, though much is mysterious in the details from our imperfect knowledge of the ultimate effect upon aggregate humanity of the discipline of life, and our ignorance of the part which our race is to play in the eternal universe.

Leibnitz divided evil into moral evil or sin, physical evil or suffering, and metaphysical evil or the limitation of our endowments. He addressed men who were satisfied from the evidence of their internal nature and the external world that God was absolute in power, wisdom, and goodness. Hence, whatever is, is right. "We judge," says Leibnitz, "by the event; since God has so done it would not be possible to do better."[813] Pope starts from the premise of Leibnitz. He assumes the infinite wisdom of the Deity, and concludes that this wisdom must have formed the best possible system. But to a great extent he differed from Leibnitz with regard to the cause of the several kinds of evil, and his optimism was of an adulterate, untenable kind. He did not allow that moral evil was the pernicious abuse of a free will, with which we are endowed because men are preferable to automatons, moral agents to passive machines. He held that moral evil was in itself a good, and that God was the author of it. He it is who "pours fierce ambition into Cæsar's mind," and nature no more requires "men for ever temperate, calm, and wise," than "eternal springs and cloudless skies."[814] Since the sin of men is imposed upon them by God they must be machines after all, and of a debased and often devilish species. An inexorable fatalism becomes the law of humanity, and Borgias, Catilines, and Cæsars are destructive wheels which simply obey the motion impressed upon them by the omnipotent architect. God can do no wrong; man is the puppet of God; and whatever is, is consequently right, the villanies of miscreants included. The Essay swarms with contradictions, and in other passages Pope treats man as an accountable being who departs from the commands of his Maker.

Of physical evil, or suffering, Pope notices only "plagues, earthquakes, and tempests," which he justifies by the remark that God "acts not by partial, but by general laws."[815] Bolingbroke gave the same explanation. Either, he said, such visitations are "rational chastisements," or they are "the mere effects, natural though contingent, of matter and motion in a material system, put into motion under certain general laws."[816] Individuals, that is, must suffer that the laws of matter may not be infringed. Leibnitz rejected the principle. "That which is an evil," he said, "for me would not cease to be an evil because it would be good for some one else. The good which pervades the universe consists, among other things, in this, that the general good is the particular good of every one who loves the author of all good." So, he says again, "we suffer often from the misdeeds of others, but when we have no share in the crime we may hold it for certain that the sufferings procure us a greater happiness."[817] The system of Pope subordinates moral agents to physical, and he finds it a sufficient vindication that the mechanical law is general, and the injury to men only occasional. Whatever may be the worth of particular persons, he believes that they are properly sacrificed to the regularity of material laws, which roll on with undistinguishing, terrific might, crushing any thinking, sentient, virtuous being who may happen to cross their path. He supposes, nevertheless, that these unbending, undiscerning laws have undergone a "change," and, what is singular, the alteration has been from better to worse, whereby he accounts for a portion of the prevalent physical evil.[818] Another portion he at one time ascribed to "chance," which had intruded itself into the arrangements of the Almighty, and overruled his designs.[819] The optimism which represented man to be the sport of mechanical laws, of deteriorating changes in the physical system, and of blind, ungovernable chance, was not an optimism to clear away difficulties, and silence objections.

Metaphysical evil, or the limitation of endowments, is inevitable in every being below the Godhead, and Pope contends that the best system must manifestly consist in an infinite series of creatures, from the greatest to the least. The notion is found in Locke and Leibnitz. There are beings, said the latter, above and below us, or there would be a void in the order of species.[820] The idea was more fully developed by Archbishop King, and is simply an extension to the universe of the terrestrial system, where a gradation of beings on a connected plan is the law. Pope carried the principle to extravagance. He contends that the omission of the smallest creature would break the chain, would throw the universe into confusion, and involve all creation in a common ruin.[821] To keep the universe from tumbling to pieces, "it is plain," according to him, that "there must be somewhere such a rank as man,"[822] and the rule holds equally of the minutest animalcule on the globe. There is a flaw in his premises. It is not apparent that the extinction of the flea would upset the universe, nor that the scale of beings must necessarily be the same which at present prevails. The facts are against the "must be" of Pope. There was a time when other creatures were, and man was not, and when animated nature was able to dispense with the human race. Infinite wisdom must form the best possible system and a gradation of beings, which now includes man, is an actual part of the scheme. Pope's argument breaks down when, to justify the creation of man, he supposes that a chain of beings and an orderly universe could not have existed unless man had been a link in the series. His argument is equally weak when he maintains that the infinite wisdom of God is a guarantee that there will not be a gap in the endless chain of existences, but that it is a question whether infinite wisdom may not have made a mistake with respect to man's proper place in the series, and erred in the after sorting of the gradations which it had previously conceived and created on an infallible plan.[823] The poet was inconsistent to childishness. Johnson believed that when Pope talked of man's place he did not attach any meaning to the term. The words would seem to imply that it was a question whether man was placed in the circumstances which were best adapted to his moral, mental, and physical nature. But if Pope had thoroughly comprehended his borrowed phrases, he would not have proposed the enquiry under a form which stultified his premises.

There were errors enough in Pope's doctrine without the misinterpretations of Voltaire, who has falsified the views of the poet, as he had previously misstated the profounder system of Leibnitz. "Those," says Voltaire, "who exclaim that all is good are charlatans. Shaftesbury, who brought the fable into fashion, was a very unhappy man. I have seen Bolingbroke devoured with chagrin and rage, and Pope, whom he induced to put the mockery into verse, was as much to be pitied as any man I have ever known,--deformed in body, unequal in his temper, always ill, a burthen to himself, and harassed by a hundred enemies to his dying hour. Quote me at least some happy men who say that all is good. Any one who had seen the beautiful Ann Boleyn, and the still more beautiful Mary Stuart, in their youth, would have said that is good, but would he have said it when he saw them perish by the hand of the executioner? would he have said it when he saw the grandson of the beautiful Mary die the same death in the midst of his capital? would he have said it when he saw the great-grandson more unfortunate still, since he lived longer?"[824] Pope, in his imperfect theory, did not deny the existence of sorrow, but asserted, or implied, that the sorrow was an advantage either to the sufferer or others. Voltaire looked singly at the misery without heeding the gain. Mary Queen of Scots at the block was superior to the radiant beauty who was starting on a profligate career. Charles I., penitent for his murderous abandonment of Strafford, and, perhaps, for his creed that duplicity is a virtue when employed by kings to circumvent subjects, was a vastly better man on the scaffold than on the throne. James II. was in a more advantageous position with the inducement to repentance which his long exile supplied than if he had succeeded in his fraudulent attempts to subvert the English church and constitution. The rage of Bolingbroke, and Pope's fretful temper, were certainly inexplicable on the pretence that they were poured into the mind by the Deity. They did not militate against the truer optimism which saw in them self-imposed vice and pain, rendered possible by the free-will which is a privilege to mankind.

Pope filled up the outline of his system with declamatory invectives against objectors, and with reflections intended to prove that the imperfections of man befitted his position in the universe. There is little force in the poet's reasoning. He passes over difficulties, and replies to cavils which no one worth answering ever urged. Some of his remarks are obscure, some erroneous, some common-place. Such as they are they have not been woven into a consecutive argument. M. Crousaz says he knew persons who were persuaded that Pope had tacked together a number of fragments he had composed at different times, before he had the idea of an Essay on Man, which was a contrivance to work up his collection of odds and ends. He understood, in fact, little beyond the separate thoughts, and was insensible to the want of coherence, consistency and purpose. It would be lost labour to search, like Warburton, for a strength and closeness of reasoning which were not in the mind of the author.

The second epistle treats of man "with respect to himself as an individual." The Bible is a revelation of God, and a perpetual summons to mankind "to know and understand" him. "Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me."[825] The divinity at last descended upon earth, and lived our life, acting and speaking under our circumstances, that God might be clearly manifested to the world. "He that hath seen me," says our Lord, "hath seen the Father."[826] The divine light appeared darkness and imposture to Pope. He was even blind to the light which his natural understanding would have furnished, and, taught by Bolingbroke, he abjured all pretension to a knowledge of the Almighty under the plea of reverencing his inscrutable grandeur. Man must not venture to scan God; his only proper study is to learn to know himself.[827] This second epistle exhibits the kind of self-knowledge to which Pope attained, when, renouncing the knowledge of God, he determined to limit his investigations to man.

He draws a desolate picture. Man is in doubt whether he is a god or a beast; whether he ought to prefer his body or his mind. He is a confused chaos of thought and passion, he reasons only to err, and is only born to die.[828] The general incapacity, we are told, extended to Newton, and it might have occurred to the poet that it was a useless task to study our nature when the deductions of reason in its highest estate are uniformly wrong. He committed the oversight from his habit of borrowing fragments he was not at the pains to understand. His caricature was a partial and distorted copy from Pascal, who with wonderful energy of language, amplified the helplessness of fallen man that he might insist the more strongly on the necessity of his restoration through the Gospel. He overcharged the evil to exalt the remedy. Pope had not any remedy to suggest. He leaves the "confused chaos" in its primitive impotence, and calls upon mankind to embark in a deceptive study, with the warning that they will wander from error to error.

Without tying Pope down to the rhetorical exaggerations in the opening paragraph of his second epistle, we find from a passage in the first epistle that he reduced to insignificance the self-knowledge attainable by mankind. He said that when the proud horse and dull ox knew why man put them to this use or that, then would proud and dull man comprehend the end and use of his being, passions, sufferings, and actions.[829] The amount of knowledge possessed by the horse and ox is not discoverable by us. The only nature adequately known to man is his own, and his nature reveals his end. The ideas which ought to govern him proceed from his Maker. They are the voice of God speaking to him, and telling him the purpose for which he lives. He learns, above all, that he is the servant of the Almighty, that his passions are to be ruled by his conscience, that duty is supreme, that his sufferings are the discipline to perfect his character, that earth is the school for a higher existence. He may be negligent and perverse; he may refuse to look into his nature, and may, in part, defy it; may thence arrive at false conclusions, and adopt a false course of conduct, which are the abuses of a free-will that can sink or soar, but the grand outlines of his nature are plain to every honest and earnest enquirer, and blank ignorance on the end of his being, passions, sufferings, and actions is not the inevitable condition of man.

The conviction that we are ignorant of the use of our being and actions did not keep Pope from acknowledging that "good" is the end to which we aspire.[830] The nature of this good, and the means of obtaining it, is the main subject of the second epistle, "which contains," says Warburton, "the truest, clearest, shortest, and consequently the best system of ethics that is anywhere to be met with."[831] The system which Warburton thought "true and clear" appears to be eminently false and contradictory.

Man has certain implanted tendencies, physical, intellectual, and sympathetic,--the craving for food, for knowledge, for society, etc. None of our primitive endowments can be termed moral, since they are bestowed upon us independently of our will, and it is not till will interposes that morality begins, but in their purity they are all advantageous, and many of them are directed to the identical end which morality prescribes. They are part of the stock-in-trade with which man starts in his career, and he is charged with the wise administration of them. A brief experience teaches him that an instinctive tendency may be carried to excess. His craving for food and drink may turn to gluttony and drunkenness; his passion for knowledge may convert him into a solitary student without any care for his kind; his love of society and affection may unfit him for the business and drudgery of life. Or he may yield to a propensity till satiety succeeds, and he is left listless and jaded. Or he may indulge a lawful propensity by lawless methods. Or he may be hurried away by successive impulses, and be too unstable to put his gifts to a profitable use. In any of these ways his proper nature becomes mutilated and degraded. His reason informs him that to enjoy the full advantage of his tendencies he must not consent to be drifted along by the current which is strongest for the moment. He must curb the lower propensities, and foster the higher; he must regulate the several unities in a manner to derive the greatest benefit from the whole; he must substitute for the reign of impulse what moralists call his interest well understood. He does not stop at self-interest. He rises above his personal good into the impersonal sphere of good in itself. He perceives that there is a law superior to his individual interests, a law of universal obligation, and which is immutable and eternal.

Of these three motives, the instinctive, the prudential, and the law of independent morality, Pope rejects the last. He believes that self is the single spring of action in men, and he seriously adopts the old sarcastic saying, "Every man for himself, and God for us all."[832] He divides this selfish nature into two parts,--self-love, which designates the impulsive propensities, and reason, which governs them on the behalf of interest well-understood.[833] Already there is an inconsistency in his phraseology when he puts self-love in direct opposition to reason. Reason in his theory is simply the selfishness of calculation; self-love the selfishness of impulse. Self-love is absolute in both, and is not the less self-love because we deliberate upon the means which are best adapted to secure the selfish end.

The erroneous phraseology signifies little. The important point is the radical falsity of the system. The three grand duties of man,--his duty to God, his neighbour, and himself,--are resolved by Pope into the single duty of man to himself. In the first epistle the poet rebuked the pride which supposed the heavens and the earth to be created for its use.[834] In his second epistle he teaches us that they are totally indifferent to us under any other aspect. He will tell us that the way to promote our personal interest is to love God and our neighbour, but the end and motive of the love must on his system be our individual interest still. The gospel precepts must be set aside; for in place of loving our neighbour equally with ourselves we are to love him simply for the sake of ourselves; and in place of loving God with all our hearts, and minds, and souls, we are to love him solely as a tributary who ministers to our absorbing love of self. When we practically think and act as though we were the centre of the universe; when, horrible to say, we view the Deity merely as an instrument to promote our selfishness; when we discover nothing in the Creator to adore, nothing in his creation to admire, apart from their fitness to advance the interests of one puny mortal, we invert the actual constitution of things, we base our morality upon a lie, and we only cheat ourselves with delusive terms when we talk of our duty to God and our neighbour.

The test of the system is in the phenomena of consciousness which are open to universal observation. When our moral principle is an unalloyed selfishness we seek our private good alone, and there can be no obligation to consult the interests of our neighbours. I pay a debt because it is to my advantage, and not from any sense of what is due to my debtor. I forbear to kill, and maim, and torture, not in the least because I am bound to consider the rights and feelings of my fellow-creatures, but because it would be present or future pain to myself. Owning no law, except the law of selfishness, I should be dishonest and cruel if I could believe that the balance of personal pleasure was on the side of inhumanity and roguery. When I blame murderers and thieves, I inconsiderately distinguish between the guilt and folly of the crime, which is a vulgar mistake. The selfishness which respects nothing beyond the requirements of self is the law of our race, and the miscalled criminal has obeyed the governing principle of mankind. He owed no duty to others, and his sole fault was not to have judged wisely for his interests. I talk of patriotism and public spirit, of sacrifice and disinterestedness, but they are words which convey a false impression. Sacrifice and disinterestedness do not exist, and the apparent devotion to country and public is at bottom a complete devotion to self.

Common experience is too powerful for bad philosophy, and it is plain that this is not a true description of the moral man. Pope puts a part for the whole. The Creator has endowed us with a desire for happiness, which is inseparable from our being. The individual is a portion of the universe, and though he is only an atom, his interests are cared for in common with the rest. But he has a consciousness that the good of others must be cared for likewise, that Providence has enjoined him to contribute to the result, and that his refusal to recognise the duty he owes to his neighbour would be guilt. He has a conviction that the great source of all being and all good is to be adored for his infinite perfections, and that to love him solely for the sake of the blessings he communicates to ourselves is a maimed, derogatory, and impious idea. Man has been constructed to perceive things as they are, and to act in conformity with his knowledge. He is the creature of his Maker, a unit in a multitude, and could not be permitted to consider Maker and multitude subordinate to the creature and unit, without a complete perversion of the facts. With the desire for our own good there has been instilled into us that law of good in itself which embraces the universe,--a law which, while it includes our individual concerns, extends infinitely beyond them, and to which we do homage under its aspect of good in itself, as well as under its aspect that it is good for me. Our personal pleasure is not therefore, as Pope asserts, "the whole employ of body and mind."[835] Happiness in the long run is dependent upon well-doing, and we consult our interest when we adhere to duty. But our rule of duty must not be bounded by our self-interest, which, reducing our motives to a petty egotism, corrupts the nature of man, and contaminates duty at its source.

The prevalent habit of abandoning duty for personal pleasure begets the mistaken idea that where there is pleasure there is absolute selfishness. The degree of selfishness must be determined by our motives, and not by the feelings which accompany our acts. Whatever is done for self-gratification is selfish; and everything in which our end is external to ourselves is disinterested, in so far as the accompanying gratification is not the motive to the deed. Although the benevolent man has a satisfaction in reflecting that the sufferings of the needy are removed, his predominant motive to benevolence is the relief of the wretched, and not his own personal pleasure. His intention terminates in the objects of his charity, with little return upon himself, and unless his sympathy with them was real the gratification would not be felt. Happiness is the proper effect of pure goodness, and if the junction of perfect happiness and perfect goodness was incompatible with disinterestedness, the celestial spirits would be more selfish than men. Men, in turn, would grow selfish in the same proportion that perseverance in well-doing rendered duty delightful. "I find a pleasure in serving my friends," said Schiller in refutation of the doctrine; "it is agreeable to me to fulfil my duties. This troubles me, for then I am no longer virtuous."[836] The love which is capable of the utmost sacrifice is not less generous because no sacrifice may chance to be required, any more than a man who is proof against all temptations to steal, is less honest because he is not exposed to temptation. From our proneness to self-deceit we are accustomed to estimate disinterestedness by actual sacrifices, which both test our motives, and inure us to self-denying love, but disinterestedness is the cause of self-denial and must precede it, and the disposition remains when the call for self-denial may have ceased. Qualities are what they are, whatever may happen to be the surrounding circumstances. Grant that a man can love his neighbour and himself with an equal love, and the same proportion will be preserved whether his love procures him unadulterated pleasure, or entails on him a vast amount of pain. Happiness and disinterestedness are not in their essence mutually destructive; they co-exist and coalesce.

A close scrutiny into the motives of moral men will satisfy us that the love of our neighbour is not wholly or chiefly a disguised love of self; that we love God for what he is, transcendent in goodness and wisdom, as well as for what he is to us; that we do not bow down to duty solely because it is our interest well understood, but much more because it has an illimitable authority independent of our individual interests, and binds the conscience by its right to supreme dominion. God, man, duty are external objects which, over and above the consideration of self-interest, are served by morality as an end. Bishop Butler even maintained that all our instinctive impulses "are particular movements towards particular external objects," and cannot be ascribed to self-love. He instances the desire produced by hunger, of which "the object and end," he says, "is merely food."[837] But there is a further object for which alone the food is desired,--the removal of painful sensations, or the gratification of the palate, or the prolongation of life. All these objects are often purely selfish, and always in their ordinary unreflecting state.[838] The uneasy sensation of hunger begins and ends with the individual; the single purpose for which he covets the food is to allay his particular physical craving; outside self there is no object left to attract the mind,--no over-plus to which our thoughts can be directed. There is not, as in the case of God, man, and law, an object which has a claim upon our hearts and understandings distinct from the special benefit to ourselves. The desire for food is a selfish, but not an evil instinct, for self-love is part of the duty and constitution of man. Pope's error was in putting a fragment for the whole, and merging duty in selfishness.

There is a second part to Pope's system. He has told us that the function of reason is to "advise and check" the instinctive impulses; that she "mixes the passions with art, and confines them to due bounds;" that she "compounds and subjects, tempers and employs them;" and that her "well-accorded" combination of jarring elements "gives all the strength and colour to our life."[839] The instant after he lays down a directly opposite theory. He says that every man brings into the world a "ruling passion," which is "cast and mingled with his very frame;" that this master passion "grows with our growth," and "swallows up" all the other passions; that whatever "warms the heart or fills the head" goes to feed the one despotic desire. When we fancy we curb a passion we are deceived; we have only resigned a lesser passion in favour of a greater.[840] Reason, which lately mixed the passions in their proper proportions, and confined them to due bounds, is suddenly stripped of her prerogative, and becomes the slave of the master passion.

The ruling passion, be it what it will,
The ruling passion conquers reason still.

Reason in this new theory is worse than helpless; she deserts to the side of her enemy, gives the monster propensity "edge and power," and exerts herself to exasperate the "mind's disease."[841] Such contradictions were the natural consequence of the perfunctory manner in which Pope had picked up his scraps of philosophy.

The slightest acquaintance with the world is fatal to the hypothesis that an exclusive ruling passion is the universal characteristic of mankind. Each person has various appetites, desires, and affections, and it is rare to see a man in whom "one master passion has swallowed up the rest." Propensities intermingle and take their turn. Characters are notoriously complex, and every individual is not the incarnation of a single unattended passion. A desire for power may be joined with sensuality, a love of fame with covetousness, an eagerness for knowledge with affection. In the play of passions one may preponderate, but all the rest are not reduced to nullity. Allow the existence of the ruling passion, and Pope's account of its origin could not be correct. A passion which is cast in our frame from our birth, and continues thenceforward to grow with our growth, must be permanent and unalterable. The individual must be governed by the same passion in childhood and age, in the season of thoughtlessness and of wisdom, in dissoluteness and virtue, in all the possible changes of condition. This is not the scene which life presents. "Every observer," says Johnson, "has remarked, that in many men the love of pleasure is the ruling passion of their youth, and the love of money that of their advanced years."[842]

With an inherited ruling passion, and reason helpless to restrain it, we should be altogether the creatures of fate on Pope's hypothesis, if he had not furnished reason with a last resource, which, as is evident from several parallel passages, was chiefly suggested to him by the works of his contemporary, Mandeville. This shallow thinker put forth a system of morality and political economy in his Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. The book, which was philosophically weak, attracted much notice at the time from the liveliness of his coarse illustrations, the vigorous ease of his inaccurate style, and the cynical parade of his licentious doctrines. He had the folly to imagine that commerce could only flourish when the wealth of a nation was consumed by the idle, the sensual, the luxurious. Hence, he argued that their wasteful vices were a national gain. This was his political economy. His morality consisted in denying the reality of virtue. He held that every apparent virtue was prompted by an underlying frailty, and that all ostensible goodness was the false mask worn over inward weaknesses. The indignation his system provoked induced him subsequently to throw in some qualifying phrases, but his faint, and always equivocal concessions, are forms of speech, and did not prevent his repeated avowal that genuine virtue had no existence on earth. "I often," he says, "compare the virtues of good men to your large China jars; they make a fine show, but look into a thousand of them, and you will find nothing in them but dust and cobwebs."[843]

Pope, like Mandeville, founds virtue upon vice. The ruling passion is evil, but reason gives it a bias towards good.[844] "Spleen, obstinacy, hate, and fear," each produce "crops of wit and honesty;" "anger" is the parent of "zeal and fortitude;" "avarice" of "prudence;" "sloth" of "philosophy;" and every virtue under heaven may issue from "pride or shame."[845] The ruling passion having engulphed the whole family of affections and desires, this individual is a personification of anger, that individual of hate; a third of fear; a fourth of sloth; a fifth of pride. The sole moving principle of man is his giant passion.[846] The function of reason is only to foster it,[847] and select the means for its gratification. Whatever these means may be, the motive of the incarnate monster lust, is to feed sensuality; of the monster sloth to secure ease; of the monster pride to inflate self-importance. "The same ambition," says Pope, "may make a patriot, as it makes a knave."[848] But the incarnation of an all-pervading ambition can be only a patriot in appearance, and uses patriotism to serve the ends of ambition. Let the two diverge, and by the law of his nature he must fling the patriotism to the winds. "Either," says our Lord, "make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else, make the tree corrupt and his fruit corrupt."[849] On Pope's theory, to make the tree good is impossible. Man has no escape from the ruling passion he brings into the world. He must be angry, avaricious, or slothful, according to the seed which was sown in him at his birth, and the tree must remain corrupt to the last.

The fruit would inevitably betray the taint of its origin, and Pope was mistaken in supposing that a vitiated motive could keep steady to outward virtue. "Hate," to which Pope ascribes the singular power of producing "crops of wit and honesty," must repudiate love, or whatever else did not subserve the one unamiable passion; and a man all hate,--a frantic enemy to every kind and tender emotion,--would be hateful, however honest and witty. "Anger" would renounce the meek and charitable, "pride" the humble virtues, together with any other virtue which did not minister to inordinate anger and pride. Neither passion would assume a moral aspect. "I observe," says Baxter, "that almost all men, good and bad, do loathe the proud, and love the humble." "Zeal" is the prerogative ascribed to "anger," and the zealot who was urged on by fierce unflagging anger would be a terror and a scourge. Pope himself has drawn a horrible picture of the miseries inflicted upon humanity when "zeal, not charity, became the guide" of the teachers of religion.[850] "Sloth" supplies us with "philosophy," or the apathetic submission to evils we are too lazy to correct, which is the virtue that induces thousands to live in dirt and ignorance, because cleanliness and knowledge are not to be had without industry. "Avarice" is credited with the faculty of "supplying prudence," which is as true as to say that a burning fever supplies a moderate, healthy temperature. The moral system which confines man to the counterfeit "virtue nearest allied to his vice," or ruling passion, is an extravagant libel upon the virtuous, and outrageous flattery of the vicious.[851]

Mandeville took his morality from La Rochefoucauld, and Pope took hints from both. The principle common to the three is the motto which La Rochefoucauld placed at the head of his Maxims, "Our virtues are usually vices in disguise." The doctrine, when expressed in La Rochefoucauld's language, was condemned by Pope.

"As L'Esprit," he said, "La Rochefoucauld, and that sort of people, prove that all virtues are disguised vices, I would engage to prove all vices to be disguised virtues. Neither, indeed, is true: but this would be a more agreeable subject; and would overturn their whole scheme."[852] He repeated the criticism in a suppressed passage of the Essay on Man,[853] with a complete unconsciousness that the "scheme" he fancied he could "overturn," was the very soul of his system. "Heaven," he said, "can raise virtue's ends from the vanity which seeks no reward but praise,"[854] and for man to be virtuous solely out of vanity was exactly the virtue which La Rochefoucauld called "vice in disguise." He who feeds the hungry from vanity alone is not moved by sympathy for suffering. Charity is merely the pretence which his vanity pleads. Each of the other ruling passions acts according to its own exclusive nature, and the virtue which is adopted to humour anger, hate, sloth, and avarice, is by general consent called delusion or imposture. La Rochefoucauld has the advantage over Pope. The succession of selfish passions he discovered too uniformly in man is less odious than the concentrated anger, hate, or sloth which never pauses or turns aside; and the satirist who lashes the deceptive vices of mankind is to be preferred to the moralist who teaches that vice in disguise is virtue.

The contradictions are not at an end. Pride, folly, "even mean self-love," have all, says Pope, some good in them.[855] He forgot that self-love is, with him, the principle of every virtue and vice, their essence and life, their origin and end, and to call self-love meaner than pride and folly is either to assert that self-love is meaner than itself, or to abandon the foundation of his moral systems. He goes on to ascribe an influence to self-love which is incompatible with his second system, or theory of the ruling passion. "Self-love," he says, "is the scale to measure others' wants by thine," or, as he remarked to Spence, "self-love would be a necessary principle in every one, if it were only to serve each as a scale for his love to his neighbour."[856] On Pope's second system this love of each for his neighbour must be extinct, unless love chanced to be the ruling passion. Unmixed anger, hate, and sloth retain no trace of affection. When we are reduced to a single passion, and for selfish purposes "measure others' wants by our own," anger can but have an intellectual, unsympathising perception of rival passions, and will only assist them in the degree which will serve its irritable instincts. Sloth, anger, hate, and the rest will act according to their kind, and to call upon them to love their neighbours as themselves is to enjoin the deaf to hear, and the blind to see.

An evil fatalism, therefore, remains the leading principle of Pope's second system. A man must be avaricious, slothful, or angry as nature appoints. He cannot select his passion, or divert, or repress it. The sole power reserved to his will is a certain latitude in choosing the diet upon which the passion feeds. This meagre and polluted freedom dwindles to nothing with such passions as sloth and avarice, and if there was room for prayer, when our nature is fixed for us by an irreversible decree, we ought to petition for the "pride and vainglory" against which we pray in the Litany, since, if Pope is right, they permit more variety of specious virtue than the griping prudence of avarice, and the corrupting philosophy of sloth.

The poet passes from his review of individual man to the designs of God, and his degenerate morality sinks lower as he proceeds. "The ends of Providence," he says, "and general good are answered in our passions and imperfections," and he goes on to show "how usefully" the Deity, acting in the interests of the "whole,"[857] has "distributed" imperfections to "orders of men, to individuals, and to every state and age of life."[858] Pope refuses to ascribe our evil passions to the abuse of that freedom of will which is inseparable from the idea of a moral being. He retains the doctrine laid down in his first epistle, and involved in his ruling-passion hypothesis, that our evil passions are the immediate gift of God. "Heaven applies" what Pope calls "happy frailties to all ranks,--fear to statesmen, rashness to commanders, and presumption to kings."[859] "Pride is bestowed on all, a common friend,"[860] which overthrows his theory that the ruling is our only passion, and pride incompatible with avarice, sloth, &c. The blessing he imputes to pride is that it takes possession of the "vacuities of sense," and prevents self-knowledge.[861] "The proper study of mankind is man," but the desirable effect of the study is that man should be self-deceived,--that he should be soothed into complacency by ignorance of his individual defects, and by a conceited dream of imaginary excellence. The "bubble joy" is ordained by Providence "to laugh in the cup of folly," that folly may be cheered in its career, and fast as "one prospect is lost" may be lured on by "another."[862] The poet had already furnished an illustration of his doctrine, in the consolatory fact that "the sot" fancies himself "a hero!"[863] "Pleasure," says Pope, is "our greatest evil or our greatest good," and these were among his good pleasures,--the contrivances of a beneficent Deity for the comfort and encouragement of vice and folly. Bolingbroke was better informed. "The man," he says, "who neglects the duties of natural religion, and the obligations of morality, acts against his nature, and lives in open defiance to the author of it. God declares for one order of things, he for another. God blends together the duty and interest of his creature; his creature separates them, despises the duty, and proposes to himself another interest."[864]