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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 76-3515 OLSON, Charles Roll in, 1933- ALEXANDER POPE'S RESOLUTION OF CONTRADICTORY PREMISES IN AN ESSAY ON MAN* The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1975 Literature, general

Xerox University Microfilms,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106

© Copyright by Charles Rollin Olson 1975

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. ALEXANDER POPE' S RESOLUTION OP CONTRADICTORY PREMISES IN AN ESSAY ON MAN

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Charles Rollin Olson, B.A., B.S., M.A.

* * * * *

The Ohio S tate U niversity 1975

Reading Committee: Approved By

A. E. Wallace Maurer Edwin Robbins . 1 • tJLhu**' Betty Sutton Adviser Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My adviser, Wallace Maurer, has been indispensable to me during this project. He gave focus and direction to my inchoate ideas when I most needed assistance, and he read my pages with sympathetic interest and detailed commentary, saving me numerous wrong turnings and useless pursuits. He was always ready with assurance and percep­ tive advice, even during midnight phone calls. For all his help I am deeply grateful.

My family has been heroically patient, curbing their own activities to accommodate my demands for silence and solitude and lovingly forgetful of my one thousand and one broken promises.

I have benefitted from discussions with several colleagues, and during the dissertation oral examination the members of my committee opened up for me a number of issues relevant to subsequent study of my subject.

The faults in this dissertation are all mine to bear, but the largest measure of thanks I extend to Prof.

Maurer. *

VLTA

October 31, 1933...... Born - Moorhead, Minnesota

1957 ...... B. A. and B. S. Moorhead State College Moorhead, Minnesota

1957-1960 ...... Assistant Instructor, Robert College, Istanbul, Turkey

1960-1968 ...... Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio S tate U niversity, Columbus, Ohio

1962...... M. A. English, Ohio State U niversity

1968-1972 ...... Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Natchitoches, Louisiana

1972-1975 ...... Instructor of English, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... ii

VITA ...... iii

Chapter......

I. PROBLEMS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL POEM...... 1

F o o t n o t e s ...... 33

II. CRITICAL DISAGREEMENTS AND THE CASE FOR

ROOT METAPHORS...... 38

F o o t n o t e s ...... 65

III. TRANSCENDENT FORMISM AND DISCRETE

MECHANISM IN THE ESSAY...... 68

F o o t n o t e s ...... 132

IV, THE PHILOSOPHICAL RATIONALE FOR

CONTRADICTORY PREMISES...... 136

F o o t n o t e s ...... 184

V. THE MASTERY OF T O N E ...... 191

F o o t n o t e s ...... 213

CONCLUSION ...... 218

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 224 CHAPTER ONE

PROBLEMS OP THE PHILOSOPHICAL POEM

I

1 Critical assessments of Pope's Essay on Man have often implied that there is a disjunction between the thought and the language in the poem. The predominant critical view has been that Pope's ideas, whatever their historical interest and significance, are philosophically inconsistent, though melifluously expressed. According to this view, what we have in the Essay is a body of general assumptions, occasionally mere truisms, that do not and cannot hold together as a coherent philosophic statem ent, though they charm the ea r w ith mnemonic re so ­ nance and impart an urbane and w ittily paradoxical, but overly o p tim istic , explanation of man's dilemma and fa te . A corollary to such a view—sometimes stated, sometimes implied—is that poetry and philosophy are inimical to each other, that to succeed competently at either one is to sully the spirit of the other.

1 2

At the least here, two questions confront a student of An Essay on Man. Does philosophizing demand some kind of logical rigorousness that is unamenable to the poetic muse? Second, what features or predicates of the poem induce critics to dismiss the "ideas" but applaud the eloquence? The most perceptive modern critic of Pope, Maynard Mack, has stated that "of all Pope's poems, the 2 Essay on Man is the one most profoundly misunderstood." Thirty years and some astute criticism have marked the time since that statement was made, but the Judgment has not lost its relevance. Hence this dissertation. This study seeks to reinterpret the Essay by a root-metaphor analysis, thereby delineating the essential philosophical and poetical predicates of the poem and demonstrating why the Essay has been alternately or simultaneously criti­ cized for logical inconsistency and praised for poetic eloquence. My thesis—closely put—is that Pope's Essay rests on two contradictory metaphysical hypotheses that are (l) assumptions inevitably central to the age, (2) fundamental determinants in the argument of the poem, and (3) the auspicious occasions for Pope's happy marriage of philosophy and poetry. That there are two such hypotheses has not been dem­ onstrated in previous criticism, and their functioning has been obscured by circumstances not unusual in literary 3 history: first, an understandable readiness among Pope’s contemporaries to concur in the poet's succinct expression of preoccupations of the agej later, in succeeding gener­ ations, the disdain for what were considered the facile assumptions of the past; later again, a sharp and re­ stricted assessment on announced philosophical grounds; eventually, efforts to evaluate the poem on aesthetic grounds, by-passing philosophical Issues because they were construed to be irresolvable wrangles. These four points can be briefly illustrated without at this time undertaking extensive review of the criti­ cism. By publishing Epistle I anonymously, Pope secured unprejudiced reviews, and the contemporary reaction to his 3 poem was widely e n th u s ia s tic . A lita n y of comment, of course, had to set in. Some critics spied grounds to dissent from applause. Samuel Johnson pronounced on the poem tersely, indelibly: "Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised."^ John­ son admired the poem's eloquence but dismissed the ideas as e ith e r commonplace o r, in some in stan ces perhaps, as misconceived or inadequately grasped by the poet himself. Johnson's note of strident assurance has rarely been struck in our time. A critic unsympathetic to the Essay, John Laird, has, indeed, dismissed any claim of philosophic m erit fo r the poem, w ith remarks not a l i t t l e ornery and obtuse.-* It is, however, more usual among modem critics to ground their objections on specific and thoughtfully considered points. Thus J. M. Cameron, for example, cites what he considers "incoherences of argu­ ment"; he does, however, find evidence to exclaim how "Pope shows a fine sense of the connexion that must exist for poetry between the experience of living as a concrete process, Wild Nature’s vigor working at the root ( I I , 184) and the conceptual schemes designed to universalize it." On the other hand Mr. Cameron implies a very large objec­ tion when he considers the imagery of the poem ornamental and not compatible "with the seriousness of the theme." By the time Mr. Cameron drives toward his conclusion, the reader might not be agreeing but neither has he been scoring off the Judgments as hasty or ill-tempered: "Such, then, are some of the considerations which seem to make it important, for the sake of the credit of the poem it­ self, not to advance the highest claims for the Essay on Man." That kind of Judicious balance of praise and blame for the Essay has been common fare in our time, and many readers are likely to nod assent when finding brief pronouncement in Kathleen Williams' swift oxymoron: "Pope's magnificent failure, the Essay on Man." In brief, then, Johnson disdains Pope's facile generalizing, Laird 5 scorns the poet's whole philosophical undertaking, and Cameron and Williams can admire the poem aesthetically but patronize or dismiss it intellectually. One large issue that has hung in the air over the years, sometimes expressly affirmed or denied, more often merely implied, is the assumption that there is some in­ herent and inescapable difference between philosophy and poetry, that writing philosophy and writing poetry in­ volve talents somehow inimical to each other so that he who can undertake the one is unfit for the other and vice versa, Earl R. Wasserman urges a d is tin c tio n between the two modes of w ritin g : Philosophy cannot be poetry because it establishes discursively arranged logical Interconnections among concepts, and poetry makes statements beyond the discursively possible as the consequence of an extjralinguistic ordering, although that order may derive from the conclusions or principles of a systematic philosophy. . . . But it is of the very essence of a poem that it is a making, a weaving, and is not discursively successive. . . . The philo­ sophic systems a poem evokes cannot constitute the statement the poem makes, but can only establish the relational system by which the poem conducts its integrative act.8 In distinguishing between philosophy and poetry Prof. Wasserman does not wholly exclude one from the o th er. A poem may grow out of the "conclusions or principles of a systematic philosophy,? but a poem is not a logical trea­ tise. It aims for heightened effects, for nuance and suggestion, for the rich inclusiveness of ambiguity. 6

A poem Is "a making, a weaving." Prof. Wasserman's re­ marks, X must point out, appear in an essay which here at the outset seeks to forearm us readers against blithely assuming that we can find in any poem something like a philosophic system logically deduclble. Rather, he would have us "distinguish between world-pictures and philo­ sophic systems." In the present Instance Prof. Wasser­ man is leading into an attack on critics who in his view have too readily explicated Shelley’s "Mont Blanc" in terms of Platonism or Necessitarianism or various other -isms. These qualifications notwithstanding, in the re­ marks quoted above, Prof. Wasserman would seem to affirm that philosophy and poetry are different, period. Stated thus reductively, the contention does not elicit my agreement (for reasons which shall become evident later), though it must be conceded that Prof. Wasserman has made the distinction in order to confront a specific critical problem w ith a s p e c ific poem; he might not want to promote his remarks to general truth. Confronting An Essay on Man, some critics have im­ plied a distinction between philosophy and poetry but without proceeding from Wasserman’s kind of painstaking exactitude. Samuel Johnson helped pose the issue for many when he remarked: 7

The Essay on Man was a work of g reat labour and long consideration, but certainly not the happiest of Pope's performances. The subject is perhaps not very proper for poetry, and the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject; metaphysical m orality was to him a new study, he was proud of his acquisitions, and, supposing himself master of great secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learried.9 Johnson questions the propriety of the subject but with a note of hesitation that forestalls any sweeping implica­ tion that there might be some subjects not fitted for poetry. Mainly he c r itic iz e s the poet him self whose intellectual attainments Johnson considered inadequate fo r the subject undertaken. To Johnson, Pope was too short on the knowledge required to handle the arguments that needed examination. Similar misgivings have been echoed by various critics since. More recently, for example, Reuben Brower has pon­ dered whether art and argument in the Essay are miscible: But we can hardly say what kind of a poem the Essay on Man is, or where and when it is poetry, or wKe'fHer it has imaginative unity, unless we attend to what Pope says, to his "argument.11 He certainly does not have an argument in the Miltonic and heroic sense of a myth that dramatizes important values and beliefs. But it is clear enough that he has an argument in the persuasive sense of the words, and it is equally apparent that he claims to have an argument in the sense of a discourse with an ordered series of inferences that follow from certain first principles or assumptions. Pew readers who have looked for this kind of logic in the poem, from Dr, Johnson to recent students of philosophy in literature, have been very happy with what they have found.10 8

Brower willingly concedes to the poem a high level of argumentative force, but he is leery about ascribing to the Essay an imaginative unity which culminates in a poem. For Brower the lack of a central myth "that dramatizes important values and beliefs" might represent a failure of insight on the part of the poet, but Brower avoids drawing a sharp conclusion. Instead he declares that the poem has nevertheless "an argument in the persuasive sense of the words" and in the sense of an orderly dis­ course, but he suggests that many critics would not agree with him. Brower's criticism implies that he perceives some gap between thought and language in the Essay. The latter enchains his affection, but the former invites his distrust because it is not marshaled by a central and controlling myth. Thomas R. Edwards also wants to legislate somehow between the thought and the language. He points to a resolution in Pope!s marriage of idea and word, but im­ plicit in his criticism is the assumption that a poem labeled An Essay on Man ought to be as rigorously inte­ grated by propositional statement as a philosophical trea­ tise. While he cannot find such a quality in Pope's poem, he eventually claims that it delivers insights not attain­ able by bald, prose argument. 9

Let us consider Edwards' views in more detail. His initial remarks alternately credit and discredit the Essay, as if he were taking back with his left hand what he has just offered with his right. He allows that Pope undertook "a difficult poetic problem" in attempting to vindicate the ways of God to man and that the poem "can­ not avoid simplification and direct statement," even though "Pope was uncomfortable with didactic strategies." But Edwards asserts that Pope "was not a very gifted thinker, if by that word we mean someone capable of clear and sound consecutive reasoning; by accepting the didac­ tic role, he incurred an obligation to be rational that he could not fulfill." Thus to Edwards the poem is "unsound a t i t s avowed cen ter"; n ev e rth eless, i t "cannot be dismissed simply as a failure."11 What Edwards finally affirms12 is that the Essay transcends its argu­ mentative limits, substituting perhaps an amplitude and awe for its argumentative breaks: Though the Essay lacks thoroughgoing doctrinal coherence, still in some important ways it suc­ ceeds as a poem, even a t the expense of i t s philosophy. What we have, I think, is a case of sensibility opposing and finally killing doctrine, as Pope's grasp of real experience stubbornly resists the use of such experience as a vehicle for rational abstraction. But sensibility kills doctrine only that it may assert positive values of its own, values firmly rooted in direct apprehension of the beautiful complexity of actual things (pp. 28- 9). 1 0

To evaluate this remark by Edwards that the Essay "lacks thoroughgoing doctrinal coherence" even though "still in some important ways it succeeds as a poem"; or to evaluate Brower's assertion about the poem that "we can hardly say . . . where and when it is poetry . . ♦ unless we attend to what Pope says, to his 'argument'"; or to evaluate Dr. Johnson's objections, or the objec­ tions of other critics whose sensibilities urge them to affirm Pope's artistry but to suspect his argumentation— to consider any of these views is to unravel a large question. What is the relationship between the thought and the language, between the bald propositions and the eloquent versifications of them, between Pope's arguments and his artistry? The question can be laid out in three parts. Is there some inescapable difference between philosophy and poetry? That is, does philosophizing demand some kind of logical rigorousness which poetry cannot accommodate? If so, must we then consider Pope outside his metier and concur in Samuel Johnson's Judgments "The subject Is perhaps not very proper for poetry, and the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject"? Finally, given the scope of the Essay and regardless of its discoverable merits, what general rhetorical considerations predominate? 11

We might offer a preliminary resolution of the issue thus. Poetry and philosophy are not mutually exclusive. They both fulfill the need of the thinking man to unscrew the inscrutable. Though this dissertation will contend that in Pope's Essay on Man no distinction can be made between "philosophy" and "poetry" (the highly charged, multivalent quality of Pope's language makes such a distinction meaningless), it is necessary at this point to set forth principles which broadly differentiate what we think of as philosophy from what we think of as poetry. Such a distinction will not be arbitrary though it is hazardous, particularly nowadays when the logical positivists contend that all metaphysical propositions are merely poetic anyway. Philosophy we can define as the systematic presenta­ tion of discursive propositions which aim at propounding general principles to explain the meaning of human exist­ ence. Philosophy attempts to discover truths. It is a cognitive effort, dependent on our ability to use lan­ guage to make predicative formulations beyond immediate common experience. In so doing, philosophy tries to enunciate comprehensive statements, "laws," hypotheses, or judgments which can universalize and lend discursive meaning to the fractional and disparate quality of common human experience as it is lived through or undergone. 1 2

Philosophy Is the discursive intellectualization of expe­ rience through the abstractive function of language. Poetry is an art form, and art is the symbolization of felt experience.^ A poem is an artifact and, as that word "artifact" itself denotes, a "wrought truth," a manifestation of experience undergone, comprehended, and demonstrably symbolized. A poem or any worthy artifact is an ostensive definition of a cognitive event. The best a r t i f a c t s —a poem, a p a in tin g , a symphony—always re p re ­ sent a joyous and fruitful conjunction of an artist's rational understanding, aesthetic perception, and emotion­ al fulfillment fashioned forth into a medium through craft and skill. Pope f i r s t and foremost was a poet. And as a th in k er he was sufficiently comprehensive to have never lost sight of his primary poetic aim. That is, as a manipulator of language Pope exploited tonal modulation, imagistic sug­ gestion, allusion, and sound effects—all of which neces­ sarily confect an order of meaning neither defined nor bounded by discursive, or "philosophic," statement. It is an order of meaning where the rational abstraction and orderly delivery of propositions depend upon diction emotionally and aesthetically weighted to issue forth in pronouncement such that "philosophic" and "poetic" are not qualities separate and inimical but harmonious and 13 congruent, one and the same. Maynard Mack, in h is b r i l l i a n t preface to the Twickenham E dition of the poem, affirm s the very same point several times over. For the purposes of brevity, though, the following statement can suffice. Mack has been explaining that Pope introduces numerous doctrines and arguments into his poem but that the poet character­ istically synthesizes ideas in a manner consonant with his final poetic aim. Mack continues: This is not to say that we are to expect of Shakespeare, Milton, or Pope effective refu­ tation of ethical propositions on the plane of logic and discursive reason. Poetry's habit is to take the argument to another plane altogether, where, as by the author of the Book of Job, the problem is for the moment at any rate not resolved but dissolved because the context in which we look at it has been trans­ figured and enlarged. (TE, p. lxx) Mack's generalization is sound, but it suggests rather than explains what emerges in Pope's poem. Insofar as the statement summarizes what Pope has wrought—and I believe the statement does in a sense—it is nevertheless elliptical and indefinite. Mack's mention of "another plane altogether" and of "the context" implies that there are qualities in the poem that are too intuitively grounded or perceived, too insubstantial for mere criti­ cal terminology to pin down, qualities that we can ac­ knowledge aesthetically and emotionally but which as 14

c r i t i c s we must revere in s ile n c e . Prof. Mack, a f te r all, delivers his insight with a metaphor, the vehicle of which is not concrete and particular but evanescent. Yet in defense of the statement one could say that Prof. Mack has attempted to broach a matter for which a so-called straight-forward or simple explanation might be inade­ quate. It may be that here a general principle assever­ ated by T. E. Hulme aptly applies: "Plain speech is essen­ tially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors, that is, by fancy, that it can be made precise."1^ All this notwithstanding, we are not given by Prof. Mack a clear-cut unambiguous explanation of what he per­ ceives in the Essay. We do not know, in other words, what he claims has issued forth from Pope's argument and artistry. The original nagging questions still remain: Does the Essay pretend to some kind of logical solidity of argument that it fails to deliver; in Edwards' words, has Pope "by accepting the didactic role, . . . incurred an obligation to be rational that he could not fulfill"? Or does the Essay represent something different, something other than a philosophical treatise in verse? Clearly, Prof. Mack would opt for this second question. And I agree. Whatever its presumed logical Inconsistencies, the Essay has an integrity which excludes it from the 15 kind of Intellectual analysis by which a philosophical treatise must be evaluated. Pope’s Essay on Man from beginning to end Is a con­ tinuous series of statements, questions, and hypotheses; all of which Individually considered are representable as discursive propositions. But such representations would be merely approximate, ultimately false because incqm- plete. And Incomplete because '‘meaning’1 at any point or paragraph in the poem is contingent on the form by which an idea is delivered forth. Any statements which the poem makes are inseparable from the evocative language within which an idea is both the wrapping and the gift. The idea that form is a function of content, that "meaning" derives from a convergence of ideation and ex­ pression, would seem to be a critical truism unworthy of repetition. But too often critics of Pope’s Essay have implicitly, if not downright explicitly, discussed the poem as i f i t were an amalgam of these and those d isc u r­ sive propositions which one could prosaically restate so as to sift out and measure the meaning or content for quantities of "truth" or sense. In such a manner, of course, we all approach a literary work, at least ini­ tially. We must do so, for, as Susanne Langer observes, "The affliction of literature is its relation to fact, proposltlonaltruth.We have to figure out what a 16 poem "says" so that we can begin to apprehend what It "means." Our error lies not In undertaking the reduction but in too readily allowing our skeletons of Interpreta­ tion to stand In ;place of the poet's full-bodied thought. The follow ing statem ent by Northrup Frye demands accept­ ance not only by critics of Pope but by all students of literature : For some reason It has never been consistently understood that the Ideas of literature are not real propositions, but verbal formulas which imi­ tate real propositions. The Essay on Man does not expound a system of metaphysical"’’optimism founded on the chain of being: it uses such a system as a model on which to construct a series of hypothetical statements which are more or less useless as propositions, but inexhaustibly rich and suggestive when read in their proper context as epigrams. As epigrams, as solid, resonant, centripetal verbal structures, they may apply pointedly to millions of human situations which have nothing to do with metaphysical optimism. Poetry, etymologically and in fact, is a making. Poetry confers action, order, significance, and substance onto the moods, the unstructured notions and fragmentary ex­ perience of the thinking self, matters evanescent and half-realized until poetry bodies them forth. Because any careful writer takes recourse to lan­ guage charged with nuance and suggestion in propounding his meanings, to deliver the kind of elevated pronounce­ ments which we call "philosophical" statements is neces­ sarily to appropriate non-literal language to make 17 meanings Intelligible. In other words "philosophic" statement and "poetic" statement are linguistically indistinguishable. If, then, meaning depends upon the quality of a statement, its "texture," to use John Crowe Ransom's term, and not just upon some presumed "content" that can be separated from the mode of expression by which that content is conveyed, we cannot neatly dichot­ omize "style" and "substance" as distinct attributes of a statement or proposition; nor can we very cogently dis­ tinguish between "philosophic" and "poetic" statement. We ought not criticize An Essay on Man as "unpoetic" in Its subject matter or content and as "unphilosophic" or alogical in its poetry. The spuriousness of such distinctions has been ably demonstrated by Dennis R. Hoilman in his unpublished doc­ toral dissertation, Alexander Pope1s Revisions In 'An E3say on Man1.^ Hoilman contends: "analysis of Pope's revisions reveals that seldom do they have exclusively doctrinal or exclusively poetic consequences; a change in a single word usually affects both aspects of the poem. No distinction based solely on subject matter can be drawn between poetry and prose or between poetry and philosophy" (p. 33). Common sense surely urges Mr. Hoil­ man 's conclusion, and his well marshaled evidence makes foolish an attempt to refute it. Trying to separate out 18 a presumed "philosophic" content from "poetic" assertion in An Essay on Man involves an unnecessary quandary. *n Essay on Man Pope sought to present not a systeme in poetry but rather an artistically symmetrical body of moral attitudes and philosophic assumptions re­ garding man and the human condition. Pope's remarks in "The Design" prefacing the poem are instructive: . . . I chose verse, and even rhyme, for two reasons. The one will appear obviousj that principles, maxims, or precepts so written, both strike the reader more 3trongly at first, and are more easily retained by him afterwards. The other may seem odd, but is true, I found I could express them more shortly this way than in prose itself; and nothing is more certain than that much of the force as well as grace of arguments or instructions, depends on their conciseness. I was unable to treat this part of my subject more in detail, without becoming dry and tedious; or more poetically, without sacrificing perspi­ cuity to ornament, without wandering from the precision, or breaking the chain of reasoning. If any man can unite all these without diminution of any of them, I freely confess he will compass a thing above my capacity, (pp. 7-8) Remarking here on the method and the matter of his poem, Pope employs the words "arguments or instructions" and "principles, maxims, or precepts"—words which acknow­ ledge a donne, a body of suppositions which lie behind or p rio r to the poem. In o th er words Pope lik e any w rite r seeking to explore one set of Issues asks to be granted certain assumptions. Any worthwhile "philosophizing" re­ quires argumentative progression—orderly, perspicuous 19 thought and statement* Poetry qua poetry Imposes Its own demands. It requires eloquence, unity, the delicate dic­ tion and syntax which can create and sustain the nuance which lends It peculiar power. Always aware of the precipice in the route of any argumentative line, Pope cannily shifts direction toward a complementary or an alternative issue to forestall a plunge into an assertion which outruns its evidence. He does not allow him self to be pinned by dogma, and he proffers his principles with the delicate and vivid light of imagination, "steering betwixt the extremes of doc­ trines seemingly opposite" ("The Design"). To counter critical objections to Pope's choice of subject in An Essay on Man, what can one say except that the proper subject of poetry is anything under the sun or beyond it which a poet's confecting imagination can cre­ atively light upon? One of the most famous affirmations of this principle from a practicing poet is Wordsworth's statement in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, 2 0

as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the trans­ figuration, and will welcome the being thus pro­ duced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the house­ hold of man.10 Wordsworth considered the potential subject matter of poetry to be lim itless, a view to which most critics seem to subscribe but which some fall to allow when they ad­ dress themselves to a specific poem. There is no reason to cavil at a poet's choice of material, and we certainly credit that writer who continually extends his threshold of active, creative inquiry and fashions it into a poem. As C. Day Lewis has observed: A poetry which excludes the searchings of reason and the promptings of the moral sense is so much the less impassioned, the less various and human, the less a product of the whole man at his full imaginative height.19 Two more comments on th is whole m atter of Pope's undertaking in An Essay on Man can be allowed to a scien­ tist and a philosopher, both of whom justify the intel­ lectual probings which a man may presume to engage in, whatever his c re d e n tia ls. The s c ie n tis t, Hans Z insser, includes in his Preface to Rats, Lice and History remarks aimed at disarming readers who might object to his bold and flat-footed literary Judgments set forth in his first two chapters: For our chapters and comments on m atters of lite r a r y interest we make no apologies. Although we regard them as pertinent to the general scheme of our 21

exposition, many will regard them as merely impertinent. But, In a way, this book Is a protest against the American attitude which tends to Insist that a specialist should have no interests beyond hi3 chosen field—unless it be golf, fishing, or contract bridge. A specialist—in our national view—should stick to his job like "a louse to a pig's back." We risk—because of this performance—being thought less of as a bacteriologist. It Is worth the risk. But the day has twenty-four hours; one can work but ten and sleep but eight. We hold that one type of intelligent occu­ pation should, in all but exceptional cases, increase the capacity for comprehension in general; that it Is an error to segregate the minds of men into rigid guild classifications; and that art and sciences have much in common and both may profit by mutual a p p r a i s a l . What Pope wants to appraise in the Essay is the whole scene of man. He cannot avoid the large questions, and we must allow to him what the philosopher E. A. Burtt allows to the scientist, namely that there is no escape from metaphysics, that is, from the final implications of any proposition or set of propositions. The only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing.21 In his poem Pope wants to say a great deal and Is perforce committed to a twilight threshold where the de­ mands of reason and of argumentative progression converge and meld w ith the demands of a r t i s t i c In ten t and of craftsmanship. The poet who dons the philosopher's gown does not abrogate his usual role but merely assimilates a corollary one and performs in both at once. If the philosopher's method of explanation is sequential logic, 2 2 the poet's is the figurative restatement of discursive propositions—a redefinition of premises and conclusions by means of metaphor ("metaphor" here understood as a genus word for any assertion whose sensory and connota- tive qualities overbalance a putative denotative meaning). What all this implies about argumentative method is the philosophizing poet employs a dual mode of assertion. He connects ideas through essentially denotative language in discursive statement, but when intelligibility becomes frayed, he can bind the ragged edges of argument with figurative language. A poem like Pope's Essay can be legitimately called a "philosophic poem," as a kind or genre, because it boldly addresses the large questions which eventually arrange themselves in all thinking mind3, questions of deity, of the order manifest in nature, of man's strengths and limitations as an active, willful being, and of soci­ eties claims on the self. If, however, readers willingly concede that Pope's is a philosophic poem, there is still validity in the criticism (common among us in the twenti­ eth century) that An Essay on Man is a museum of eight­ eenth-century assumptions, a catalog of bromides artfully displayed. Though he would excise the pejorative edge of such criticism, Pope would agree, for he intended the poem not as an original excursus into philosophical issues 23 but as a polished and urbane affirmation of "what oft was thought," the ethical values, the moral precepts and be­ liefs, of a long tradition of Christian humanism. Still, the poem is not a mere compendium of the thoughts of o th ers. However grounded on h is to r ic a lly common ideas and beliefs, the poem attempts a sophisticated sweep of the timeless issues regarding the human condition as the poem alternately questions, informs, confirms, hypothe­ sizes, taunts, mocks, and declares with a continuously vivid controlling intelligence. That the Essay is truly an essai in the grand neo­ classic tradition has long been noted. Samuel Johnson, to be sure, had in his dictionary tendered a definition of "essay" which implicitly denigrates this form of lit­ erature, labeling it "a loose sally of the mind, an ir­ regular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly com­ position." In our time critical views have been more complimentary. In our acknowledgment of a pluralistic moral world, we can admire—and certainly envy—the writer who boldly attempts to articulate a summary view of man's estate in a world where man too often considers himself an alien resident. Further, we can recognize An Essay on Man as distinctly an attempt or a try at the problem of verbalizing that central crisis of human-ness, the para­ dox of reciprocating identification; the awareness of 24 self as distinct from others at the same time that we discern that it is others who validate our "self." Regarding such questions as Pope's philosophic com­ petence to deliver an essay on man, or the likely literary consequences of marrying philosophy and poetry, several general conclusions are inescapable at this point. To be su re, "The proper study of Mankind is Man." A poet is a humanist seer, and his public responsibility can be dis­ charged no more su ita b ly than in a poetic essay on man. Pope's Essay is social, a poem of public affirmation. It presents points of view, men thinking—as in conversa­ tion—and the controlling voice is that of a shrewd, in­ formed, firm, and urbane speaker who knows how, with wit and precise sense of direction, "to steer / Prom grave to gay, from lively to severe" (IV, 379-80). His philo­ sophic principles and his poetic eloquence coequally de­ fine and direct his cognitive effort to "Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man" (I, 5). The style is the message; poetic expression and philosophic conception are convergent—not contradictory—attributes. They are parts of each other, like an intensive manifold. II

The voluminous commentary on the Essay delineates a historically interesting critical curve: away from a con­ cern with the philosophical bases of the Essay and toward a concern with poetic and rhetorical techniques and re­ sults. This contention cannot perhaps be insisted upon with any rigorousness. On the other hand it cannot be wholly dismissed as an untenable genera1ization, if we bear in mind a thumb-nail history of attitudes toward Pope's Essay since its publication. To Pope's contemporaries who read the Essay and won­ dered what the poet "meant" or sought to affirm, the question of Pope's intentions, as Maynard Mack has pointed out, "blurred easily . . . into the problem of his sources, since it was usually assumed that the meaning of the Essay must be approximately equivalent to that of the writers who were supposed to have influenced it" (TE, p. xxvi). Thus Leibniz, Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, and King have been variously assigned as Influences. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson's heavy critical stricture on the Essay derived

2 5 26 from his dismissal of the unoriginal thought—or vague­ ness of thought—on which he presumed the poem to rest. Johnson paid glancing tribute to Pope's expression, but he was not disposed to examine the Essay in any detail. When Wordsworth and Coleridge all>lved to declare and demonstrate a new practice and taste in poetry, much of Pope's whole poetic was too readily dismissed. Words­ worth preferred as subjects for poetry, "incidents and 22 situations from common life." He contended that rural man was emotionally, socially, philosophically, and lin­ guistically more attuned to the grand harmonies that kept the universe aright; that such a man was in his action, thought, and speech more pure and direct than other men, whom Wordsworth assumed to be sullied by the artifice and vanity of social convention. Wordsworth's bon homme was Demos. Pope's was Ariostos, the man not with a title so much as with letters, civility, taste, discretion, unnar­ rowed sympathies, and cosmopolitan scope. Demos and Ariostos cannot compatibly occupy the same shore, and the tide of the times tugged against Ariostos. He was set sailing for another locale. Coleridge acknowledged measured respect for Pope's kind of poetry, but considered it the product of an age happily passed and done with: 2 7

I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted In just and acute observations on men and manners In an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as Its form. Even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the Intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when It was a consecutive narration, asTn that astonishing product of match­ less talent and ingenuity, Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was as it were a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, or epigrams. Meantime the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the lan­ guage of poetry.23 Coleridge's remark about the matter and diction has a clear echo two generations later when Matthew Arnold de­ clared, "Lryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose.„ o h . Regarding the substance of Pope's Essay, commenta­ tors readily offered brief notices representsting no over­ ly labored attention to Pope's uses of the ideas in ques­ tion. For example, the editorial attitude of Whitwell Elwin, as Maynard Mack reminds us, was driven by Elwin's assumption that in the Essay Pope was "taking part in a conspiracy . . . to write down the Christian religion" (TE, p. xxiv). More sympathetic to Pope but not to the substance of the Essay, Leslie Stephen wrote the poem off as a literary version of "abstract deism" fashionable among Augustan aristocrats. He says that the Essay is a 28 view of life . . . in which Pope versified the deism which he learned from Bolingbroke, and which was characteristic of the upper circle generally. I need not speak of its shortcomingsj didactic poetry of that kind is dreary enough, and the smart couplets often offend one's taste. I may say th a t here and th ere Pope manages to be re a lly impressive, and to utter sentiments which really ennobled the deist creed; the aversion to narrow superstition; to the bigotry which 'dealt damna­ tion round the land'; and the conviction that the true religion must correspond to a cosmo­ p o lita n humanity. . . . Pope him self was alarmed when he discovered that he had slipped unawares into heterodoxy. His creed was not congenial to the average mind, though it was to that of . his immediate circle.25 Mr. Stephen's remarks too readily accede to an as­ sumption, and they offer a one-word sign of a corollary assumption. Mr. Stephen's statement that "Pope himself was alarmed when he discovered that he had slipped un­ awares into heterodoxy" and the further implication that the Essay presents something as unambiguous and clear-cut as a "creed," measure the difference between a nineteenth- century reading of the Essay and our own. The assumption is that Pope's seemingly abnegating and flattering letter to Warburton, in which the poet thanked the clergyman for making "my System as clear as I ought to have done & could not" can be taken at face-value as a forthright expression of humble gratitude and a frank admission that the author of the Essay had not been wholly aware of what he had authored. To counter Stephen's objections, one can as reason­ ably assume four other possibilities, (l) Pope, like any poet who has labored long and carefully to bring a work to publication, might have been more Interested In a new project than in the one just completed. Thus (2) he was happy to allow a friendly professional to fight off de­ tractors. (3) Warburton's defense, so unexpected and un­ solicited, merited a warm response from the poet; and (4) any response not patently humble, modest, and grateful might inadvertently register chilly, perhaps arrogant, indifference. As for "creed," it was a word of more reverent cur­ rency to the nineteenth century than it is to the twenti­ e th . For us the word "creed" has become too debased by the cliche "race, creed, or color" to stand current for much beyond a vague reference to a man's religion (any man's and any religion). To gentlemen of late-Victorian England, however, to a class and an age that fostered and venerated earnestness and deportment Intellectually and socially, a creed was pre-supposed in one whose intellect and conduct bespoke a serious cast of mind. The creed of any such man might be narrow or wide, but it would be there.^ It is not irrelevant that when a Thomas Henry Huxley came along and felt a rationalistic independence from conflicting dogma, he labeled himself an "agnostic," 3 0 a word that would coroe to negotiate many Intellectual transactions for later generations to whom "credence" would seem an unsophisticated acquiescence in outworn values and ideas. The remarks by Stephen were delivered as the Ford Lectures of 1903 and published the next year. They represent a Victorian critical evaluation of Pope. A bit later in this new century, however, C. A. 28 Moore’s article, "Did Leibniz Influence Pope's Essay?" evidenced that a close scrutiny of Pope's ideas had be­ come pertinent scholarship. And as late as 1929 Austin Warren could claim that his book Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist2^ was "chronologically the first of our century to treat the great poet neither as an enemy to Keats nor as a literary period piece." Pope scholarship soon began to proliferate, and it is not likely to abate much in our tim e. When in 1950 the Twickenham E dition of the Essay appeared with Maynard Mack's thorough and substantial introduction, it was evident that quick and cursory judgments about Pope's poem were no longer tenable. The serio u s reap p raisin g of Pope th a t has been going on for, roughly, the past forty years has involved not a little wrangling over Pope's ideas in the Essajl—conten­ tion over whether the poet's optimistic purview of this scene of man evokes a spirit to which we can sympatheti­ cally respond with a sense that Pope's generalizations 3 1 are still viable for our age. And what is the spirit of our age, these 1970's? Perhaps it is bewildered but un­ daunted, experimental but unsusceptible to panaceas, un- religious but without despairing that we ought to have some transcendent faith. Whatever it Is, some kind of spirit of the age will erect the premises which evaluate the success of Pope's Essay on Man as a grand poetic ef­ fort. Every age, of course, reevaluates the literary legacy of its predecessors. But if today most critics will allow that the Romantics and the Victorians were short-sighted in their views of the Essay (and of Pope's whole poetic), many of those same critics are hesitant to grant the poem the highest grade or mark as a timelessly relevant summary of the human condition. The evaluation of Pope's success as poet-philosopher must be reserved for a later chapter, however, and the Judgments will have to be personal ones. What can be remarked at this point is that critics have been increas­ ingly willing to accept Pope's ideas—whatever they might be--on faith, and to turn their attention to the ingenu­ ity, delicacy, and finesse whereby the poet measured out his commentaries on life. The direction is certainly a healthy one for the sympathetic evaluation of writings by a poet who did not seek to preempt the efforts, of meta­ physicians. Pope's primary fealty was to Apollo, not 3 2

Urania—though In his devotion to the one he paid homage to the other, as do all poets whose imaginations confect an explicable order out of the fragments and pieces of common experience. FOOTNOTES

1 The te x t of Ail Essay on Man is th a t of Maynard Mack, e(i‘ * The Twickenham E dition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ill, i (New Haven: Yale University Press, and London: Methuen, 1950). All subsequent references to this volume will be cited in my text as TE. 2 "On Reading Pope," CE, 7 (Oct. '45 - May ’56), p. 272. This essay is the printed version of an address Prof. Mack delivered before the English Graduate Union, Colum­ b ia U niversity, Dec. 13* 1944. 3 For highlights of the early reception of Pope's Essay, see TE, pp. xv-xxii. 4 Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford!* The Clarendon P ress, 1905)* III* 243.

"Pope's Essay on Man, " Philosophical Incursions into English Literature (New York, 194bJ, pp. 34-f>l. 5a*"~ 6 Cameron's article, "Doctrinal to an Age: Notes Towards a Revaluation of Pope's Essay on Man," first appeared in The Dublin Review, 225 (195177 PP. 54-67. The te x t I have used is that of the reprint in Maynard Mack-ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 196TJ, pp. 329-345. My four quotations of Cameron appear respectively on pp. 332* 339* and 342.

Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: The University oiTCansas Press,T95s* paperback edition, 1968), p. 27.

33 3 4

8 The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, Chapter vl, Shelley: Mont Blanc." This quota­ tion and the brief ones which follow appear on pp. 195- 196.

Lives of the English Poets, III, 242-243. 10 Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,T555FJ7w.“^O B ^ ------11 This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (Berkeley: Univer­ sity of fla 1 Iforn 1 a Press, 1963’), p. 28. Subsequent quo­ tations from Edwards are from this work and will be identified by page number following the matter quoted in my te x t. 12 His affirmation is certainly qualified, however. At the very end of his second chapter, "The Mighty Maze," which examines An Essay on Man, Edwards concludes on a note of grudging praise: "TTo one could deny that the poem would be better if its argument were more consistently rea­ soned, if the didactic Impulse were more cogently real­ ized. But such 'intentional' success would have taken the Essay even further from the Augustan mode's complex adjustment of ideal and actual, and the poem's poetic failure is the curious measure of its human success" (P. 45). 13 This is Susanne Danger's definition, an idea which she affirms many times. For example: "Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling," Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953; paperback edition SL 122), p. 40. 14 "Romanticism and Classicism," reprinted in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. W. J. Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc., 1970), p. 572.

1 5 Feeling and Form, p. x i. 3 5

16 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957; rpt. Hew York: "Atheneurn* 1970), pp. 84-85* 17 University of Utah, 1968. My subsequent quotations of Hoilman are all from this dissertation and will be cited by page reference in my text, following the matter quoted. 18 "Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads," The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952), II, 396-397* 19 WTrrrisrr-The Poetic Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 20 New York: L ittle, Brown and Co., 1935; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1967* P* v i l l . 21 The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York: Doubleday Anchor edition, 1954), p. 227. 22 "Preface to . . . Lyrical Ballads," p. 386. 23 Biographla Literaria (London: Everyman rev. ed., I960), p. 9 (dtiap. ±, para. 11). 24 "The Study of Poetry," Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London: MacMillan, 190377 IV, 31.

25 English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Cox & Wyman X td., l9o4j rp t. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1962), pp. 68-69* 26 L e tte r of Pope to Warburton, 11 A pril 1739* The Corre­ spondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherbum (Oxford: Vne Clarendon Press, 1956), IV, 171* 36

My generalization Is no doubt a capacious one, but I find corroboration for it in a very worthy source, Henry D. Aiken, The Age of Ideology (Boston: Houghton M ifflin Co., 1957). In his introductory chapter, "Philosophy and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century,*1 Prof. Aiken defines the philosophical climate of that age as predom- inantly ideological in character, and he concentrates his attention on explaining why the age can be described as "the age of ideology." His concluding remarks (pp. 25-26) are particularly relevant here:

Prom one point of view, the whole history of ideas in the modern age may be regarded as a history of the progressive breakdown of the medieval Christian synthesis which had been most powerfully articu­ lated in the Summas of Thomas Aquinas and most movingly and persuasively expressed in Dante's Divine Comedy. Since the Renaissance, the primary and increasingly crucial "existential problem" of man has been the adjustment of the new attitudes and ideas to the orthodox values and the tradi­ tional conception of human destiny that are repre­ sented in the medieval synthesis. From the middle of the eighteenth century on, however, the very possibility of such an adjustment came increasingly into question, and on more and more fundamental cultural levels. In the nineteenth century, many philosophers can no longer credit such a possibil­ ity . . . ; the nineteenth-century philosophers became involved in a gigantic task of ideological and cultural reconstruction which precluded the very possibility of doing philosophy in the time- honored "rational" and "objective ways which had prevailed in Western philosophy since the time of Plato and Aristotle. These philosophers could no longer simply contemplate, speculate, or reason about the nature of things, for the very frame work within which traditional philosophical contempla­ tion, speculation, and reasoning proceeded had now been shaken to its very foundations. They were involved, in short, in a prolonged crisis of reason, more profound than any that had occurred in Western culture since the original collision of paganism with primitive Christianity. 3 7

28 JEQP, 16 (January, 1917), 84-102.

Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1929$ reprinted, 1963. The quotation is frora "Foreword to the1963 R eprint." CHAPTER TWO

CRITICAL DISAGREEMENTS AND THE CASE FOR ROOT METAPHORS

I

In the second and third paragraphs of "The Design"

Pope acknowledges the complexity of the subject he has undertaken; and in remarking on the superlative efficacy of verse in expressing his ideas, the poet suggests that the question of method might be a paramount consideration in the Essay, Critics who have sought to give the Essay an unprejudiced examination have directly confronted the methodology of the poem. That is, they have sought to define either the philosophical grounds upon which Pope's argument is built; or the aesthetic principles which give the Essay continuity, order, Integrity, and design as a poem; or both. Inevitably, then, the essential critical issue which has emerged for many commentators is the question whether the Essay is logically consistent and poetically harmonious, whether Pope's ideas hold together as a more or less legitimate argument and whether Pope's

3 8 3 9 direction and control of his material devolves into an artistic whole that can be called a poem.

Some critics have denied both philosophic and poetic merits to the poem. More characteristic of the past

twenty years, perhaps, has been the tendency to by-pass

the question of logical consistency as an inscrutable wrangle, an evaluative standard by which the work of a

poet can only be measured unfairly. Thus critics have

weighted their examinations toward aesthetic matters and

have sought to define principles and patterns that will

warrant eminent claims for the Essay as a poem despite

its presumed weaknesses as philosophy. J. M. Cameron gives contemporary expression to Sam­ uel Johnson's point of view, namely that the Essay repre­ sents common ideas disguised by eloquence. Cameron im­ plicitly disparages the Essay as poetry: "Pope's method of composing the Essay, so far as we can establish it, supports the view that we are concerned with philosophy versified."1 He then goes on to examine two passages (I, 29-32, 61-68) which he believes militate against the high seriousness of the rest of the poem and in doing so represent "incoherences of argument" (p. 332). Thus Cameron cannot wholly c re d it the Essay w ith lo g ic a l con­ sistency either, though he does allow that "judged by such tests, there are few philosophical works—-perhaps none— 4 0 that would be thought by all philosophers to be of merit" (p. 334). In sum, Cameron views Pope's Essay as a verse treatise the Ideas of which do not always hang together. Primarily he criticizes the poem for tending to represent man's relationship to the cosmos not as a mystery to be embraced but as a problem to be solved ("the attitude often in control is that suggested by the word ’maze'" [p. 340]). Further, interpreting Pope's phrase "poetical ornament" (in "The Design") in a too restrictive, twenti­ eth-century meaning, Cameron considers the imagery of the poem to be ornamental, hence "incompatible with the ser­ iousness of the theme" (p. 342). Cameron tends to d ich o t­ omize the poem into thought and language and to disparage both. R. L. Brett and G. Wilson Knight have directly grap­ pled with the question of logical consistency. The former disparages what he finds; the latter applauds it. R. L. Brett alludes to a "strict empiricism" combined with "metaphysics" and rather disdains the result: The philosophy of the Essay on Man is indeed an eclectic one. Something of 7Eis seems to have stru ck Pope him self, fo r he w rites in the Design which a c ts as a preface to the poem: " If I coulcf flatter myself that this Essay has any merit, it is in steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite. ..." Logically the attempt to eat his cake and have it is doomed to failure: one simply cannot combine strict empiricism with metaphysics. Whether this implies a failure on the part of the poem must concern us later. But 4 1

we must first ask why Pope elaborated this self­ contradictory philosophy. Only when we have answered this question can we consider the "meaning" of the poem.2 Mr. Brett assumes a great deal with his terminology, and one is not being cranklly skeptical in wondering whether the terms "strict empiricism" and "metaphysics" are clear enough here so that we can see an attempt to "combine" them as the analogue to eating one's cake and having it. Empiricism is an eplstemological term. Its concern is with data, with what shall be admissible as evidence in propounding truths. Metaphysics is an onto­ logical term. It presupposes that there is, beyond phe­ nomenal reality, a ground of being about which one can predicate assertions. Pope, of course, believed that there was indeed such a ground of being; but the critic's terminology, not the poet's belief, is at issue here. The question which Mr. B re tt would ask is premature, i f not prejudged. 0. Wilson Knight is more sympathetic to Pope's philosophical efforts, perhaps effusive: In the Essay on Man we have various epistles with th e ir own, w a te rtig h t, approaches, a t le a s t two apparently incompatible philosophies being pre­ sented in balance, and yet we are not asked to choose one and reject the other, but rather to accept both, and build from them a new totality. The coherence is less logical than structural. . . . As in a drama, where truth is shadowed by con­ flicting voices, so the Essay builds from opposi­ tion a unity. . . . My whole point is, that the 42

planning, or the structure, is the philosophy; and that by such a dynamic, or dramatic, method, Pope has come near to solving the enigma of good and e v i l . 3 Mr. Knight claims that the poem structures a synthesis of incompatible philosophies to present an Intellectual dia­ logue, a dramatic act of philosophizing. That is, within the tension between opposing ideas, Pope gives drama and dynamic movement to enigm atic questions o f good and e v il. If, according to Knight, Pope "has come near to solving the enigma of good and evil," presumably the poet has done so in the sense that he presents the Issues to elu­ cidate their connections; the poet reduces the formidably enigmatic to the dialectical. In thus construing Mr. Knight's use of the word "solving," I can agree with him. But the word is still too strong; it implies an abrupt and happy dispatch of imponderables. One still has to ask at any one point in the poem what the poet values or dlsvalues, what he affirms or denies. Critical studies directed at the question of logical consistency have sometimes weighted us more with notions of what the poem is not than of what it is, and then by demonstrating compensatory excellences have intimated a note of apology—as if art in this instance stood in need of it. Of course one can concede immediately that the Essay is widely varied and eclectic in its allusions, *3 examples, Illustrations, and tropes, in its modes or methods of argumentation, and in its alterations in tone.

The heterogeneity of the poem invites the question of logical consistency.

Nevertheless, the question is misconceived because it exposes a negative edge, implying that discursive con­ tinuity of statable propositions is a. necessary quality for poetry of the Essay*s scope. But a poem is more than a treatise. Instead of delivering a sequence of abstrac­ tions, a poem emphasizes, through its grammar of metaphor, thoughts as configurations of felt experience. No con­ templation undertaken with words can be wholly devoid of moral, emotional, and aesthetic frames of reference. To theBe frames of reference a poem is directed; a poem ir­ radiates rationalistic abstraction by appeal to the con­ crete and experiential.

In his dissertation Dennis Hoilman has analyzed and classified five different strategies pursued by critics who have sought to vindicate the Essay even though they find it logically inconsistent. Because I would like to be brief here, and because Mr. Hoilman's observations and

conclusions are neither necessary nor inimical to my own argument, I shall merely list the five strategies and note within parentheses the critics with whom Mr. Hoilman

identifies the strategy in question. 4 4

1. One strategy Is to "admit Its logical deficien­ cies while singling out for praise some other aspect which, it is hoped, will compensate for Pope's weaknesses as a philosopher" (p. 14). (Sherburn and Dobree.)** 2. "The strategy of this type of defense is not to defend the poem's logic, but to admit its weak­ nesses and, by comparing it to other more strict­ ly philosophical works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of even more recent times, to show that many professional philosophers have been guilty of the same faults which the poet committed" (p. 18). (Mack and Cameron.)5 3. There is a strategy, "represented in its most extreme form by G. Wilson Knight, which also ad­ mits the poem's philosophical inconsistency, but In stead of commending i t s 'e x p ressio n ' o r compar­ ing its logical defects to those of philosophical works, praises the inconsistency as the chief virtue of its structures" (p. 20). (Knight and R ogers.)^ 4. Another is "a type of defense whose strategy is to maintain that the author's conscious intention is essentially irrelevant to the genesis, struc­ ture, or meaning of the poem" (pp. 25-26). 45

Hoilman contends that "The obvious conclusion to which It leads Is that the Essay Is a better poem than Pope, at least In this Instance, was a poet" (p. 24). Hoilman believes this strategy #4 to be a likely derivative from Mack's suggestion that the Essay might partially originate In motives within Pope which were unconsciously "felt." Thus, Bays Hoilman, "some of the meanings of the poem may not have been consciously Intended by the poet" (p. 24). Hoilman finds "the classic presentation of this position" (p. 26) in Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy." Hoilman also assigns this position to Brower and to 7 Edwards. 5. "Quite another, and less psychologically oriented, defense of the poem has been offered by D. J. Greene, Frank Brady, Geoffrey Tillotson, and others" (p. 28). The direction of this tack is to consider the Essay an "essal" or, In Samuel Johnson's phrase, "a loose sally of the mind." Concomitantly, then, the poem Is viewed not a3 a treatise "but an essay in the 'Epistolary Way of Writing' [Pope's phrase], and, as such, it neither demands nor properly allows a 'sound logical structure' [Greene's phrase]," (p. 29).® 4 6

Hoilman finds fault with all five of these strategies In that they entail the forced acceptance of some presumed disparity between Pope's thought and his language. In his study of Pope's revisions in the Essay, Hoilman's inten­ tion— in which he very well succeeds— is to demonstrate that the revisions clearly reveal Pope's simultaneous con c e m with both thought and language, with both ideas and expression.

Other critics have attempted to vindicate the poem by conflating aesthetic and philosophic Issues. Maynard

Mack and Ernest Tuveson have commented lucidly on the

Essay, explaining both the philosophic and aesthetic rationale for Pope's stress on acts and data of vision.

Mr. Mack has stated that we should expect in the poem "a particular balance of the concrete and universal" (TE, p. Ixxvil). Such a balance inheres because "the aspect of objects that is mainly decorous to his theme in the

Essay, is their relation to, their place in, the cosmic order ..." (TE, p. lxxviii). Pope's aim in his poem is to induce us to acknowledge the perceptual basis for this cosmic order. As Prof. Mack explains:

Popevs subject is not the visible universe but the intelligible manifested in the visible; the concreteness that he is concerned with is not of objects as individuals but of conceptual wholes in which objects are arranged— and where Keats's "coming musk-rose filled with dewy wine" would be as out of place as "Die of a rose in aromatic pain" 47

would be out of place in the "Ode to a Nightingale.11 (TE, p. lx x v lil) To this statement by Prof. Mack, Ernest Tuveson has offered an amendment. In an essay which argues that Pope was doubtless Indebted "to that Lockean model of the mind which became standard even before the second decade of the century was out," Prof. Tuveson avers that he would amend Mack's statement to read: Pope's subject is "the intelligible composed of the visible," and the poet is concerned with "not . . . objects as individuals but . . . objects so arranged as to compose conceptual w holes."9 Pope, in other words, seeks to represent the Invisible in terms of the visible, the idea in terms of the thing. Of the technique of the Essay as a whole Tuveson says that Pope . . . would attempt to select and present in an effective, clear, and harmonious way the very "simple ideas" of which the complex ideas—even the idea of God—are themselves composed. We would move, not up a scale of increasing intel­ lectuality, but across, bringing more and more of experience within the view of the understand­ ing, so that eventually the whole pattern, like a panorama at first puzzling, would assume a re­ cognizable pattern. Thus the poet would assist us in doing what each man can do by himself—but usually does not—to "abstract" by selecting and Isolating key impressions, and to place them before the "considering" understanding.10 In short, Pope's analogical reasoning in the Essay en­ tails the marshalling of data which can stand for con­ ce p ts, the d e lin e a tio n of phenomena which can Id e n tify k Q noumena. In a later article1* on the same subject Prof. Tuveson minimizes the Lockean assumptions of the Essay In order to stress Pope's common-sense and practical approach and, thus, the poet's likely Intention in his poem. Prof. Tuveson quotes from "The Design" Pope's remarks which indicate the poet's intention to take a limited purview of his subject, in Pope's words the "large, open, and per­ ceptible parts." Tuveson then poses a question and a reply to explain the relationship between image and idea of the Essay: How would this kind of thinking about man's mind affect the technique of a moral philosopher in verse? Pope would aim, i t seems to me, a t a poem of a kind that he would think had not been written before: one working always with and from the sim­ ple perceptions of experience, chosen for their representative quality, and eliminating so far as possible the gulf between those ideas and reasoning. He would avoid as much as possible intellectualizlng, "ratiocination," as Bolingbroke puts it. He would, on the contrary, seek to compose h is p rin c ip le s from the groupings of the ideas, derived from experience and observation, that would Impress themselves on the mind of an impartial and wide-ranging student of nature and man. His aim would be to expand the range of experience, by widening the horizons of observation, even while emphasizing the inherent limitations of the senses and hence of understanding. . . . The figures would be simple, direct, of what Bolingbroke, in a discussion of this question, calls a peculiarly "corporeal" nature: we must try to make the intellectual world seem clearly visible, like these objects which we most fully apprehend in the world around us.3-2 49

Pope's attention to perceptual detail has been con­ sidered by Patricia Meyer Spacks to have been an aesthet­ ic choice dictated by the poet's desire for thematic unity rather than an Inevitable concomitant of a philo­ sophical assumption. The philosophical issue Prof. Spacks deliberately by-passes. She Intends to avoid the argumentative quiddities which, in their examination by some other critics, have tended to fragment the Essay for ) readers who accept the judgments of those critics: An Essay on Man, like An Essay on Criticism, has suf feredTecause of iFs subjecIT”matter. Hike the e a r l ie r poem, i t is ric h in memorable quota­ tions, and its content too has provided material for scholarly controversy. Is its philosophy commonplace? Are its inconsistencies reconcil­ able? The question of whether it is really a poem at all has been relatively neglected until recently, when the commentary of Maynard Mack, Reuben Brower, and Thomas Edwards has called attention to some of its poetic brilliancies. But brilliancies alone do not make a poem. Since M artin K a llic h 's attem pt to reveal a coherent structure of imagery in the Essay was only a dubious success, the problem re­ mains of defining its sources of poetic (as op­ posed to philosophic) coherence. Seen as part of Pope's sequence of experiments in control, the Essay on Man represents an attempt to use the powers of human perception, physical and metaphysical, both as subject matter and as organ­ izing device. The concentration on perception and its objects provides for the poem exactly the kind of coherence that has often been denied by its critics. A single aesthetic approach organizes the wealth of detail and of idea incorporated in a loose philosophic framework.*3 Prof. Spacks reductively groups all the large philosophic issues into "metaphysical perception," cognition that is 5 0 the Immediate correspondent of physical perception. Prof.

Spacks's starting point Is legitimate, and In considering a "concentration on perception and Its objects" as the poet's expeditious way of organizing material, she has a fruitful approach for examining the Essay as a poem uni­ fied by an explicable technique.

Nevertheless, large questions remain; a problem Is not resolved by setting it aside. If, as Prof. Spacks maintains, "A single aesthetic approach organizes the wealth of detail and of Idea incorporated in a loose philosophic framework," what is "the wealth . . . of idea" thus loosely incorporated? What does metaphysical perception consist In, enabling it to be used along with physical perception "both as subject matter and as organ­ izing device"? If the Essay is indeed sustained by mere­ ly "a loose philosophic framework," is the bpdy of idea truly a "wealth"? Or Is It a scintillation of aphorisms too general to be wholly denied or affirmed, not specific enough to warrant close scrutiny, and curious for histor­ ical reasons but devoid of substance beyond the age that gave birth to this "wealth" of idea so blandly dismissed?

Pope surely believed that he dealt with momentous ideas, that he could produce "a temperate yet not incon­ sistent, and a short yet not imperfect system of Ethics."

Unless the word "system" has no meaning whatever, unless 5 1

his well-fashioned poem unwittingly scuttles his stated IntentIon, his Essay must manifest some plan, some prin­ ciple , some order, sequence, and result. Pope, It Is clear, delivers an argument; no critic denies this. But to deliver an argument Is to proceed upon premises, and not very many critics have bothered to ferret those out. Maynard Mack's twenty-flve-year-old "Introduction" to the Twickenham Edition is s till the cynosure of commentary for explaining the biographical, historical, and intel­ lectual background; the aesthetic principles of Pope's poetry in general and of the Essay in particular; the / range of attitudes and beliefs that informed Pope's most considered convictions; and the essential contour and substance of those convictions as they evince themselves in the poem. This present study, it is hoped, will add one more dimension to criticism of An Essay on Man by explaining two essential premises underlying the poem. One more recent study must be acknowledged first, Douglas H. White's Pope and the Context of Controversy: The M anipulation of Ideas in 'An Essay on Man' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Mr. White's concern is with the climate of the age that nurtured the Essay. His technique is to examine writings on issues which parallel Pope's, thus to explain contemporary attitudes toward ideas th a t Pope ranged among. His th e s is is to 52 accept as forthrightly descriptive the statement of Pope in "The Design" that he was "steering betwixt the ex­ tremes of doctrines seemingly opposite." And not the least interesting of Mr. White's illuminating dlsoussion is his discovery that Pope's "manipulations are rather w ittily carried on by granting to extreme arguments their premises while denying their conclusions or by granting their conclusions though denying their premises" (p. 9). In sum, Mr. White fully establishes what he set out to do, explains heady issues with perspicuous erudition, and quite solidly grounds a concluding generalization: "The notion that Pope merely dressed and decorated ideas that he neither understood nor appreciated seems, in the con­ temporary context that I have outlined, quite untenable" (p. 193). II

Pope's remark In "The Design" prefacing the poem that he sought to form "a temperate yet not inconsistent, and a short yet not imperfect system of Ethics" helps to provide a rationale for those critics who have raised the question of logical consistency. Pope's remark does, after all, claim for the Essay a didactic intent; and thus the poet's philosophic arguments can warrant examina- for their legitimacy. Pope's remark also invites the reader's forbearance, however; the poet suggests that he was clearly enough aware that his subject was hedged by obstructions. Pope's era was strained by what, in an­ other context, Alexandre Koyre has called "the replace­ ment of the teleologies1 and organismic pattern of think­ ing and explanation by the mechanical and causal pat­ tern."^ This dissertation contends that these two pat­ terns underlie the poem and that they are represented by two divergent metaphoric hypotheses, transcendent formism and discrete mechanism.1** These are "world hypotheses," fundamental assumptions about the primary order of the universe. Each one amounts to a configured image of the

5 3 54 world, and one configuration necessarily legislates against the other, for such is the cognitive function of metaphor.

These hypotheses, pushed to their farthest limits, are Incompatible, and they necessarily generate incompat­ ible argumentative premises. But within the poem they are sufficiently harmonized by Pope's skillful maneuver­ ing to enable the poet to raise, examine, and logically deliberate upon the philosophical questions regarding God, nature, and man as those questions framed themselves In the early eighteenth century.

Pope accepts the phenomenal universe of process, change, and chance; of birth, growth, and physical anni­ hilation; his donne is the real world. But he questions our grasp of it. Pope acknowledges the split in our un­ derstanding between the ,world "out there" and the human mind which attempts to understand It. It is this prin­ ciple, the split between mind and world, that underlies the whole poem and legitimizes a fundamental feature of

An Essay on Man: its reliance on contrary metaphysical hypotheses.

The assumption about the world is that "All is One."

The world In its plurality and diversity of species com­ prises a single harmonic order created and directed by

Divinity. 5 5

The assum ption about th e human mind i s th a t "One is Two." Man's mind consists of two alternative principles, self-love and reason. Ideally working in harmony ("Self- love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain"), they in fact in all men subsist in ..perpetual Imbalance, thus produce discord in all human lives. Summarily speaking, Pope's cosmological hypothesis entails a principle of identification and his psycholog­ ical hypothesis entails a principle of differentiation. Each one points to an underlying metaphor, and the two metaphors together represent fundamental philosophical predicates of the poem. To be sure, Pope's concerns with cosmology and with psychology are primarily contained in Epistles I and II respectively. Elsewhere in the poem Pope ranges across matters social, political, moral, and ethical—matters ultimately relatable to but necessarily different from cosmological and psychological specula­ tions and assumptions. But the metaphors are, in effect, analytic or cognitive tools by which Pope examines "all this scene of Man." The one metaphor is that of sim ilarity and it im­ plies the total Integration of distinct and disparate species in the phenomenal world into a hierarchical ar­ rangement of types or forms which ultim ately comprise a universe. The other metaphor is that of a simple machine, 5 6 like a lever, which implies fields of Immediate cause and effect, action by contact. These tvro metaphors underlie respectively the two metaphysical hypotheses fundamental to th e whole poem Ari E ssay on Man. F ollow ing th e f r u i t ­ ful suggestions of Prof. Stephen Pepper, I call these hypotheses "transcendent formIsm" and "discrete mechan­ ism . " The contrariety of these two hypotheses accounts for the eclecticism In the poem. I shall state my thesis thus: In An Essay on Man the shifts in modes of argumen­ tation, the subtle alternations In tone, and the wide and various allusions and Illustrations derive from a dual-- and disjunctive—mode of reference, "transcendent formism" and "discrete mechanism." In demonstrating his conten­ tion that "order Is Heav'n's first law" and that objects In the phenomenal world are signs or examples of meta­ physical forms, Pope relies on a formistic hypothesis— metaphysical assumptions consonant with Platonic and Neo- platonlc and Christian doctrine and a long tradition of Renaissance humanism. On the other hand, in explaining reasons for man's discomfort and irrationality, and In explaining inter-relationshlps in the earth-bound human community, Pope relies on a mechanistic hypothesis—meta­ physical assumptions about Immediate patterns of contigu­ ity, of action-reaction. 5 7

The form istic and mechanistic hypotheses are two of the six world hypotheses—metaphysical first-principles from which philosophizing proceeds—which Stephen C. Pepper has examined by a root-metaphor analysis. Of these six hypotheses, formism and mechanism have been the most seminal in Western intellectual history, at least un­ til the advent of a systematic science of biology and of electromagnetic theory in post-Newtonian physics. Pepper distinguishes two species of formlstlc theory, immanent and transcendent. Immanent formism is a response to the common-sense recognition of exactly similar phe­ nomenal objects. It generates the analytic categories of (l) characters, (2) particulars, and (3) participation. To use Pepper's example, in the statement "This is yel­ low," "this" represents the uncharacterized particular; "yellow" the unparticularized character; and "is" the "participation of each in the other to produce the object" (p. 154). What is most immediately Important about im­ manent formism is that there is "a powerful cognitive instrument which is generated by the participation of characters in particulars, namely, the concept of class" (p. 159). What Pepper means by "class" here is what we mean in common parlance when we use the word to denote a grouping of objects according to an acknowledged prin­ ciple of likeness—or sim ilarity. "Class is simply a 5 8 name for a specific operation of the three Immanent cate­ gories, an operation completely analyzable Into the func­ tioning of these categories. A class is, accordingly, a thoroughly real thing, but what Is real Is the function­ ing of the categories" (p. 162). Transcendent formism Is a more complicated hypothe­ sis because of what the root metaphor of sim ilarity en­ t a i l s : The common-sense or prim itive root metaphor of transcendent formism comes from two closely allied sources: the work of the artisan in making differ­ ent objects on the same plan or for the same reason (as a shoemaker making shoes, or a carpen­ ter making beds), and the observation of natural objects appearing or growing according to the same plan (as crystals, oak trees, sheep). Plato stressed the artisan, Aristotle the natural growths, but the categories achieved along this route are the same.(p. 162) Pepper's examples above suggest the pertinence of the label "transcendent." Whether with a made thing or a natural object, an Imputation of sim ilarity presupposes an ultimate version, or archetype, or plan—In short, a norm. And a norm is not wholly revealed In the object which participates in the norm. Rather, the norm tran­ scends the object. The root metaphor of transcendent formism, then, is that of plan and material. The categories of transcendent formism are:"(l) norms, (2) matter for the exemplification of the norms, and (3) a principle of exemplification which materializes 5 9 the norms" (p. 163). Pepper points put that "the only Important difference between the Immanent and the tran­ scendent categories lies in the first category. Both sets recognize a category of (1) forms, a category of (2) the appearance of these forms in nature, and a category of (3) the connection between the first and second categor­ ies" (pp. 163-4). Pepper differentiates a norm (the first category of transcendent formism) from characters (the first category of immanent formism) by explaining that "a norm is a complex set of characters" (p. 164). Pepper considers the question of whether there is actually any evidence for norms or whether they are just fictions and hence a delusive substitute for the immanent formlstlc categories. He cites a few commonplace ex­ amples—"the shoemaker's norm of a good pair of shoes, the nature lover's norm of an oak tree"—and goes on to assert that there is "evidence that norms seem to be used or presupposed in much of the basic work of empirical scientists" (p. 165). Pepper then sets forth examples from biological and physical science to conclude: "The obvious interpretation of all such facts is that there are norms in nature, just as Aristotle observed" (p. 166). Pope in much of his poem depends upon the metaphysi­ cal hypothesis of transcendent formism. He describes, notably in Epistle I, an ordered universe wherein the 6 0 full array of individual species perceptible to men tes­ tifies to our analogical recognition of a hierarchical arrangement of physical entitles and spiritual forms, a universe "Where all must full or not coherent be, / And all that rises, rise in due degree" (I, 45-6). Quite different from the formlstlc hypothesis, which posits a universe of spiritual forms or norms and phenom­ enal entitles, is Pope's mechanistic hypothesis through which he theorizes about cause and effect patterns in the immediate world. The root metaphor of mechanism, as pre­ viously noted, is that of a simple machine like a lever. Pepper defines the mechanistic categories by examin­ ing the operation of a lever—a bar, two weights, and a fulcrum—to explain that such a model clearly reveals both the suggestiveness and the peculiar difficulty of the mechanistic hypothesis. In the first place the mech­ anism has qualities capable of unambiguous description in exact quantitative terms. That is, such primary consid­ erations as the weights of the objects placed on the bar, the length of the bar, the location of the fulcrum under­ neath the bar, and the functioning of the whole mechanism are all matters of exact scientific explanation. Second­ arily, however, are matters not similarly accountable. Such possible phenomena as the colors of the weights, their textures or hues, or the odor of the fulcrum or the 61 bar are qualities Inhering in the whole mechanism, how­ ever Irrelevant those qualities might be to the function­ ing of the mechanism. Accordingly, then, the mechanistic hypothesis distinguishes between primary and secondary categories and generates the following series: Primary categories: 1. Field of location 2. Primary qualities 3. Laws holding for configurations of primary qualities in the field (primary laws) Secondary categories: 4. Secondary qualities 5. A principle for connecting the secondary qualities with the first three primary or effective categories 6. Laws, if any, for regularities among secondary qualities (secondary laws) (PP. 193-4). What such a conceptual model implies is that of a process working itself out within a space-time field of activity. Further what is implied is a pair or group or series of discrete entities coexisting in some kind of contiguous relationship. Finally, the idea of a "pro­ cess" or a "relationship" between or among entities im­ plies an operational principle or a "law" governing the interaction of contiguous entitles. At this point a brief comparison of the root meta­ phor of transcendent formism with the root metaphor of mechanism can suggest the radical difference between the two world views which issue from the basic conceptual 6 2 models represented by the root metaphors. Transcendent formism, with Its assumption of sim ilarity between plan and material, envisions a universe of things partaking In the essence of their transcendent forms. Starting from the premise of similitude it can deduce, by analogical reasoning, a moral and a spiritual order from a natural order, ultimately harmonizing All Into One created and sustained by a Deity who Is “the first Almighty Cause" (I, 145). Mechanism, with Its assumption of discrete ob­ jects Interacting within a delimited field according to some law, envisions a universe of objects In motion through time and space and regulated—according to the Newtonians—by laws mathematically definable. If one pushes this conceptual model further—something that Newton and his fellow Christians sought to avoid doing- one can hypostatlze the discoverable mathematical laws Into a self-sustaining ontological first principle and thus render God irrelevant to the universe. Summarized in terms of their root metaphors, the two hypotheses discussed above are strikingly dissim ilar. Indeed Stephen Pepper cites as one of the principles of his study: "Maxim II: Each World Hypothesis Is Autono­ mous. Pepper's maxim would surely seem to have prlma facie validity, for to drive a mode of philosophizing down to the rock bed of Its original conceptual frame, 63

Its root metaphor. Is to offer up for Investigation a picture the major details of which determine the routes of thought. The root metaphors which Pepper identifies and examines may be rudimentary, but their ramifications are cosmic; they Issue into "world hypotheses." I have summarized Pepper's World Hypotheses to ex­ tract the most Important details of his analysis and to give Intelligible definition to the terms I use. I trust that my summary does not distort Pepper's discussion, of which I omit much. I have not, for example, distinguished between "discrete" and"consolidated" mechanism, though in his chapter on mechanism Pepper does do so, giving more emphasis to the latter. But Pepper makes clear, first, that the conceptual model of a lever and the analytic categories which ensue from it suffice as a description of the root metaphor for either species of mechanism. Secondly, consolidated mechanism is a species of this world hypothesis notably emergent with electromagnetic theory, an advance in physics foreign to the world of Pope's poem and not worked out until the researches of James Clerk Maxwell (most important among others). Hence I have not noted the distinction In my pages. As I shall contend In this dissertation, An Essay on Man rests on contrary metaphysical hypotheses. But the concomitant eclecticism in the poem is neither a sign of 64

"philosophic failure"—that is, an unwitting and deep- seated inconsistency that critics must "excuse" in a poet who sets up as a philosopher—nor a sign of Pope's com­ mitment to "poetic expression"—that is, a bland unconcern for logic under the benign protection of poetic license* With Pope's ideas, as with any man's, any two, three, or four of them pushed to their lim its would probably reveal inconsistencies. But Pope, as he reminds us in "The De­ sign," sought to steer "betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite" in order to deliver for thoughtful men succinct and intelligent commentary on some of the volatile ideas of his time and place. As a poet and thinker he maneuvers with adroit assurance, always aware of the limits of logic, of the weight that any proposi­ tion can plausibly support. In a word, the contrariety of his two metaphysical hypotheses he resolves in a man­ ner that is logically legitimate and artistically skillful and sound. FOOTNOTES

1 "Doctrinal to an Age: Notes Towards a Revaluation of P o p e 's Essay on Man," p . 331. 2 Reason and Imagination: A Study of Form and Meaning in Four Poems ^'London: Oxford University Press, 1966)7 p7~57. 3 Laureate of Peace: On the Genius of Alexander Pope (New York: Oxford University Press, 19$$)> p. 17u. 4 George Sherbum, A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York: Appleton-Tiehtury-Crofts, Inc, 1948); Bonamy Dobree, E n g lish L ite r a tu r e in th e E arly Eighteenth Century, vol. VII of the OxforT~History or English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, wm. 5 Maynard Mack, "Introduction" to the Twickenham Edition; J. M. Cameron, "Doctrinal to an Age . . . ." 6 G. Wilson Knight, Laureate of Peace . . . ; Robert W. Rogers, The Ma.lor Satires^oF^Alexander Pope, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, !K£ (Urbana: Uni­ versity of Illinois Press, 1955).

W. K. Wirasatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," first published in the Sewanee Review, 54 (Summer 1946), reprinted in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, l9f>4; New York: Noonday Press, 1965); Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion; Thomas R. Edwards, This Dark Estabe.

65 6 6

8 D. J. Greene, "'Logical Structure' In Eighteenth-Century Poetry," PQ, 31 (July, 1952), 315-36; Prank Brady, ed. An Essay on Man (The Library of the Liberal Arts, TndianapoTTs: Hobbs-Merrill Co., 1965); Geoffrey T illot- son, On the Poetry of Pope (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1938); and Pope and~Tfuman Nature (Oxfords Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 195b ).

"An Essay on Man and 'The Way of Ideas,'" ELH, 26 (September, 1959), 368- 86. The first quotation is on p. 368, the second on p. 372. 10 Ibid., p. 373. 11 "An Essay on Man and 'The Way of Ideas s' Some Further Remarks, (April, 1961), 262- 69. 12 Ibid., p. 268.

An Argument of Image3 (Cambridge: Harvard University H*e'ss7 1971)> p. 41. 14 "Preface," From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957; Harper Torchbook edition, 1958), p. v.

15 The terminology Is that of Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press,“T942; paperback edition, 1970). Prof. Pepper examines the metaphoric predicates of six fundamental philosophic assumptions, or "world hypo­ theses," that he considers representative of Western thought: animism, mysticism, formism, mechanism, con- textualism, and organicism. I shall be using Prof. Pepper's terminology in this dissertation, and all of my quotations of Pepper derive from the book cited above and w ill be identified in my text by page number following the statements which I quote. 6 7

16 Pepper sets forth and discusses four maxims, pp. 96 f f . The first, third, and fourth maxims are as follows: Maxim I A World Hypothesis Is Determined by Its Root Metaphor Maxim I I I E c le c tic ism I s C onfusing Maxim IV Concepts Which Have Lost Contact with Their Root Metaphors Are Empty Abstractions. CHAPTER THREE

TRANSCENDENT FORMISM AND DISCRETE MECHANISM IN THE ESSAY

I

Pope and his contemporaries confronted a dilemma— in the root sense of that word, a "double proposition." On the one side Western Christendom had for centuries taught that the world was "A mighty maze.' but not without a plan" (I, 6); that "All are but parts of one stupendous whole" (I, 267). On the other side science had been teaching men to analyze the whole in terms of Its parts, to account for phenomena by empirical Investigation of simplest elements, "the latter related temporally as ef­ ficient causes, and being mechanically treatable motions of bodies wherever it is possible so to regard them."1 Briefly, then, Christianity urged men to venerate the divine synthesis; science urged men to undertake analysis, thereby generating knowledge about the world. Pope as a philosophizing poet who sought to summar­ ize what his era knew and to define the boundaries of

68 69

Intellectual certitude was obliged to consider alterna­ tive truth claims. Christianity declared the universe to be divinely ordained, hierarchically ordered by God to the fulfillment of His plan for creation. Christianity taught man to admire the magnificence of God's manifold creation, to acknowledge that In the interdependence of all living things there was order In variety, and in the apparent cycles of seasons, flora, and fauna there was a teleology: place, purpose, and destiny, with parts sub­ servient to the Whole according to God's Inscrutable choice. Christianity gave man a grand synthesizing view: m ultiplicity dissolved into the divine unity of some far- off cosmic event. Science gave man an analytic view of the world of sense impression, personal memory, social intercourse, and the historical record attested by books. Science urged man to "measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides" (II, 20). Christianity carried the imprimatur of rich tradition and superlative moral value. Science justified itself by manifest and cumulative success with mathematical-mechanical explanation. In Pope's day the old teleology and the new mechanism existed side by side. Pope and his contemporaries exper­ ienced—in the words of Alexander Koyre again—"the re­ placement of the organismlc pattern of thinking and ex­ planation by the mechanical and causal pattern.11 Whether 7 0

Pope was aware that the two modes of thinking were con­ tradictory at their most fundamental level seems unlike- 2 ly, but he was fully aware that the ideas of his day were rife with contradiction. He sought to reconcile them in a way that would be contradictory neither to that Christian Renaissance tradition to which he paid alle­ giance nor to that spirit of scientific investigation—so brilliantly exemplified in Newton—which had revealed the broad claims to be made for mechanistic causal explana­ ti o n . Early in the Essay on Man Pope gives expression, in separate but juxtaposed paragraphs, to these alternative truth claims, the teleological view and the scientific view. The two views are represented by root metaphors— respectively, transcendent formism and discrete mechan­ ism—and throughout the Essay the formistic and mechan­ istic metaphors alternate as fundamental predicates of Pope's philosophical analysis. Pope was a man of his age, when transcendent formism and discrete mechanism were alive and well and wedded and bedded together, however tenuous the union may have been. Not even Locke recog­ nized that empirical reasoning, predicated on mechanistic assumptions, was inconsistent with metaphysical probings predicated on the formistic assumptions of analogical reasoning. Pope was, however, a shrewd enough thinker and 7 1 dialectician to do much more than versify some philo­ sophical commonplaces. In writing the Essay Pope surely recognized that he was ranging widely over the grounds and the evidence for what his era understood about existence, broadly con­ ceived; purposeful direction in the universe; the sources, nature, and lim its of human knowledge; the characteris­ tics of human behavior; and the relationship of the indi­ vidual to society. These are respectively ontological, teleological, epistemological, psychological, and ethical and political issues. In broaching these issues Pope w ill appeal variously to sa priori assumption, syllogistic reasoning, received tradition, historical and contempo­ rary example, and common sense. And he will vary in his manner of presentation "From grave to gay, from lively to severe" (IV, 380). What underlies Pope’s argument at all times is the conviction that a survey of man's relation­ ship to nature, to others, and to his own interests is a serious and worthy undertaking, one which deserves an earnest and spirited examination, eschewing both lugubri­ ousness and blithe superficiality. This chapter w ill sustain these judgments by demon­ strating how Pope navigates on choppy seas of thought with a sure sense of the hazards of the voyage but a clear vision of the destination which makes the trip 7 2 worthwhile. Pope uses the charts of other voyagers but is a shrewd captain of his own soul and recognizes that good navigation requires keeping a weather eye open for squalls, tempests, and the potential problems of badly- charted regions. It Is no doubt wise to push this navigation metaphor no further, especially considering that this dissertation is a root-metaphor analysis demonstrating how Pope's con­ ceptions are largely controlled by two contrary metaphors; they themselves w ill require close exposition. This whole subject of metaphor can serve, however, to Introduce one problem that needs to be cleared away before we examine the passages introducing transcendent formism and discrete mechanism, a problem that emerges in the poem prior to Pope's root metaphors. I refer to the Great Chain of Being as an analogue or metaphor or, more properly, a synecdoche exemplifying the created world. Pope Introduces the Great Chain of Being at the end of section I of the first epistle and in doing so he abruptly poses both a conceptual problem and a rhetorical one: Is the great chain, that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee? (33-4) The conceptual problem resides in the fact that Pope alludes for the first time to a distinct philosophic 7 3

theory, the great chain of being. The rhetorical prob­ lem is latent in the couplet's interrogative form. A question presupposes an answer—even though an answer might not be Immediately forthcoming—and a question in a discourse represents a speaker's intention of establish­ ing a coign of vantage from which to Introduce and dis­ patch the respective points at issue, and of directing the whole argument economically and comprehensively. The conceptual and the rhetorical problems are hardly sepa­ rable, however, given the nature of this or any other poem; and for his first reference to the great chain of being Pope supplies an ambiguous context. There is a literary precedent for Pope'3 reference to the great chain, as the Twickenham note to these lines indicates; but to follow a precedent is no proof of final commitment to the idea at issue. The Essay on Man is another text, with its own integrity; and a brief allu­ sion is rarely, if ever, a casual one with Pope. The convergence of a conceptual and a rhetorical problem within the couplet epitomizes the issues under­ taken in the epistle as a whole. Pope must present a cogent series of assumptions and premises and then demon­ strate their legitimacy. The forceful imperative which w ill open Epistle II, "Know then thyself, presume not Qod to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man," is 7 4 validated by 294 lines of argument in Epistle I which ex­ amines proper and Improper uses of human intellection. Pope identifies the argument of Epistle I to be that "Of the Nature and State of Man,with respect to the UNIVERSE." He roust, therefore, present an intelligible and verifi­ able synecdoche of the universe in order to make explic­ able man's relationship to it. That the great chain of being is such a synecdoche is the problematical—and only problematical or hypothet­ ical—postulate of JU. 33-4. In the question, "Is the great chain, .../... upheld by God, or thee?" the participle "upheld" is an Instance of syllepsis and it engenders two distinct implications, for the great chain cannot be "upheld" by man in the same sense that it is by God. By man the great chain is upheld—"believed in" or "conceived"—as an intellectual model, a figure of speech, a synecdoche for the comprehensive order and process of the universe. By God the chain is upheld ontologlcally. He has created all being and ordained its harmonious co­ herence. The couplet, with its dual force of "upheld" and its interrogative form, implies something further. The question warns us not to assume that the intellectual model is identical with the actual mystery to which it r e f e r s . 7 5

Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau have argued convincingly that Pope Is not committed to the doctrine of the great chain of being. "In Its traditional sense, the Great Chain of Being Is not the dominant doctrine In Epistle I of An Essay on Man. Pope Is not thinking of the Great Chain In terms of plenitude or continuity and 3 Indeed denies some of its presuppositions." One presupposition of the traditional theory Is that the cosmic order Is a necessary order. God, in effect, had no choice but to create the order that he did create. Contrary to that Idea is the Newtonian concept that the cosmic order was created by divine w ill. God could have imposed another order, had He chosen to do so. In the view of Newton and his followers, God created the uni­ verse, and He exercises upon it a continuous, providen­ tia l sustaining power, a power manifest in such mathemat­ ically deducible principles as that of gravitation. According to Nicolson and Rousseau, Pope became acquainted with these Newtonian concepts during 1713 when the poet's interest in astronomy was excited by the cof­ fee-house lectures of William Whlston. To corroborate their remarks about Pope and the great chain Nicolson and Rousseau quote P. E. L. Priestley who asserts £ propos

I , 247-58 s 76

The context here is primarily that of the astro- theologian. The "amazing Whole" is that of earth, planets, suns, "world on world," held In a system of orderly motion. When Pope describes the way in which, In the "amazing Whole," "each system in gradation" rolls, he Is clearly using "gradation" In a quite different sense from that of the Great Chain. The "dread Order" he here pictures as being broken is that observed by the astronomer. . . . The catastrophe Pope describes so vividly is precisely the same as that which Newtonians like Whiston ascribe to the suspension or with­ drawal from the Universe of the "continued exer­ cise" of the Divine and Immaterial Power upon which Its order depends.** Nicolson and Rousseau summarize: There is little question that the magnificent first'E pistle of An Essay on Man would never have been written had ^ope not HearTlrfhlston1s coffee­ house lectures. As we know from his early letters, what most Impressed him was the astounding extent of cosmic space, the worlds on worlds that make one universe.5

Given, first, that Pope’s reference in 11. 33-** to the great chain is suggestive but ambiguous; and given, second, convincing arguments by Nicolson and Rousseau and Priestley that Pope was committed to doctrines contrary to the traditional great chain theory, one must acknowl­ edge that this couplet warns us against assuming that Pope glibly accepted ready-made formulations. The couplet is a quizzical pause demanding that we search elsewhere for legitimate principles underlying the structure of the cosmos. Here we must summarize these Introductory points re­ garding Pope's philosophizing. As a man of his age Pope 7 7 was obliged to accommodate two modes of analysis which, finally, are contradictory, though it is unlikely that Pope or his contemporaries, generally, were fully apprised of the contradiction: (1) the traditional Christian syn­ thesis which saw all parts of the universe as hierarchi­ cally ordered constituents of a divinely directed Whole and (2) scientific empiricism which urged and reaped suc­ cess in the examination of cause and effect relationships between contiguous bodies in the phenomenal world. Both modes of analysis comprised the metaphysics of the age and Pope, writing a poetic summary of man's understanding of his role and place in the world had to account for the Christian view (essentially teleologlcal) and the scien­ tific view (essentially ontological with little, if any, implied rejection of the Christian teleology). Pope did not just parrot maxims and assumptions floating around at the time, though, for we can see in his reference to the great chain of being both a rejection and a qualified acknowledgment of that ancient concept. One more point must be made before we examine the passages which introduce transcendent formism and discrete mechanism. If Pope tenders suspicion that the great chain of being is a legitimate ontological principle, he nevertheless believed with his era that man is not wholly cut off from knowledge of God's cosmic order. Prom his 7 8 limited view man has available to him evidence for legit­ imate metaphysical probing. Pope believed with his era that analogical reasoning enabled man to derive metaphys- ical truths. Faith in the efficacy of analogical rea­ soning rested on the assumption that man must be allowed to have some empirical evidence for arriving at divine truth. This assumption was qualified by the acknowledg­ ment that because man is finite and God infinite, between the created and the creator there is an absolute gap so that species or things are only the phenomenal manifes­ tations, the type or similitude, of the divine. Analogical reasoning is the cognitive method of the formistic hypothesis: physical things are reagents of in­ visible formsj perceptible data are predicates of meta­ physical knowledge. Appropriately enough, then, through­ out Epistle I and Indeed the whole Essay Pope lays great stress on objects of sight and on the act of perception which reveals to man the physical evidence for metaphys­ ical knowledge. One historian of the Augustan period has remarked that "until the nineteenth century felt its ro­ mantic intoxications the deeper emotions were stirred rather through the eye. It is what the Augustans saw more than what they heard that reveals their nature."^ Data apprehended by the eye w ill, of course, be especial­ ly important to an age that declares a poem to be a 7 9 speaking picture, the verbal analogue to a painting. Such writings on optics, as those by Newton and Berkeley, also testify to Augustan preoccupation with sight as a cogni­ tive mode. With the formistic hypothesis as a starting point Pope can appear to be following an empirical method o f p h ilo so p h iz in g , c o n s tru c tin g a w orld-view from common- sense data. The categories for analysis are Immediately available to sense perception, because the variety and m ultiplicity of living things, so apparently interdepen­ dent, testify to a nature of broad order and harmony, even though each individual of a species has but a limited span of life. In 11. 43-50 and 11. 51-60 of Epistle I emerge the two hypotheses, transcendent formism and discrete mechan­ ism. Each of the hypotheses rests on a root metaphor, and the respective root metaphors generate successive assumptions. Transcendent formism centers in 11. 43-50s Of Systems possible, if 'tie confest That Wisdom I n f i n i t e m ust form th e b e s t, Where all must full or not coherent be, And all that rises, rise in due degree; Then, In the scale of reas'ning life, 'tis plain There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man; And all the question (wrangle e'er so long) Is only this, If God has plac'd him wrong? Here the poet tells us that there are perceptible and im­ perceptible species harmonized along a graduated scale of increasing complexity to comprise a universe and not a 80 pluriverse. The assumptions generated by this formistic hypothesis and either explicit or Implicit In the lines quoted above are the following: 1. Among the different species of plant and animal life there are varying levels of complexity, complexity of organic constitution and of need and function In the natural habitat of each o organism . 2. Phenomena are the predicates of noumena. 3. Given, then, a "scale" of living things, there must be correspondingly a scale of spiritual form s. 4. A cause must always be adequate to an effect.^ For every existent entity and for every occur­ rence in the phenomenal world there must be a. priori an agency with as great power as or of greater power than the entity or occurrence engendered. In effect, then, there must be an eventual ascension to a First Cause capable of engendering all existent entities, material and s p i r i t u a l . What is Immediately noticeable about Pope's lines is that they allude very compactly to a complex and broad set of propositions, in fact, that they assume Immediate assent on the part of the reader (they were, of course, 8 1 well known In Pope's day). In a mere four couplets Pope defines the principle of cosmic order, and such brevity is telling. He Intends us to accept, without arguing, fundamental assumptions about the universe. Dispatching those, he directs our attention quickly to man and man's estate. This passage is wholly consonant with the major thrust of Epistle I: to forestall metaphysical specula­ tion and to hold our attention to Issues regarding man immediately. The poem is, after all, an essay on man. Lines 43-50, quoted above, have been well explicated by a Twickenham note which spells out the set of proposi­ tions which Pope wants to circumscribe for argument. Briefly stated, Pope's lines concede the validity of the principles of sufficient reason (i.e., that the universe is a divinely rationalistic plan, that it is the "best" work o f "Wisdom i n f i n i t e " ) and th a t th e harm onic p r in ­ ciple of the universe consists of fulness, continuity, and hierarchical arrangement of created beings. Significantly, however, what is fact Pope makes hypo­ thetical, and what is hypothetical he assumes to be fact. Pope introduces the postulates within a conditional sen­ tence, the independent clause of which, 11. 47-8, sustains an order of validity which is not at all contingent upon the conditional—the "if"—clause.' That is, we need no arcane argumentation to tell us that man exists. And to 8 2

query whether "There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man," making that possibility contingent—even though only grammatically contingent—upon the existence "Of Systems possible, . . . / Where all must full or not co­ herent be, / And all that rises, rise in due degree," is surely to foist an ironic reversal which renders spurious what it purports to accept. The cautious Twickenham note that "A hint of humour may lurk in 1^. 48" may certainly be affirmed. Through irony, then, Pope bends the argument in the direction he wants it to take: we should not presume to scan the heavens but to consider man. Pope deftly side­ steps metaphysical quiddities and maintains poise and aplomb in the face of intricate postulates. Two more de­ tails are noteworthy here, and both are contained in the couplet which concludes the paragraph: And all the question (wrangle e'er so long) Is only this, if God has plac'd him wrong? When we pursue all these Issues, we merely "wrangle"; we hamstring ourselves without harrowing out the truth. But the matter we must confront is not what metaphysical qual­ ities among "systems possible" make up our world, rather the question is whether man is wrongly placed. In 11.43-50 Pope describes the cosmic order. Its attributes of ful­ ness, coherence, and hierarchical arrangement are analog­ ically derived, but analogical method is most notable 8 3 when by an a fortiori Ironic shot, Pope identifies as the significant and meaningful issue for analysis that of man's place in the cosmos. Pope suggests that man speculates amiss to question the grand cosmic order. Yet it is the nature of man— aware of burdens, toil, suffering, and inevitable death— to seek a meaning in the fate he must bear. Accordingly, the poet tells us that the question man would ask is whether "God has plac'd him wrong." In 11. 51-60 when Pope addresses the issue of man's place, his argumentative method noticeably shifts. Where­ as in the previous paragraph his argument moved by a ser­ ies of hypotheses which assumes sim ilitude between per­ ceptible species and imperceptible forms, in JL1. 51-60 he employs a mechanistic analogy, comparing man to a machine in order to suggest how man's efforts effect his purposes: Respecting Man, whatever wrong we call, May, must be right, as relative to all. In human works, tho' labour'd on with pain, A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain; In God's, one single can its end produce; Y et se rv e s to second to o some o th e r u se . So Man, who here seems principle alone, Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown, Touches some w heel, o r v erg es to some g o a l; 'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole. The above analogy of man and a machine is different in kind from the analogy posited in the preceding paragraph. Here what is implied is a discrete separation of parts. 8 4

Nan's efforts ("a thousand movements") and his "purpose" are aligned like weights at opposite ends of a lever so that an exertion at "movements" would effect a reaction at "purpose." Another kind of machine image also emerges in these lines. In view of Pope's later use of clock Imagery, notably in II, 59-60, one Is tempted to say that the machine is a clock, given several details: "human world" (53)# "a thousand movements" (54), the statements th a t man "a c ts second" ( 58) and "touches some wheel"(59), and the idea that man sees but a part, not the whole. But whether man is likened to a lever or a clock or both at once, the implication which intrudes is the same: the human world is imagined or deemed somehow Independent of God's providence; terrestrial man directs his own life by the laws of his own volition Just as a machine conforms to its own laws of motion whatever else may transpire be­ yond. Such an Implication does not receive the weight of Pope's emphasis, however. Pope would like to Insist that the universe is a teleologlcal construct Impenetrable by man who is only a part of the whole. Accordingly, the passage mutes its mechanistic hypotheses; the metaphoric lineaments are minimal and imply a tentative acknowledg­ ment that the mechanical images might not fit the cosmic fact. The passage has a neutrally expository tone, and 8 5 with the juxtaposition of "may" and "must" implies that conjecture and hypothesis are immediately overborne by logical necessity. The subsequent "seems" and "Perhaps" also Impart hesitant notes so that the final line sounds a flat declaration: "'Tls but a part we see and not a w hole." With these two passages respectively Pope has adum­ brated two fundamental and very different hypotheses. In 11. 43-50 he cleverly advances the formistic hypothesis by an «a fortiori argument which assumes as "given" what would seem to require proof—namely, that there exists a graduated scale of species and transcendent forms harmo­ nized into a "full" universe. And he represents as ques­ tionable or hypothetical precisely that which common sense calls a fact—namely, that man exists. In 11^. 51-60 Pope advances the mechanistic hypothesis by comparing man's efforts and purposes to machine movement. But Pope in ti­ mates clearly enough that his analogy is merely approxi­ mate. There is not in this passage the bold cleverness of the preceding paragraph, and one might wonder whether Pope felt uneasy about his own hypothesizing here. Despite his use of a mechanical analogy, Pope was no deist or mechanistic philosopher and would hardly seem comfortable with that common analogy favored by many of his contemporaries, the universe as a cosmic clockwork 8 6 and man as a minor Interior gear. To Pope the universe and man were spiritualized entitles, not mechanistic ones. Nevertheless, the mechanistic hypothesis was vitally alive In Pope's day, and no man wholly escapes the Intel­ lectual prepossessions of his time and place.10 Leaving aside the large question of where the formis­ tic and mechanistic conceptions emerge in intellectual history or whether Pope would even have perceived them as root-metaphor hypotheses, we can plausibly enough assume that Pope, like any philosopher, will proceed from a few a priori assumptions, ones which he can expect his inter­ locutor or adversary to assent to. The knottiest problem in reading the Essay is figuring out at any one point just what it is that Pope is affirming or denying and the degree of that yea or nay. There are two guiding princi­ ples we can hold to, however. One is that Pope will more readily emphasize man's intellectual failings than his strengths and will assume that there is a large margin of error in any human formulations about the world, for Pope repeatedly insists that man has not only a limited grasp but also an arrogant pride urging him to try to exceed that grasp. The other principle to bear in mind is that the Essay is a poem which assumes an audience; there is hardly a "simple" assertion in it, and poetic and rhetor­ ical considerations must always be invoked. II

Epistle I must be examined In some detail, for, as Patricia Meyer Spacks observes, "The lines of the drama sketched In Epistle I help to shape subsequent epistles as well."11 Because this epistle necessarily represents the broadest part of Pope's whole subject In the Essay, Its arguments warrant close scrutiny, at least up to the point where Pope's overall plan can be seen to emerge. There are other reasons for directing special attention to Epistle I. Dennis Hoilman has observed that the manuscript ver­ sions of Epistles II, III, and IV contain extensive anno­ tations from which the "Argument" for each of those epis­ tles was composed; further, he has observed that these annotations "did exist at an early stage in the poem's history and thus helped to shape and structure Its devel­ opment ..." (pp. 324-5). With Epistle I, on the other hand, the "Argument" was undoubtedly drawn up after the composition of the epistle as Indicated by "(1) the ab­ sence from the manuscripts of any notations related to it,

8 7 88 and (2) the fact that, when first published, Epistle I lacked the 'Argument1 which appeared in all subsequent editions" (p. 235). Hoilman considers it an "attractive hypothesis . . . that until assured of its favorable re­ ception, Pope had no wish to burden his anonymously is­ sued and informally titled Essay with the formal trappings of an 'Argument,' which by its mere presence might seem to contradict his modest claim that this was an 'essay*— •a trial account,' a 'loose sally of the mind'" (p. 236). After witnessing the success of the first edition of Epis­ tle I, "Pope might well have felt encouraged to claim more for the Essay than he had dared at first and, cer­ tainly, the presence of the 'Arguments' gives the impres­ sion that the poem is more formal, that the subject is more serious, and that the development is more systematic than the title would imply" (p. 236). At any rate what is demonstrable is that "in the published versions, the last three epistles received much less rearrangement, in fact, much less revision of all kinds, than had Epistle I. It is not clear how much of this was due to other factors—their less sensitive doctrinal content, Pope's fading interest, their generally less complicated subject m atter—and how much was due to the guiding influence of the marginal glosses" (pp. 236- 7). 8 9

Hoilman'8 evidence and analysis Invite the conclu­ sion that with the first epistle the poet labored care­ fully to establish the broad principles of the poem, thus to cue the arguments for the three subsequent epistles. That Epistle I is central to the whole Essay on Man Is the conclusion of H. E. Hughes, who demonstrates that Its argument follows "the traditional oratorical frame­ work:"12 exordium, 1-16; narratio, 17-42; probatlo. 43-112; refutatlo, 113-280; peroratlo, 281-294. Hughes asserts that "the second, third and fourth epistles are all built on the foundation of the first; furthermore, each succeeding epistle contains an argument first stated in the opening epistle." In his brief article Hughes does not push his argument forward to any great detail except to Indicate Pope's topical concerns In each of the five parts of the classical rhetorical formula, and to cite passages in Epistle I which Introduce Ideas that the poet will amplify in the subsequent epistles. Hughes sees the first epistle as Pope's effort to establish an eplstemology which emphasizes the lim itations of man's Intellectual reach. Hughes's division of the first epistle warrants agreement. For example, his assignment of the probatio to 11.43-112 Includes the two passages where Pope pre­ sents the formistic and mechanistic hypotheses—his 9 0 ontological premises, plus all of section III in which Pope addresses himself to an epistemological considera­ tion essential to the poem. Several obvious features of the Essay establish for the poem a dramatic stance, a sense for the reader that he is following a conversation—or, more precisely, the half of a dialogue in which the poet addresses an inter­ locutor. The frequently recurring questions, the impera­ tive mood verbs and, of course, the direct addresses to Bolingbroke which open (I, 1-16) and close (IV, 373-98) the poem enable Pope to delineate the issues and marshal his arguments on his own terms while imparting a sense of 13 on-going and wide-ranging discourse between gentlemen. Pope begins on an exuberant note inviting his inter­ locutor, Bolingbroke, to deliberate with him on the nature and fate of man. In announcing parenthetically that "Life can little more supply / Than just to look about us and to die," Pope implies that we can see and observe but we can understand little ; we can examine phenomena and find matter for speculation, matter not wholly comprehensible but necessarily engaging and momentous. We will confect an essal, a try or attempt, probing the possibles. Pope seeks to "expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man," a subject whose dimensions he implies by designating them with a series of antitheses which bracket an unknown 91 somewhere between the opposites yielding it the only iden­ tity it can have. In lines 6-8 Pope introduces, either explicitly or im plicitly, three of the four major premises underlying not only Epistle I but the poem as a whole: namely that, (1) the universe is ordered: (2) all subsists by elemen­ tal strife; concordia discors is the ruling principle of the cosmos; and (3) pride is man's primary sin and source of despair. (The fourth premise, that physically and intellectually man is fitted for his place in the world, emerges shortly hereafter.) Pope's "scene of Man" is alternately A mighty maze.' but not without a plan: A Wild, where weeds and flow 'rs promiscuous shoot, Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. (6-8) The reference to "plan," to the motley of "weeds" and "flowers," and to a "garden tempting with forbidden fruit" pick up respectively the suggestions of universal order, concordia discors, and man's aboriginal sin of pride. Maynard Mack quotes Pope's post-publication annotation of 11. 6-8 indicating that Pope "at some point came to think of the passage as applying to his larger plan," of a ser­ ies of moral essays. Pope's remark notwithstanding, my above commentary indicates that, regarding these lines, I agree with Prof. Mack: "It Is equally possible to 9 2

Interpret these lines (as perhaps they were originally composed) in the context of the Essay alone" (TE, pp. 12- 13, n . 6 ). Another motif underlies the opening paragraph con­ sisting of these and the rest of the first sixteen lines- namely the hunting imagery: Pope represents philosophic excursus as a sport and exercise: Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Polly as it flies, And catch the Manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; But vindicate the ways of God to man. (9- 1 6) In lines 17-32 emerge two assumptions that are cru­ cial to Pope's argument throughout the poem, one about reasoning method and one that God exists. The first of these is the eplstemological premise of the formistic hy­ pothesis. It is the assumption that analogical reasoning is a legitimate mode of cognition, the means of adumbrat­ ing the natura naturans in the natura naturata. This assumption is implied in the couplet (17-18): "Say first, of God above, or Man below, / What can we reason, but from what we know?" Considered from the point of view of strict logical requirements and demands, this assumption is the most vulnerable one in the whole Essay. To those critics who would discredit Pope's philosophizing, one 9 3 must concede that the poet's effort to predicate a spir­ itual order and hierarchy on phenomenal data Is a pre­ sumptive method that is historically Interesting but log­ ically Illegitim ate. Pope's error, however, was excus­ ably that of his time and place. Or, more exactly, the error was central to much of the thought In the Christian West until David Hume exposed it through his writings. l ii David Hume's signal legacy to Western thought was to demonstrate that human reasoning can claim absolute cer­ tainty only in stating the relations between Ideas. That Is, our minds can manipulate propositions or they can manipulate symbols, and in so doing we can attain the cer­ tainty of logical demonstration. But the certainty which we thereby arrive at has no connection to the facts of this world, i.e ., with existence and process In phenom­ enal reality. For facts about the world we have to rely on experience, sense-perception, introspection, and accu­ mulation of data which can lead to inductively based knowledge. But such knowledge can only achieve probabil­ ity of varying degrees, never certainty. Of the old on­ tology, s till considered legitimately demonstrable by Pope in the Essay and by many writers and thinkers prior to Hume, F re d e ric k C opleston rem arks: 9 4

A philosophical system which possesses absolute certainty and which at the same time would give us Information about reality and be capable of indefinite extension through the deductive dis­ covery of hitherto unknown factual truths is a w ill-o'-the-w isp.15 The other of Pope's assumptions in the verse para­ graph comprising 11. 17-32 is slipped in disarmingly. In the couplet (21-22), "Thro1 worlds unnumber'd tho' the Ood be known, / 'Tls ours to trace him only in our own,” Pope affirms the existence of God by delivering that pos­ tulate in a subjunctive construction following the adverb of concession, "tho1." Grammatically, a subjunctive ("tho' the God be known") after a though or although ex­ presses an admission or a concession not as a fact but as a supposition. Were Pope to have employed the Indicative is instead of the subjunctive be., he would have posited a putative fact instead of a supposition; and the rhetori­ cal difference between fact and supposition is signifi­ cant. The former calls attention to itself as an asser­ tion warranting demonstration, or at least corroboration or amplification. The supposition "tho' the God be known" implies the affirmation of a minor point easily conceded to and not subject to quibble. The premise that God exists underpins the whole Essay, and in this muted half- line delivery of that premise we see a tactic character­ istic of the poem. Pope minimizes emphasis on any 9 5 contention which Is a sine qua non to a line of his spec- ulatlve argument. Pope wants to Insist that we are limited In our ef­ forts to know, and In 11. 17-32 where the poet begins to lay out his argument the Idea of human lim itation Is cen­ tral. Dennis Hollman, having studied the revisions, says of these lines: "In the revised version there Is a grad­ ual Intensification of tone from the straight-forward, if slightly patronizing, tone of the questions with which the passage begins to the scornful irony with which It ends" (pp. 260-1). He remarks further that "the progres­ sion of thought In the passage Is not logical but emo­ tional" (p. 262). Pope lays out the boundaries of his argument with 11. 17-32, beginning with two questions contained in the first two couplets, which are then followed by four coup­ lets amplifying the Issues; and the paragraph closes with two parallel questions comprising the last four lines (29-32). Pope's argumentative boundaries entail anti­ thetical terms, God and man: Say first, of God above, or Man below, What can we reason, but from what we know? Like so many of Pope's couplets this one amounts to a matrix wherein key terms are disposed to multiply and re­ inforce cross references, inviting an alignment of the 96 verb "reason" with God and the verb "know" with man. This couplet 1 have previously discussed for Its Implica­ tion about analogical reasoning. In contrast to the verb "reason," the verb "know" would seem to Imply that our understanding of man is direct, an implication reinforced by the next couplet which suggests that what we can know of man depends on what we can see of him: Of man what see we, but his station here, Prom which to reason, or to which refer? This question Is a corollary to the couplet which has pre­ ceded it, bringing our angle of vision from God to man. And in such downward focusing the poet implies that our speculative reach in such matters is limited, an idea re­ inforced by "station." As denominator of place "station" implies both apportioned demesne, duly and fittingly granted; and restrictive locale, necessarily occupied. This is the first of numerous references in the poem which undercut pride of intellect by reminding man that his pur­ view is limited. "Station" as restriction undercuts pride of intellect, but "station" as apportioned demesne implies that our limited locale is wholly consonant with the scheme of things. These two couplets suggest the last of the four major premises identified previously, namely that physically and intellectually man is fitted for his place in the world. 9 7

Basically the verse paragraph represents an argumen­ tative deduction moving in three stages which, however, cannot be viewed as a single syllogism. The first three couplets enjoin the necessity of analogical reasoning; we must look for God on our own planet. The next three coup­ lets comprise a single sentence which asserts, In effect, that philosophical certitude Is contingent upon Impossible conditions: He, who thro’ vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, What vary'd being peoples ev'ry star, May te ll why Heav'n has made us as we are. (23-28) There seems little doubt that Pope intends these lines I r o n ic a lly . To " p ie r c e ," " s e e ," and "observe" th e Immen­ sity beyond our planet is too magnificently outside of human scope. Prof. Mack remarks: Pope's passage is im plicitly a reply to Lucretius's celebration of Epicurus . . . as a mortal whose mind, defying religion, did pierce through vast immensity . . . and beyond the universe . . . to reach a godlike knowledge of why we are as we are. Pope's MS. version of 23-4 explicitly echoes the Lucretlan passage. (TE, p. 15* n. 23) Yet Epicurus's certitude could have been only putative not actual, consisting in the testimonial of one pagan to another. In his fame, however, Epicurus stands apart from most men, presumptuous perhaps, but for Pope a good example to heighten the insistence of the question that 98 fo llo w s s But of this frame the bearings, and the ties, The strong connections, nice dependencies. Gradations Just, has thy pervading soul Look'd thro1? or can a part contain the whole? (29-32) In considering the diction in this passage Maynard Mack's note helpfully suggests the wide sweep of the poet's allusiveness. "The pervasive figure here seems to be blended of architectural, hierarchical, and astronomi­ cal allusions" (TE, p. 16, n. 29). Pope brings together in one brief passage hints of specialized knowledge con­ tainable not even in the mind of a polymath. What Pope would seem to be alluding to here in the first two and a half lines is a comprehensive, underlying order, a com­ plex unknowable directly, hence ontologically indefinite. In the mention of "strong connections, nice dependencies, / Gradations Just," the emphasis falls on the attributes "strong," "nice," and "Just"—each a single accented syl­ lable. It might be pushing too hard at a speculative point to assert that in this series of six nouns and three adjectives Pope is suggesting a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the former the "macro­ scopic properties of bodies that are of a geometrical and l 6 dynamic sort," the latter the humanly apprehendable properties. 9 9

At any rate, the question "has thy pervading soul / Look’d thro’?’1 has an ironic edge, "Pervading” suggests that power of understanding which Christian philosophers like Aquinas called intellectus, a power of comprehension which belonged to angelic intelligences. Although the human soul somewhat participates in that superhuman In- tellectus, human understanding is more fully represented by ratio, the power of discursive, logical thought.1? Man does not have a pervading soul, but the second part of Pope's question, "can a part contain the whole,” is more problematical. In the penultimate paragraph of the Essay, IV, 361-372, the answer to the question is a partial "yes," In view of what immediately follows in this first epistle, however, the question implies a "no" and seems to be directed to force the acknowledgment of unanswerable complexities. Further along, in line 60, the poet insists "'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole." With the disjunctive question posed by the one- couplet paragraph, Is the great chain, that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee? (33-34) the poet directs the argument upon grounds other than the ontological presuppositions of the great chain theory. What those grounds open up to be is evident in the next two couplets: 1 0 0

Presumptuous Man.' the reason wouldst thou find, Why form'd so weak, so little , and so blind.' First, If thou canst, the harder reason guess, Why form'd no weaker, blinder, and no less.' (35-38) In addressing man as presumptuous the poet throws him Into a defensive posture Isolating for his scrutiny a "harder" question, a question which in the words of the Twickenham note Is harder "In being a less congenial ques­ tion for pride to resolve, and in view of man's unworthi­ ness to have come off so well" (TE, p. 18, n. 37). By t h i s p o in t in th e poem Pope has s e t f o r th some general principles of what we can affirm, and he has dis­ posed of—or at least called into question—what we can not presume to broach. With the next two verse para­ graphs (43-50 and 51-60) emerge the two metaphysical hypo­ theses, transcendent formism and discrete mechanism. These verse paragraphs were examined at the beginning of this chapter to demonstrate how the hypotheses are couched. Their significance, briefly restated, is that with the formistic hypothesis Pope is able to posit a gradu­ ated hierarchy of species comprising a cosmic system in ti­ mately linking material and spiritual entities, kind with kind, up to God, the creator of all being. Discrete mech­ anism insists not on similitudes but on differentiation. This hypothesis presupposes a pair or group or series of 1 0 1 discrete entitles Interacting because of some law Inci­ dent upon their contiguous relationship within a limited space-time field. Transcendent formism is Pope's ration­ ale for arguing that ultimately "All are but parts of one stupendous w hole, / Whose body, N ature i s , and God th e soul" (I, 267-8). Discrete mechanism is Pope's rationale for explaining immediate patterns of action and reaction In man'3 earth-bound existence. When in line 60 Pope avers that "'Tls but a part we see, and not a whole," he is insisting that our direct knowledge is limited to a recognition of contiguous rela­ tionships evidenced by sense experience and empirical data. The grand cosmic whole man can know by humbly acquiescing in the fact that he has no angel's sight but that the grand design is good and it is divine. Man can never see the whole, however. The distinction between part and whole in JL. 60 echoes the famous passage in I Corinthians XIII: 12, as Maynard Mack points out, and "is of course fundamental to theodicy" (TE, p. 20, n. 60). But with the mechanical implications of the whole ten-line paragraph the line takes on mechanical overtones to reinforce the idea that man, in his place, role, and understanding in this ter­ restrial existence, is hedged round by laws of mechanics and efficient causality. 1 0 2

Nevertheless, Pope believed that nan and the uni­ verse were Imbued with spiritual qualities; they were not reductively definable by mechanical laws. Thus these im­ plications of mechanical necessity are translated Into other terms, Into analogies In the two subsequent verse paragraphs which exemplify man's need to submit to forces too immense for puny man to comprehend. In 11. 61-8 man's ignorance of his role and state Is likened to the inability of horse and ox to comprehend the treatment rendered them. Horse as symbol of pride and ox as symbol of dulness imply that man's comprehension of his own fate is veiled by delusive pride on the one hand, limiting dulness on the other. The horse and ox are animal analo­ gies of the two parts of man's nature, the active and the

iQ passive. Further, the differentiation of man Into a duality of active and passive forms exemplifies the poet's conception of terrestrial existence as involving contin­ gencies of impulse and act or action-reaction, a mechan­ istic conception. The comparison of man to animals deni­ grates and dismisses man's claim both to mastery and to an understanding of his own worth and estate in his ter­ restrial experience. Man's eminence, then, is minimal; but the paragraph ( 11. 69-76) which concludes section II affirms the fitness of man's lowly worth—this not in the terrestrial but in 1 0 3 the cosmic sense: Then say not Man's imperfect, Heav'n in fault; Say rather,Man's as perfect as he ought; His knowledge measur'd to his state and place, His time a moment, and a point his space. If to be perfect in a certain sphere, What matter, soon or late, or here or there? The blest today is as completely so, As who began a thousand years ago. (69-76) With the explicit reference to time, space, and sphere, Pope's analogy here is astronomical. The analogy also entails a principle not of differentiation but of identi­ fication. What is predicated of man is not activity or process but rather being; man is likened to an astronom­ ical body, temporally momentary and spatially minute. But if man's space is a mere point, a point is nevertheless the center of a sphere, the figure of perfection. What there is of man's eminence, however, derives not from his own aspiration, potentiality, and achievement but from the boon granted by heaven. His worth is not a function of his own being but of heaven's benign bestowal. To summarize, in section II of Epistle I Pope first Insists that we are limited and Ignorant; and, in our quest to know, presumptuous (35-^2). Second, to define the nature of the universe Pope has posited a cosmic or­ der characterized by continuity and hierarchy among mate­ rial and spiritual existences, and a fulness of life ne­ cessitating the placement of man within the cosmic order 1 0 4

(43-50). Third, Pope demonstrates that man's terrestrial experience evidences patterns of contiguous actlon- reaction, the necessary relationship of part to whole de­ spite man's teleological ignorance (51-60). Fourth, Pope implies that though man is necessarily circumscribed by laws of efficient causality, man is himself not mechani­ cally governed but rather subject to analogous differen­ tiating qualities in his own being, the active and the passive; and he is deluded and demeaned by his pride and his dulness (61-68). Fifth, Pope declares that man is not just a lowly terrestrial animal with a consciousness but rather a being potentially blest within the eternal harmony of God's magnificent cosmos (69-76). By the end of section II Pope has established what we can call his ontological premises. His next step— which brings to a close the heady, theoretical part of his epistle—is to establish an eplstemological premise essential to his poem. Though Pope has already quite ex­ plicitly declared that our cognitive capabilities are limited (11. 17-42), he delineates in section III a tele­ ological rationale for the fact of human lim itation and forthrightly argues that man's happiness is contingent upon his ignorance "to a certain degree," fundamentally an eplstemological proposition. 1 0 5

Pope's aim in Epistle I Is to forestall metaphysical speculation, to limit those issues so fondly pursued by "First Philosophers" and to direct attention Instead to moral Issues appropriate to an essay on man. Neverthe­ less, Pope has committed himself to considerable metaphys­ ical hypothesizing, and such a commitment is inevitable in any attempt to survey "the Nature and State of Man, w ith re s p e c t to th e UNIVERSE." In section III Pope argues that man's "happiness de­ pends on his Ignorance to a certain degree.V Our under­ standing reaches no further than the present, but limited knowledge is a boon because it precludes knowledge of our fate. Implicit in 11. 77-90 is the idea that man's u lti­ mate fate is rightfully to be feared and good not to know. Pope mutes that implication, however, by shifting his ground to declare that our future bliss—not horrible demise—is unknown (1. 93: "What future bliss, he gives not thee to know"). Death is the "great teacher," and in place of knowledge we have hope. In short, to get around the issues which he has raised regarding the relationship of ultimate knowledge to present condition, Pope shifts the emphasis. Our end or "Fate," which in 3L1. 77-80 implies a doleful doom comes to mean in jl. 93 probable bliss. Hope as a succedaneum for knowledge is given further vindication in the two 1 0 6 couplets which conclude this paragraph: Hope springs eternal In the human breast: Man never Is, but always To be blest: The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come. (95-98) Man, living in Ignorant "dis-ease" (because his soul is "confin’d from home"), meditates fondly upon after-life. The passage on the Indian (99-112) is all one sen­ tence down to 1,. 108, a sentence which designates no ac­ tion of which the Indian is truly an agent. This fact renders intelligible the Twickenham note: "There is irony directed against the Indian . . . as well as against proud Science" (TE, p. 27, n. 99). The Indian is a crea­ ture passively acquiescent. Having an "untutor'd mind," he imputes visions and voices of divinity to clouds and wind. Yet he is clearly intended by the poet to exemplify more than does the civilized man a proper and reasonable— if less rational—acceptance of his condition and estate in God's universe. Lacking the striving arrogance of civilized man, the Indian feels that "To Be, contents his natural desire" (.1. 109). Naive and simple in his faith, the Indian arrogates to himself no comprehension of God's divine order but merely accepts it. After section III Epistle I embroiders the general theme that man is endowed with attributes adequate to his role and estate but that his pride impels him to strain 107 arrogantly beyond his Just lim itations (sections IV through VIII). Man In his pride is rollsome to himself (113-122), impious in his presumption (123-130), absurd in his conceit (131-172), unreasonable in his laments (173-206), blind to his status! in a justly arranged hier­ archy (207-232), insubordinate in his role (233-246), and potentially destructive In the grand scheme of things (247-258). In the first of three sections which drive toward the peroratio of Epistle I, Pope describes in section VII a graduated scale of faculties which testify to hierarch­ ical ordering of nature. Prom extremes of sense percep­ tio n among some an im als, n a tu re bestow s ru d im en tary i n t e l ­ ligence in higher animals (the "half-reas'ning elephant"), and finally true reason in man—all representing divinely appointed limitations of faculties to sustain nature's graduated ordering of being. Pope's mention of "barrier" (jL. 223) and "th' Insuperable line" (JL. 228) to distin­ guish animal intelligence from human indicates that he commits himself in 11. 223-232 not to some of the standard notions of the chain of being but rather to traditional theology which insists that man differs from animals not Just in degree but In kind. In section VIII Pope introduces the chain of being concept more affirm atively than he does anywhere else in 1 0 8

Epistle I, but In doing so he does not accept the concept In Its traditional sense. To begin, the poet enjoins ob­ servation and survey, a recognition of the extent of life: See, thro1 this air, this ocean, and this earth, All matter quick, and bursting into birth. (233-4) Ours Is a world of being ("quick") and becoming ("bursting into birth"); ontologically the created world consists of potentiality and actualization. It Is full too: Above, how high progressive life may g o .1 Around, how wide.' how deep extend below.' Vast chain of being, which from God began, Natures aethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect.' what no eye can see, No glass can reachJ from Infinite to thee, Prom thee to Nothing— (235-41) In the first couplet here the implicitly circular sweep of such a purview and the reference to three dimensions 19 invoke the image of a globe. The succeeding lines de­ scribe our world as marked by fulness and gradation ("progressive life"). But Pope supplies no indication that the fulness in this world is the traditional concept of plenitude which presupposes the necessary actualization of all possible existences. Similarly, though Pope posits a hierarchy of species, his statements merely Imply a very full series of kinds of existence—i.e ., presumably with a "leap" from one kind to another. He does not accept the illogical and traditional concept of an absolute 109 continuum of qualities linking, unbrokenly, each kind to another, ad Infinitum. A. 0. Lovejoy has best expressed the Ulogic of the latter notion, which Is not Pope's: Wherever, in any series, there appears a new quale, a different kind of thing, and not merely a different magnitude and degree of something common to the whole series, there is eo ipso a breach of continuity. And it follows thaF tne principles of plenitude and continuity—though the latter was supposed to be implied by the former—were also at variance with one another. A universe that is "full," in the sense of exhibiting the maximal diversity of kinds, must be chiefly full of "leaps." There is at every point an abrupt passage to some­ thing different, and there is no purely logical principle determining—out of all the infinitely various "possible" kinds of differentness—which shall come next.20 In the remainder of the first paragraph of section VIII, 11/ 2*H-6, Pope represents the chain of being as static and rigid, each "link" necessarily stationed such that movement of any one being or "pow'r" might dishar­ monize creation: On superior pow'rs Were we to press, inferior might on ours: Or in the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroy'd: Prom Nature's chain whatever link you strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. Few metaphysical postulates could be as unhappy as this one, were it applied as a rule of life. It enjoins sub­ mission to the status quo, acquiescence in the scheme of things. Perhaps Pope relies handily on that verb "might" to negotiate an exit for himself, to free his larger 1 1 0 argument from the dilemma posed by a too rigid application of the chain of being metaphor Into, say, the political or social order. Nevertheless the implication of the pas­ sage is that the graduated order of the cosmos necessi­ tates rigid placement of each being; consequently, the striving of any individual Induces strife in the Whole. S till, all of this is merely hypothetical, grounded on a perhaps, the "might" of 1. 242. But hypothesis be­ comes hypostasis in the next passage. Lines 247-58 cumu­ late images of super-terrestrial disorder, system over­ turning system, culminating in cosmic disorder—all the chaos to be laid to Pride's Satanic charge: And if each system in gradation roll, Alike essential to th' amazing whole; The least confusion but in one, not all That system only, but the whole must fall. Let Earth unbalanc'd from her orbit fly, Planets and Suns run lawless thro' the sky, Let ruling Angels from their sphere be hurl'd, Being on being wreck'd, and world on world, Heav’n's whole foundations to their centre nod, And Nature tremble to the throne of God: All this dread ORDER break—for whom? for thee? Vile worm.'—oh Madness, Pride, Impiety.' That climactic denunciation represented by the last coup­ let above is validated by the poet's sleight-of-hand equivocation. The hypothetical has been reified into an actual, a fait accompli. The "dread ORDER" is broken when the argumentative hypothesis is muted and conse­ quence is Imaged forth; rhetoric supplants logic. In the Ill passage there is a slight shift in meaning between "if" and "let." The first sentence (11. 247-50) is clearly hypothetical, resting upon the "if" clause, the protasis of a conditional proposition which we might paraphrase thus: systems being mutually dependent, confusion in one confuses the whole. In contrast to the rhetorical force of "if," "let" comprises protasis and apodosis both. Rhetorically we are induced to imagine that the earth is unbalanced, planets and suns do run lawless, angels are h u rle d .... The general hypothesis has given way to an Imaged hypostasis; cosmic disorder has been reified into a fact, and the Interlocutor is denounced as Satanic usurper of cosmic harmony. A common-sense question obtrudes itself at this point. Can man's presumptuous pride so disorder the scheme of things? Can man's striving beyond his station rattle the cosmos to the throne of God—or is Pope merely relying on "poetry" to accommodate in his argument what "reason" cannot? A little of both, perhaps. It was a tradition since Aquinas that man's usurpations visit ir­ regularities upon more than his sphere, earth. Pope re­ lies on that belief here. Faith underpins this passage so that doctrine and poetry trim the ragged edges of argument. The fact Is worth noting, for most often in An Essay on Man Pope tries to ground his arguments on 112 putative reason and common sense, however much he may call up for support old and venerated ethical or theological n o tio n s . More significant is that Pope likely had in mind the Newtonian idea that Qod created the universe by divine fiat and it is His continuous exercise of divine power that maintains the cosmic order. Were gravitation—the manifestation of divine power—suspended, a ll the whole System would immediately dissolve; and each of the Heavenly Bodies would be crumbled into Dust; the single Atoms commencing their several Motions in such several strait Lines, according to which the projectile Motion chanc'd to be at the Instant when that Influence was sus­ pended or withdrawn .... 21 Acquainted as he was with such descriptions in layman's terms of current scientific ideas, Pope could be expected to exploit the poetic possibilities. One more matter in this passage deserves commentary. The exclamation "oh Madness, Pride, Impiety.1" which con­ cludes section VIII, assigning to man an auxetic scale of nefarious attributes, can be viewed as a terse summing up of matters covered in sections VI, VII, and VTII, re­ spectively. In section VI the poet castigates man for his foolish desire to have in addition to his distinctive human qualities those special attributes of respective creatures below him on nature's scale. In thinking thus, however, man Impugns his own rationality, his special 1 1 3 attribute ("Shall he alone, whom rational we call, / Be pleas'd with nothing, If not bless*d with all?"). Fur­ ther, In Images representing man's experience were he in­ vested with heightened sensory powers, the poet depicts man as suffering and maddened, "stunn'd by the music of the spheres. Man's peculiarity of pride is the implicit motif in section VII. Exclaiming that "Far as Creation's ample range extends, / The scale of sensual, mental pow'rs as­ cends," Pope itemizes instances of superlative sensory powers among creatures (sight, lynx; smell, hound; hear­ ing, birds; touch, spider; taste, bee) through mental powers among animals, thus to pose the question at the end of the sections "Is not thy Reason all these pow'rs in one?" (1^ 232). Man, were he Justly to consider his own condition, occupies a pinnacle of "Creation's ample range," a position of proud superiority. Impiety Instigates the disordered cosmos Imaged In section VIII. The full, continuous, and graduated uni­ verse extolled in 11_. 233-41 represents the balance main­ tained when all powers retain their proper spheres. But, "On superior pow'rs / Were we to press, inferior might on ours"—thus instigating that cosmic destructiveness till "Heav'n's whole foundations to their centre nod, / And Nature tremble to the throne of Ood." The reverberations 1 1 4 do not, of course, afflict the Deity, for He Is Inde­ structible. To conclude by referring to the beginning of this epistle, a major consideration of the one-couplet para­ graph Is that it queries the legitimacy of human formula­ tions about the universe: Is the great chain, that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee? (33-34) In so doing, the question im plicitly posits the primacy of (tod's order as given or made and the erroneousness of man's failure to accept the design, for he Is even divided within himself into active and passive principles (cf. 11. 61-68). Man's mind is limited, and he seeks to differen­ tiate but he cannot harmonize. He can apprehend the physical world, but he cannot comprehend the spiritual. Granted only physical sight, he can examine only material reality; and he postulates mechanistic formulations to accommodate analytic categories generated by his own lim­ itations: cause and effect; contingent circumstances and concomitant events; irregularities, discords, and disas­ ters, and their partially discernible or wholly inexplic­ able origins. Man's metaphysical formulations are delu­ sive and differentiating. For man to acknowledge the grand design, the order and harmony of the whole, he must su b m it. 115

With this Injunction Pope brings Epistle 1 to a close. The formistic hypothesis Is preeminent In sections IX and X, for Pope stresses the necessity of gradation and hierarchy, the subordination of the part to the whole, and the superlative rightness and goodness of the whole. In the last six lines of the epistle Pope delivers a series of asseverations which—both in the grammatical and In the ontological sense—deny differentiation by In­ sisting upon identity: All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; A ll D iscord, Harmony, not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, is RIGHT," The physical world which man discerns as mutable species and inexplicable processes is a complex created and sus­ tained by divine intelligence. Chance or happenstance is truly purposeful event. Discord or irregularity is truly regularity not comprehended. And what man sees as wrong Is but one part of God's magnificent scheme for the right. Ill

The abrupt command with which Pope opens Epistle II forces attention to the subject of inquiry appropriate to man, him self: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. The two verbs "know" and "scan" are emphatically disposed to enforce a suggestion that man's intellect, seeded by sense Impression and fitted to manipulate empirical data, can workably attend to evidence enabling man to know him­ self. However, man's intellect, confined to a physical body in a temporal world, cannot plumb God's magnificence. Man directing his intellect heavenward can only presume with his mind, affronting the Deity with a sightless gaze, not able to know but merely to scan. It was stated previously that Pope’s cosmological hypothesis entailed a principle of Identification; his psychological, a principle of differentiation. This latter is preeminent in Epistle II where Pope examines "the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Himself, as an Individual.11 Individual man, described in the opening eighteen lines of this epistle, is truly individuated,

116 117 divided within himself, an epitome of antinomies. Rebecca Price Parkin describes this passage as one of "Impas­ sioned" humor: In verse after verse man has been granted a positive quality only to have it immediately snatched away. The picture which emerges is of man as a very ecstasy of antitheses. This to n a l excitem ent and the humor condition each other. Both interact with the steel control of the rhetoric to keep the passage from losing perspective and urbanity under the pressure of religious urgency.22 The poet emphasizes contrariety, division, disharmony— with several rhetorical figures. With oxymoron: A being darkly wise, and rudely great. With antitheses: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast. With synoeclosis: Bom but to die, and reas'ning but to err. And with paradox: Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: • • • Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole Judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd: The glory, Jest, and riddle of the world.1 The rationale for man's contrariety and divisiveness Pope defines in mechanical terms, in section II, wherein the poet explains that 118

Two principles In human nature reign; Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain. These discrete but mutually operative antinomies are meta­ phorically equated with watch movements in 1]1. 59-66. Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; Reason's comparing balance rules the whole. Man, but for that, no action could attend, And, but for this were active to no end; Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot, To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot; Or, meteor-like, flame lawless thro1 the void, Destroying others, by himself destroy'd. This figurative identification is parallel to but more explicit than 11. 51-60 of Epistle I where Pope first in­ troduced his mechanistic hypothesis. The mechanical meta­ phor does not sustain the full weightof the passage, how­ ever; for Pope likens man, unurged by self-love, to a plant; and man, unconstrained by reason, to a meteor. The sequence of figures mechanical, vegetable, and astronom­ ical offer parallel descriptions of man's nature as if to insist that these are merely similitudes and that man is a creature too complex to be reductively identified. Mechanistic principles, though, receive renewed em­ phasis in the verse paragraph which follows, particularly in the first two couplets: Most strength the moving principle requires; Active its task, it prompts, impels, inspires. Sedate and quiet the comparing lies, Form'd but to check, delib'rate, and advise. (67-70) The Twickenham note to 11. 66-6 (the flam ing meteor image) 119 supplies a hint respecting a possible orientation of Pope's thought In these succeeding couplets, specifically the verbs "prompts, impels, inspires." Regarding the meteor Image Prof. Mack remarks: Self-love Is likened, In Pope’s metaphor, to the tendency of heavenly bodies to keep moving (the modem physicist's inertia), and reason to the force of gravitation that is necessary to hold them in their orbits .... Newton's postulates for the physical universe were being increasingly applied in Pope's time to the moral and political worlds. (TE, p. 63, n. 62, 65- 6) In view of Pope's familiarity with the scientific princi­ ples of his day, and in view of his poetic practice of charging his words with multiple resonances, it is not too speculatlvely hazardous to propose that the three verbs in 1. 68, "prompts, impels, inspires," represent not merely a convenient and sonorous triplet but a com­ pact allusion to Newton's three laws of motion: I. Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces im­ pressed upon it. II. The change of motion is proportional to the motive forces impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed. III. To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.23 To "prompt" is to initiate movement, overcoming inertia to instigate action. To "impel" is to drive or urge 120 forward, though less in the sense of an Initial, Insti­ gating force than in the sense of adding momentum to an object not In stasis or of altering the direction of movement. To "inspire" is to animate, quicken, arouse, exalt; it implies an immediate response Incident upon a single or localized Influence. The obverse of those ac­ tions, "to check, delib'rate, and advise," is the office of reason, "The God within the mind" (]l. 204) which over­ sees the whirlings in man's psychic world. In Pope's poetry a handful of verbs is no flimsy peg to hang a hefty allusion on, and one must burrow long and hard to unearth what could be called a "simple statement." Robert Frost once remarked whimsically that critics were free to read into his poems whatever they saw, but he should get credit for putting it there. Pope's is a more public poetry, deliberately allusive and multivalent to snatch into its statements echoes of ideas, attitudes, and events that informed his world as his literate read­ ers knew it. With such a principle in mind Dennis Holl- man remarks, "It Is sometimes said that critics make Pope's poetry seem over-subtle or over-complicated. There is, however, little need to worry about attributing to Pope more su b tle ty than he deserves ..." (pp. 60-6l). Pope was su rely acquainted w ith the Newtonian common­ places. As Prof. Mack a s s e r ts , "The v astness and 121 impersonality of Newton's universe everywhere permeates the poem, but I t Is re o rie n te d , In a way th a t I t Is not by Bolingbroke, for Instance, to personality and the uses of religion. Mechanical Images from the Newtonian world are woven Into the tis s u e of Images from o lder and more humane conceptions" (TE, p. lxviii). The mechanical lineaments of Pope's psychological premises in Epistle II are patent. The varieties of human action, virtuous or wicked, the diversity of human personality types, historical or hypothetical, are de­ scribed not in terms of complex and diffuse motivation but in terms of contiguous action and reaction, of sharp­ ly located impulse and immediate response. Virtue itself is not so much abstinence as activity: In lazy Apathy let Stoics boast Their Virtue fix'd; 'tis fix'd as in a frost, Contracted all, retiring to the breast; But strength of mind is Exercise, not Rest; The rising tempest puts in act the soul, Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole. (101- 6) Pope's conception here is not without precedent, of course. Milton's disdain of "a fugitive and cloister'd vertue" comes immediately to mind. But doubtless an additionally telling indicator of Pope's mechanistic formulation is his theory of the rul­ ing passion. In setting forth that conception Pope accom­ modates the common-sense fact, that each person 13 122

distinctly different, by reductively localizing personal­ ity uniqueness to a single mainspring of impulse or m otive. Bertrand A. Goldgar has examined writings which might have offered precedents for Pope's idea of the rul­ ing passion, but he nevertheless credits the poet with something new: The concept of the ruling passion is sometimes said to have been a commonplace before Pope popu­ larized it; there are some senses perhaps in which this is true, but it seems to me that Pope's formu­ lation of the idea in the Essay on Man is for the most part his own invention.24 Mr. Goldgar goes on to claim that Pope's contemporaries would have found the poet's idea a novelty also: His treatment of the idea would, I think, have stru ck h is readers as f a ir ly new. For Pope elevates the notion of a ruling passion into the principle which makes the ultimate reconciliation between the elements of apparent discord in man's nature and the contrasting attitudes which he has held in balance throughout the Epistle. We have seen that, drawing from different traditions of thought, he accepts the view of the passions as selfish and defective and also as useful and vital when regulated by reason. These opposing sets of ideas are constantly reconciled throughout the Epistle in terms of the divine plan, with the principle of the ruling passion affording the chief means of this reconciliation.25 Mr. Goldgar offers a plausible logic for Pope's concep­ tion, namely the poet's effort to integrate the principle of human discord with the principle of cosmic harmony. 123

Maynard Mack Is less Inclined to credit Pope with novelty in the conception: There is nothing original about the conception, which was of course implied in humoural psychol­ ogy and medicine, in the dominant humour of dramatic theory, in the Theophrastian character, and elsewhere, though Pope's treatment is con­ siderably the most complete. If Pope has a particular indebtedness on the matter, it is possibly to Bacon and Montaigne, both of whom seem to have seen in the ruling passion a kind of "forme maistresse," around which the other ele­ ments of personality must be organized and without which no lasting consistency of character can be a tta in e d . (TE, p. xxxvi) Mr. Mack does, however, allow the idea of a ruling pas­ sion a contemporary pertinence: If we may assume, as some modern psychologies suggest, that human beings pass from chaotic to better organized states by ways which we still know little about, the ruling passion might be called Pope's guess at one of the ways. Lacking this passion, man would be in Pope's view a vessel tossed in contrary directions by the aimless suc­ cession of his desiresj having it, he goes with some stability to his main objectives. This con­ ception is central to the second Epistle, where it is obvious from the imagery that Pope is thinking of character as a creative achievement, an artistic result, something built out of chaos as God built the world. The ruling passion, which God sends, affords a focal point for this activity. The direction of the character is thus a datum, but what man makes of it, and whether it leads to virtue or to vice, depends upon his skill. (TE, p. xxxvi) The last three sentences quoted above acknowledge in Pope's conception a functional purpose of integrating the poet's ideas respecting human character with the idea (central to the poem) of harmony which informs the whole 124 cosmos. Both Goldgar and Mack assign Pope's conception of a ruling passion an Intimate function In the large scheme of the poem. Their Judgments warrant acceptance especial­ ly when It is recognized how this rather unique Idea of Pope's is contingent upon those two metaphysical hypothe­ ses that have been adjudged essential to An Essay on Man. In other words the idea of the ruling passion is fundamen­ tally a mechanistic conception conjoined with a formistic one. Conceived as the essential mainspring of character in each man, the ruling passion bears those mechanistic attributes of a force operative on contiguous entities within a delimited field. Thus the ruling passion is lik e the weight a t one end o f a bar. The b ar is a l i f e span; the opposite weight, a man's responsive acts; and the fulcrum is the soul. Conceived as the singular agency imparted to each man As Man, perhaps, the moment of his breath, Receives the lurking principle of death (133-4) the ruling passion is the necessary principle equivalent in man to that "plastic nature," the natura naturans, through which God directs the Whole, 125

Temporally the ruling passion Is the Instigator or predisposer of activity, conduct, and habit In man’s life on earth. Spiritually the ruling passion Is the primary ontological principle in human-kind, the informing agency whereby God creatively encloses man within his cosmic plan. To sum up, in Epistle II Pope describes man as discretely divided, nevertheless transcendently inte­ g ra te d . Pope's philosophic commitment to emphasizing connec­ tions between matter and spirit is evident in two further examples of Pope's contrary metaphysical hypotheses, an example from each of Epistles III and IV. The assertion with which Epistle III opens, "Here then we rest," sig­ nals that we are at the center of the poem (God is rest, peace). And the adverb "Here" also links the opening of this epistle to the close of the preceding one which has announced one primary attribute of man and one of God: "Tho1 Man's a fo o l, yet GOD IS WISE." The remainder of the opening couplet, "'The Universal Cause / Acts to one end, but acts by various laws,'" warrants an expectation that at this Juncture In his poem Pope will summarize laws operative in the spiritual world and laws operative in the physical: the reference to "Universal Cause" and to "one end" identifies an assumption of teleology, a formistic conception, and the reference to "various laws" 126 identifies subordinate causal patterns at work In the temporal world. The long verse paragraph comprising 11. 7-26 is in­ deed such a summary. Pope's Imagery describes inter­ related patterns of differentness and identity, separate­ ness and integration, tension and harmony. In Epistle I we were invited to Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man; A mighty maze.1 but not w ithout a plan. In this third epistle we are enjoined to Look round our World; behold the chain of Love Combining all below and all above. The apparent "mighty maze" Inviting free speculation has given way to an acknowledged "chain of Love" demanding full accord. Pope defines the "combining1 activity of being and process in the world in terms of distinct but mutually operative forces: See plastic Nature working to this end, The sin g le atoms each to o th er tend, Attract, attracted to, the next in place Form'd and impell'd its neighbour to embrace. (9-12) Here plastic nature, a metaphysical conception, and grav­ itation, a mechanical law, conduce toward event personi­ fied as human embrace. The remainder of the verse paragraph alludes to formistic and mechanistic assumptions of the widest pos­ sible scope: 127

See Matter next, with various life endu'd, Press to one centre still, the gen'ral Good. See dying vegetables life sustain, See life dissolving vegetate again: All forms that perish other forms supply, (By turns we catch the vital breath, and die) Like bubbles on the sea of Matter born, They rise, they break, and to that sea return. Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole; One all-extending, all-preserving Soul Connects each being, greatest with the least; Made Beast In aid of Man, and Man of Beast; All serv’d, all serving.' nothing stands alone; The chain holds on, and where i t ends, unknown. (13-26) Mechanistic causation, teleologlcal directedness, organic generation and decay, emergence, dissolution, and return —all together cumulate processes of cosmic Integration, each entity conducing to each, and all comprised by the One that Is vital, harmonizing, and eternal. In the l a s t th ree couplets of E p istle IV Pope sum­ marizes what he has sought by his poem to explain. His premises are latent in all he has stated before, and his concluding remarks are aphorisms meant to remind us that man errs in his imagination, his heart, his Intellect, and his social relations: For Wit's false mirror held up Nature's light; Shew'd erring Pride, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT: That REASON, PASSION, answer one g reat aim; That tru e SELF-LOVE and SOCIAL are the same; That VIRTUE only makes our Bliss below; And a l l our Knowledge is , OURSELVES TO KNOW. (393-8) Primary has been Pope's effort to separate the vagaries of idea and assumption spawned by the human Intellect and 128

Imagination from the actuality the mind would presume to reflect. That there Is a spilt between mind and world might seem to be the Import of Pope's disjunctive refer­ ence to "wit's false mirror" and "Nature's light." Yet Pope demonstrates in the Essay that it Is possible to reason aright. What is first necessary is to acknowledge that universal failing responsible for error, pride. Man in his pride arrogates to himself an eminence which his mid-point placement in the cosmic scheme does not allow to him. Man in his pride also arrogates to his mind more ingenuity and insight than the human intellect can lay claim to . Man is himself the cause of his malaise. The cosmic scheme is orderly, harmonious, and divinely sustained. It is right, and to it man must attune himself. One means of doing so is to discover some of the immutable laws of the physical world, an intellectual investigation fitting and proper when conducted in the right spirit: Trace Science then, with Modesty thy guide; First strip off all her equipage of Pride, Deduct what is but Vanity, or Dress, Or Learning's Luxury, or Idleness; Or tricks to shew the stretch of human brain, Mere curious p leasure, or ingenious pain. ( I I , 43-8) Most necessary, however, is that man examine himself, individually and communally, and acknowledge the disjunc­ tions that distort his thinking and conduct. Within 129

himself man sustains a tension between reason and passion. These are antlnomous but not contradictory. Reason mea­ sures and restrains; passion responds and Impels. Rightly d ire c te d , they n u rtu re the soul enabling man to become a creatively willing and acting beneficiary of the divinely appointed whole. Within his society man sustains a ten­ sion between self-love and social, between his private Interest and the communal good. But man is by nature a social being, and his love and charity Join the private self to the public whole: Man, like the gen'rous vine, supported lives; The strength he gains is from th 1 embrace he gives. (Ill, 311-12) Right thinking and action attune man to his role, one that is fittingly granted, properly apportioned, and essential to order. In accepting the order, man begins to reason aright and to humble his inquiries, thus to acknowledge that "all our Knowledge is, OURSELVES TO KNOW." With th a t e th ic a l Im perative, know th y s e lf, Pope brings to a close what he has described in "The Design" as "a temperate yet not inconsistent, and a short yet not imperfect system of Ethics." Some readers of the Essay might argue that ethics is but a branch of philosophy and that, accordingly, the Essay on Man is not a philosophical poem in the broader sense of "philosophical." Whether 130 one can use the labels "ethical” or "philosophical" to classify Pope's poem generlcally would seem to be a very arguable issue dependent on one's individual predilection, preference, and taste. Pope wrote for all times but from the vantage point of the eighteenth century, and his era is not ours. The Essay bears the stamp of its time, when p h ilosophical d is q u is itio n was deemed f a i r game fo r a l l literate, intelligent citizenry and when the large Issues compelling examination were deemed accessible to that citizenry. Our era finds life's issues less explicable, and for us much of philosophy has ramified in directions where only specialists hazard to tread. Pope ranged widely and if his propositions and con­ clusions are not always ours, they nonetheless comprise a philosophic undertaking which emerges as a whole and rounded poem. In s e ttin g fo rth what he considers w ill be to his readers generally acceptable principles explaining order and process in the phenomenal world, Pope commits himself to ontological inquiry. In considering how that world is knowable to the human mind, Pope commits himself to epistemological inquiry. In detailing his idea of the ruling passion, Pope not only directs his inquiry into psychology but seeks to integrate his psychological prin­ ciples with the cosmic order. Indeed it is the effort to demonstrate how human experience is comprehensively 131

Integrated that motivates Pope throughout his Essay. He would have us see the part in terms of the whole; the self in terms of the natural, social, political, and moral order; humanity in terms of a universal plan. Pope wants to integrate matter and spirit, and his mechanistic and formistic premises are the means to that integration.

V FOOTNOTES

1 Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modem Sciencet p. 303.

Historical and philosophical features of transcendent formlsm and discrete mechanism are too complicated to take up here and are accordingly examined in the next chapter. Pope!s perception of the two modes of thought would not be ours, for root-metaphor analysis is a method which has emerged as a result of such post- eighteenth-century disciplines as linguistics and an­ thropology and from nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in philosophy, psychology, and literary c ritic is m .

"This Long D isease, My L ife ?" Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958T, p . '2267” 4 Quoted by Nicolson and Rousseau on p. 226. Priestley d e liv e rs these remarks in his essay "Pope and The Great Chain of Being," in M ille r MacLure and F. W. Watt, e d s ., Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, Presented to A_. S. P. Wood ho use (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 19b4), p. 221. 5 Ibid., pp. 227-8. 6 A fine summary of eighteenth-century attitudes regard­ ing analogical reasoning is presented by Earl R. Wasser- raan, "Nature Moralized: The Divine Analogy of the Eighteenth Century," ELH, 20 (1953), 39-76.

132 133

A. R. Humphreys, The Augustan World (Londons Methuen & Co., 1 9 5 Harper Torchbook edition, 1963), p. 217.

8 The common-sense recognition that among the m ultiplicity of Individual things in this world there are likenesses, similarities, or identities of one sort or another is what rationalizes the formistic hypothesis in the first place. Thus this notion about species might be con­ sidered not an assumption generated by the formistic hypothesis but rather the rationale or the point of origin for the hypothesis. However, the intrusion of a comparative category in delineating likenesses among similar things invites additional hypothesizing. If we say that though A and B are nominally alike but that A is somehow more "complex" than B, we have introduced the necessity to define and account for such attributes as "simple" or "complex."Thus we begin postulating notions beyond mere similarity. 9 In The Metaphysical Foundations of Modem Science, pp. 307-d, E. A. Burtt explains that’Tn Western scientific philosophy there have been only three "basically dis­ tinct convictions" regarding causality: (1) the teleo- logical, worked out by the Greeks and appropriated by the Christian philosophers; (2) the mechanical, which assumes the discovery of mathematical relationships to be tantamount to a causal explanation of phenomena; (3) the evolutionary, which assumes "that the cause may be simpler than the effect, while genetically responsible fo r i t . " 10 It is relevant here to quote from Pepper the list of various philosophers with whom the two hypotheses can be associated: Formism is often called "realism" or "Platonic idealism." It is associated with Plato, Aristotle, the scholastics, neoscholastics, neorealists, modem Cambridge realists. Mechanism is often called "naturalism" or "materialism" and, by some, "realism." It is associated with Democritus, Lucretius, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reichenbach. 134

Pepper says, "Many of these men are rather eclectic and some of them develop their views only halfway, as notably Hobbes and Berkeley"; but he submits the names for convenient reference and allows that "some of the ascriptions are, no doubt, controversial" (pp. 141-2). 11 An Argument of Images, p. 45. 12 "Pope's Essay on Man: The Rhetorical Structure of Epistle r7 l ML?T,~7ff (March, 1955), 177-81. This and the following quotation are from p. 177. 13 Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, makes similar points, pp. 2l'5-41 Trhus tooTfebecca Price Parkin, The Poetic Workmanship of Alexander Pope (’Minneapolis: University of Minnesota“Fress, 1955), "The effect desired Is that of urbane conversation— something like an after-dinner chat between a success­ ful critic and man of the world and a young, eager protege seated across the fire from him" (p. 26). Prof. Parkin offers numerous astute remarks on tone, pp. 19 ff. Douglas H. White, Pope and the Context of Contro­ versy, demonstrates as an essential part of KTs thesis that Pope manages "to maintain In An Essay on Man a tone of well-informed urbanity," cEaraeterisFically "by granting to extreme arguments their premises while denying their conclusions or by granting their conclu­ sions though denying their premises" (p. 9). 14 Hume published A Treatise of Human Nature in three volumes (1738-40), but this work was largely Ignored by the public. In 1748 he published a revision of the first part under the title, Philosophical Egsays Con­ cerning Human Understanding, and then in 1751 asecond edition of ‘this work with the title An Enquiry Concern­ ing Human Understanding. This year he also published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, a work wKich Hume considered h is b e st; I t was p a r t l y a rework­ ing of the third part of the Treatise of 1738-40.

15 A History of Philosophy, Vol. IV, Descartes to Leibniz XNew York: Doubleday& Co., Image Books edition, 1963), p. 37• 135

16 This succinct definition Is from J. M. Cameron In a book-review, "Trilling, Roszak, & Goodman,11 The New York Review of Books, Vol. XIX, No. 9 (November 30, 1§7£), p. 19, para. 1, col. 1. 17 For this distinction between ratio and lntellectus I am indebted to Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: Random House, 1^52; Mentor-Omega reprint, 1963 )> PP. 26-8. 18 Cf. Maynard Mack's note to 1. 67: "The pairs of verbs pick up, respectively, the Tdeas in 63-4, 61-2, and suggest the duality of man's status in their active and passive forms" (TE, p. 21, n. 67). 19 The image supplies a detail corroborating the remarks, previously cited, by Nicolson and Rousseau and Priestley that Pope's conceptions in section VIII are those of the astro-theologians.

20 The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1^3b; Harper ^orchbook edition, i960), p. 332. 21 William Whiston, Astronomical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal'd (LonddnT l7l5)* P. 827 Quoted by Nicolson and Rousseau, pp. 226-7. 22 The Poetic Workmanship of Alexander Pope, p. 60.

23 Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles, ed. Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), p . 13 * 24 "Pope's Theory of the Passions: The Background of Epistle II of the Essay on Man," PQ, 41 (October 1962), 739-40.

2 5 Ibid., p. 742. CHAPTER FOUR

THE PHILOSOPHICAL RATIONALE fo r CONTRADICTORY PREMISES

I

Formistic and mechanistic assumptions alternate throughout the Essay on Man. They emerge separately and in their full contours as In the two juxtaposed passages previously examined from Epistle I, 11. 43-50 and 51-60. They emerge subtly interrelated in Pope's conception of the ruling passion. Eventually they conjoin, as this chapter will demonstrate later, in a poetic image of a universe wholly harmonized. More often they emerge as a hint, a bias, a tendency. At this point it must be asked what legitimacy the two hypotheses sustain as philosophic points of departure. In his attempt to "Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man," how warrantable is Pope's philosophical method of proceeding from formistic and mechanistic assumptions? Pope's warrant is simply that of his cultural tradi­ tion, the whole mainstream of Western Intellectual 136 137 history* Formisra and mechanism are co-equal predicates of Pope's poem Just as their co-existence up to and through most of the eighteenth century has shaped that dualism so characteristic of Western culture, the tension between "otherworldliness" and "thls-worldllness" (to use A. 0. Lovejoy's handy labels). It was mentioned previ­ ously that the two hypotheses are ancient and that they, like all world hypotheses, are the outgrowths of root metaphors. To determine the origin of transcendent formlsm would entail no less than discovering when and how man or a_ man undertook abstract speculation by distinguishing between plan and material (the root metaphor of transcend­ ent formlsm) In order to assume the existence of a super­ terrestrial agency as prior cause for the manifold life so vividly available to sense impression. Such specula­ tion is eminently represented in Plato's writings. Thus transcendent formlsm goes back at least to the fourth century before Christ.1 Likewise, to account for the emergence of the dis­ crete mechanistic hypothesis, one would have to know when man's familiarity with the lever Induced him to explain natural phenomena in terms of action-reaction patterns between and among contiguous bodies. The atomistic theories of Leucippus and Democritus undertake such 138 explanation; thus discrete mechanism goes back at least to the sixth century before Christ. Transcendent formlsm has served a pervasive need of man, at least In the West: to rationalize the Inexplicable yearning for something of permanence and value that Is superior to because contrary to the harsh facts of tran- sltoriness, alteration, and certain annihilation In na­ ture. The hypothesis manifests an otherworldly orienta­ tion. Contrarily, discrete mechanism serves a thls- w orldly o rie n ta tio n . I t ra tio n a liz e s the common phenomena of day-to-day, living experience—perceived event, move­ ment, process, activity—under the assumption that such phenomena must result from agency or agencies explicable within the narrow confines wherein the phenomena are mani­ f e s t. Both hypotheses assume that an effect must have an p explicable cause. Transcendent formlsm posits an ini­ tial, eternal, and super-terrestrial agency as the origi­ nator of all existent phenomena. Discrete mechanism posits a principle of motion to account for observable process and change. The hypotheses differ in emphasis: transcendent formlsm is essentially concerned with being, discrete mechanism with becoming. The word "emphasis" Is used here with deliberate caution, for now a large problem 139 emerges In this dissertation, a problem which can be only acknowledged and then skirted. This study must confine Itself to being a literary analysis of a literary text, Pope's Essay, and not presume to undertake an Issue be­ yond the scholarly competence of the writer: an explana­ tion of that central paradox of Western thought, the ten­ sion between otherworldliness and thls-worldllness. Scholars readily acknowledge that such a tension inheres. As Philip Wheelwright asserts in the introduction to his recent study, The Presocratlcs, "Philosophical thought is stirred to activity in the main by either or both of two o great human motives: the religious and the scientific. For the purposes of this study and in order to keep the issues intelligible and within bounds, it must be assumed that Western man's perennial philosophical in­ quiries are conveniently divisible into otherworldly and this-worldly inquiries, and that transcendent formlsm is, a comprehensive expression of the former route of thought, being; discrete mechanism of the latter, becoming. In point of fact, however, the two modes of thought cannot be easily separated in the philosophizing of any writer (and they surely exist side-by-side in Pope's poem). Plato is a pertinent example. His Republic is an eminent text of otherworldly thought, and his Idea of the Good superlatively exemplifies transcendent formlsm, 140 giving Plato a paramount claim as a philosopher of being. But Plato also wrote the Tlmaeus to account for a world of becoming. "In the Tlmaeus, explains A. 0. LoveJoy, "Plato definitely undertakes the return Journey from that higher region of 'absolute being* to the lower world which his thought in certain moods, and perhaps In an earlier phase, so eagerly out-soared...h 1 Is the other­ worldly concern of the Republic logically reconcilable with the this-worldly concern of the Tlmaeus? LoveJoy asserts that it is not, rather that Plato connects the two concerns by a "bold logical inversion." And thus Plato, tacitly making the crucial assump­ tion that the existence of many entities not eter­ nal, not supersensible, and far from perfect, was inherently desirable, finds in his otherworldly Absolute, in the Idea of the Good itself, the rea­ son why that Absolute cannot exist alone. The concept of Self-Sufficing Perfection, by a bold logical inversion, was—without losing any ofits original implications—converted into the concept of a Self-Transcending Fecundity. A timeless and incorporeal One became the logical ground as well as the dynamic source of the existence of a tem­ poral and material and extremely multiple and variegated universe. The proposition that—as it was phrased in the Middle Ages—omne bonum est diffusivum sui here makes its appearance as an axiom of metaphysics. With this reversal there was introduced into European philosophy and the­ ology the combination of ideas that for centuries was to give rise to many of the most characteristic internal conflicts, the logically and emotionally opposing strains, which mark its history—the conception of (at least) Two-Gods-in-One, of a divine completion which was yet not complete in itself, since it could not be itself without the existence of beings other than it3elf and inherently incomplete; of an Immutability which required, and 141

expressed Itself in, Change; of an Absolute which was nevertheless not truly absolute because it was related, at least by way of implication and causa- tlo n , to e n t itie s whose nature was not i t s nature and whose existence and perpetual passage were antithetic to its immutable subsistence. (pp. 49-50) In short, Plato's concept of Self-Sufficing Perfection, represented by the Idea of the Good, becomes the predi­ cate for defining existence and order in a temporal, mu­ table world. Thus Plato, so Aristotle. Aristotle's encyclopedic concern with this world, which induced his writing a Physics, a Nicomachean Ethics, a Rhetoric, a Poetics (to mention but a few texts), give this Greek thinker a large claim to consideration as preeminently a philosopher of becoming. Yet Aristotle also posited a Prime or Unmoved Mover, and as C. S. Lewis has noted, "Aristotle's God is as supernatural as anything could be."^ Otherworldly and this-worldly conceptions lie side- by-side in Western thought, and this dissertation must be excused from examining the ideas and the argumentative strategies by which the two contradictory concerns have been variously reconciled among philosophers. Instead we must fall back on our analysis of metaphors under the convenient assumption that transcendent formlsm manifests otherworldly thinking and accounts for being; discrete mechanism manifests this-worldly thinking and accounts 142 for becoming or process. We are still left with a very large problem. The large problem can be stated thus. If one begins philosophizing by assuming that an effect must have a discoverable cause, must he not simultaneously or alter­ natively account both for initial cause and sustaining cause? After all, the world is not merely one of being but of becoming. Common sense tells us that the world is a fact, a thing. But common sense also tells us that the world is not static. Many features of it manifest activ­ ity, event, birth, growth, death, and decay. One may, If he chooses, think formistlcally and say, "Prior to all material reality there is an original Plan, an Idea o f the Good; th ere is God.1" But then we must challenge this formistic philosopher and say, "You have accounted for an ontological first principle; you have denominated a Plan. But why is there so much change in the material? What produces change? Is your a^ priori Plan an eternal principle of continuous change? If so, you are merely telling us what our senses continuously tell us; that there is change, there has al­ ways been change, and there always will be change. You have told us nothing new." Now the formistic philosopher can reply, "AhJ But the Plan I speak of is beyond this bumbling, meager world. 143

It Is transcendent, eternal, unique, changeless, perfect, wholly self-sufficient, and unaffected and unmoved by our human concerns. It Is pure, super-terrestrial spirit]" To this description the challenger can respond, "Well, if your Spirit is so removed from our concerns In this world where we have to live and work and suffer and die, I cannot see why He or She or It is of any impor­ tance to us. He can go about His business and we'll go on with ours. Either tell us how the Spirit obtrudes on the flux of our lives and experience, or else drop the whole subject.'" The formistic philosopher may now explain how the spirit is manifest and operative; but in so doing, he will spawn logical contradictions In attempting to con­ nect a spirit of super-terrestrial changelessness with the common-sense fact of terrestrial change. As A. 0. Lovejoy asserts: The otherworldly Idea of the Good must be the idea of a spurious good, if the existence of this world of temporal and imperfect creatures be assumed to be itself a genuine good; and an Absolute which is self-sufficient and forever perfect and complete cannot be identified with a God related to and manifested in a world of temporal becoming and al­ teration and creative advance. (p. 327) The formistic philosopher may, however, drop the subject, in effect, by declaring, "The Spirit I envision is a subject of sublime contemplation. To meditate upon 144

Him fu lfills my deepest needs. Thoughts of Him draw me above the fret and suffering of my temporal life. I find such meditation an emotional solace and an aesthetic joy, and I believe other men can find similar satisfaction. For, after all is said and done, is It not more fitting and a superior good that man, endowed with an Intellect, employ that Intellect in sublime contemplation? Do you not recognize that we creatures, men and women, most wholly respond to our definitive attribute, which is in­ tellect, by exercising our thoughts wider and further than our Individual and petty and transitory concerns? If you cannot raise your earth-creeping gaze above mere working and doing, then leavei Go away.' Be damned.' I have nothing to say to you." The mechanistic philosopher, like the formistic philosopher, assumes that an effect must have a cause; thus he too is obliged to account both for initial cause and sustaining cause. Instead of leaping above the world to posit a transcendent ground of being, however, the mechanistic philosopher insists that we must discover cause within the locale wherein observable event tran­ spires. To the mechanistic philosopher, materiality is the fundamental feature of the world. What is most real to him is body. 145

"Only particulars exist," says the mechanist. "That which Is locatable In space and time Is real. To confer existence onto a thing not distinguishable In terms of space and time Is to undertake vain Imaginings .1 We must explain nature In terms of nature and account for change." "Well, we all recognize that there Is change," says the challenger. "We know th a t an acorn can become an oak tr e e , th a t a child can become a man. But how can one de­ termine the origin and the continuity of such processes?" To this the mechanist will respond, "We must assume the existence of unique, indestructible, and minute sub­ stances. These substances we can call atoms, for they are Indivisible, the smallest units of matter. They are far too tiny to see, but their varying combinations ac­ count for all particulars which we recognize in the w o rld ." The challenger might ask, "How can you assume the existence of these atoms If you admit that you cannot see them? I can see you and me, and those rocks and trees, and those sheep grazing yonder. But why should I concede that such disparate particulars are made up of invisible atoms?" "But you surely recognize," the mechanist insists, "that such particulars are divisible. If you remove a limb from that tree over there, the limb still partakes 146 of the essence of the tree. Further, If you apply a knife edge to that limb and slice away shavings, those shavings are the same substance as the limb and the tree Itself. You can cut those shavings into smaller and smaller par­ ticles, but your knife will not be fine enough nor your eyesight acute enough to cut the particles into pieces smaller than a limited amount. You can never cut the particles into their tiny single atoms. Yet a certain number of atoms cohere to make up the smallest visible particle, and larger and larger numbers of atoms cohere to make up the shavings, the limb, and the tree. The atoms which make up all the substances of the world must be virtually infinite. Their relative compactedness and connection account for variations in solidity and weight. Their individual or unitary movements and Juxtapositions account for processes of motion and change which we con­ tinuously observe. With our assumption that matter is primary in the universe, we mechanists can employ mathe­ matics to weigh and to measure real substances in their changing relationships in respect to space and time. Such analysis gives us new information about the world of events and phenomena." The challenger, however, is not obliged to be wholly convinced, and he can respond as follows. "It may well be that your assumption about the primacy of matter 147 provides you mechanists with a workable hypothesis to undertake what you call your scientific Investigations, but if we consider once again the tree limb, there are some facts which you have not accounted for. The tree limb had what 1 would call a smell of freshness about it; the knife as It cut made a squeaking, grating sound; the color of the bark differed from the color of the shavings underneath, and Indeed the shavings are sort of vari­ colored, different shades of brown. Now are those things that I smelled and heard and saw parts of the matter which you say is primary—whether we consider that matter In the form of atom, shaving, or tree—or are they some­ thing else?" "I cannot be sure what you discerned," replies the mechanist. "I do not have your nose or ears or eyes. I will say, however, that I too recognized characteristics of smell, sound, and sight. But you must recognize that sensory knowledge may differ among men; such knowledge is often—perhaps always—untrustworthy. Accordingly, we mechanists distinguish between primary and secondary qualities which we assign to separate categories, the primary and the secondary. The primary categories are quantifiably measurable and include the field of loca­ tion; the primary qualities which are size, shape, mo­ tion, solidity, weight, and number; and the laws which 1 4 8 determine configurations of primary qualities In the f ie ld . "Regarding such laws, we think that the Pythagoreans, though limited by their primitive mathematics, were not wrong when they said, *A11 is number.' We are discover­ ing that mathematics is the key to all knowledge and that we can discover mathematical relations among all objects presented to our senses. Indeed, the only sure knowledge is mathematical. And in our weighing, measuring, and computing, we shall unfold the mysteries of this vast cosmos by demonstrating the mathematical principles by which its harmonies inhere. "The secondary categories, on the other hand, are contingent upon sensory apprehension, and sense knowledge is very fallible and likely to differ from one man to another. Secondary categories include such qualities as color, odor, taste, sound, texture, and the principle which binds these qualities to the primary physical bod­ ies in which the qualities inhere. Also, there are no doubt laws which account for the binding together of the several secondary qualities among themselves. But we mechanists think that such laws are principles of mind, a subject we have little inclination to concern ourselves with, for we have many investigations to make in this vast cosmic machine of which our planet is but a part." 1 4 9

The challenger now can justifiably feel short-changed by such explanation and can attack as follows. "You are telling me, first, that primary qualities are configured dynamically according to some laws or perhaps a law. You are telling me, second, that the only certain knowledge Is mathematical. Third, you are Implying that your re­ searches proceed from the assumption that mathematical harmonies underlie the whole cosmos, and that by discover­ ing various mathematical harmonies you can explain this cosmos. Clearly what you have done Is to promote mathe­ matics from a mere cognitive method to a total ontologi­ cal first-principle. You have reified a technique Into a cosmic fact. You tend to think of mathematical law as operating on, yet fundamentally outside of, any localized field of configured entities. You have, in short, posited a principle of repetitive operation, and that—simply—is formism.’ In effect you grant to mathematical law the status of subsistence, and all of your categories fold into formism. "Your mechanistic hypothesis reveals additional prob­ lems," continues the challenger. "You are telling me that even though our evidence for the primary qualities comes wholly from the secondary categories, you cannot explain how the primary and the secondary categories interact. Further, you imply, without saying so, that we conceive 1 5 0 of secondary categories because they are contrasting con­ comitants of the primary. You thus leave us with a sharp philosophical dualism. You ascribe process and change, and cause and effect, to configurations of atoms which obey mathematical laws. As for what we men directly apprehend—colors, sounds, tastes, textures, odors—these you think of as somehow adscititious properties of bodies or perhaps as phantasms In the minds of living, breathing, p erceiving men. In sum, you affirm the primacy of m atter but cannot account for mind. "On the other hand, your opponent In metaphysical speculation, the formistlc philosopher, seems to account for mind but he cannot account for matter. He posits super-terrestrial, timeless spirit; divine intelligence. But when he tries to account for phenomena in space-time categories, he contradicts himself. Indeed his formistlc categories dissolve into mechanistic ones, Just as your assumption about a mathematical universe amounts to faith in a primary formistlc category. "If I am to be an Informed commentator on this whole scene of man," says the challenger, "I must apparently steer between opposing views until such time as I or some­ one else can come up with a new, comprehensive hypothesis. Meanwhile I am left with a metaphysical dualism. One philosophy reaps successes by experimenting in the 1 5 1 physical world—measuring, weighing, computing. The other philosophy refuses to give up an *0 Altitudo' and seeks an enduring sense of the primacy of spirit. Each philosophy by itself is incomplete, and each is strong where the other is weak. Perhaps they need each other, and perhaps imagination can bring together what logic forces apart. Something like the above was a plausible stance for thinking men in Pope’s day. Before the end of the seven­ teenth century, mechanistic assumptions had proved re­ markably fruitful. Galileo, for example, through ingeni­ ously successful experimentation had given huge impetus to an exact science of physics. Newton published h is Principia Mathematics in 1687, and astounded all men, not least among them Pope: Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night. God sa id , Let Newton be.' and A ll was L ig h t.» Pope's lin e s on Newton can serve to remind us of one important fact regarding the ambiguous philosophical tem­ per of his age, namely that otherworldly conceptions sure­ ly persisted and none of the major thinkers postulated a universe without God. In the new mechanized universe God's status was not certified with the succinct plausi­ bility envisioned by the medieval world view, but the "natural philosophers" were hardly disposed to leave Deity 1 5 2 out o f account. Quite the rev erse. As A. R. Humphreys has remarked, "Pope's astonishing epigram reflected the relief that old speculations, old assertions of trust, Q were now proven by objective demonstration." Neverthe­ less, a shift In world-view had been Inaugurated, and l a t e r generations of th in k ers would become Increasingly aware of the shift, of the strain between science and theology. The difference between the old and the new world-views can be briefly summarized. The great Pagan-Chrlstian synthesis of medieval thought had explained the why of creation. All existed for the glorification of God. Nature existed to serve man; man existed to worship God and to seek eventual union with Him. God was the final cause, the Pure Form toward Whom a l l creatio n was Im pelled. The created cosmos was a hierarchy—values of entities contingent upon place­ ment within the cosmic scheme—and man, the middle link, occupied an assured place, having dominion on earth but owing service to the Lord of Creation, a God of Love. In place of such explanation in terms of final moral value—the why of creation—science offered to explain the how of phenomena by delineating mechanical causality. With the new astronomy, with the exuberant faith in mathe­ matics as the cynosure of cognitive method, and with the demonstrable evidence of an emerging science of physics, 1 5 3 the old hierarchy was sundered Into what amounted to a triad of co-exlstents tenuously related. Nature was now Independent, a mechanistic flux of atoms In motion through space and time. Man was cut off from the Inner workings of this mechanism, his perceptions allowing him evidence of only secondary qualities. God was In His heaven, out­ side and beyond; and though traditional faith might deem Him the origin and end of all being, He was Inescapably cast by science Into the role of the first efficient cause of creation, the cosmic mechanic whose periodic Intervention adjusted Irregularities in the eternal world machine. Such an implication of the new science—that God, nature, and man were separated—might have emerged in the mind of a thorough-going mechanist or in the mind of a brooding intellectual, but the most notable result was th e b e lie f th a t Newton and h is predecessors had delivered evidence of an ordered universe that could be only divine In origin. The great minds of the period retained their belief In a God of creation, and they tended to assign to the Inscrutable workings of divine will those ambiguities and Inconsistencies which emerged in a mechanistic ac­ counting of the world and man's perception of it. In the new scientific philosophy God was the final ground of appeal In speculations about cause, and all the 154 great thinkers piously invoked Him. Galileo, for example, would not have denied an ultimately religious interpreta­ tion of nature; and he saw his own scientific investiga­ tions as a partial, piecemeal, and discursive effort to discover what, to God's mind, is complete and ever-present: As to the truth, of which mathematical demonstra­ tions give us the knowledge, it is the same which the Divine Wisdom knoweth; but . . . the manner whereby God knoweth the infinite propositions, whereof we understand some few, is highly more excellent than ours, which proceedeth by ratio­ cination, and passeth from conclusion to conclu­ sion, whereas his is done at a single thought or intuition.9 In the philosophy of Descartes the famous Cogito ergo sum eventually necessitates for this thinker a First

i Almighty Cause whose prior and eternal existence can ac­ count for a living, cogitating Rene Descartes. Similarly, John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding de­ clares confidently that our evidence that God exists is "equal to mathematical certainty, 1,10 though in his dem­ o n stra tio n in the chapter e n title d "Of Our Knowledge of the Existence of a God," Locke assumes what he purports to prove. As Fraser remarks of Locke's argument, "... the universality and necessity of the causal prin­ ciple is tacitly presupposed." To Newton the existence of God was an unquestionable fact to which a whole universe bore testimony, and New­ ton's remarks in the "General Scholium" of the Prlncipia 1 5 5 rested, of course, on the authority of Newton's own dem­ onstrated genius: This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. . . . This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God. . . . And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect.11 Such appeals to God's existence, as these by Galileo, Descartes, Locke, and Newton, have a common ground, the need to by-pass one large epistemologlcal problem: How is it that the human mind can know anything about the world at all? What principle or power connects human mental processes with that primary world which consists of ag­ gregates of atoms inferable only by "secondary" qualities? This question, occasioned by a m atter-spirit dualism which was largely the legacy of Descartes, becomes con­ fusingly complex as it is nudged around or pondered by such men as Descartes, Hobbes, More, and Newton; but by Pope's time th ere is an orthodox answer somewhat lik e the following summary. Man's mind is a unique portion of the human brain called the sensorlum, and it has no immediate contact with the outside world. Sense impressions of color, sound, odor, taste, and texture derive from the inherent tendency of phenomenal objects to convey motions 156 to the sensorium. The motions are conveyed from external objects by the nerves, the motions being then transmitted to the muscles by the animal spirits. E. A. Burtt sum­ marizes the implications of such a mechanistic account of perception: The world that people had thought themselves living in—a world rich with colour and sound, redolent with fragrance, filled with gladness, love and beauty, speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals—was crowded now into minute corners in the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world hard, cold, colourless, silent, and deadj a world of quan­ tity , a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity. The world of qualities as immediately perceived by man became just a curi­ ous and quite minor effect of that infinite machine beyond. In Newton the Cartesian metaphysics, ambig­ uously interpreted and stripped of its distinctive claim for serious philosophical consideration, f in a lly overthrew A risto telian ism and became the predominant world-view of modern times. (pp. 238-9) Here Burtt's reference to "the Cartesian metaphysics, ambiguously interpreted and stripped of its distinctive claim for serious philosophical consideration," alludes to a significant legacy to the philosophical temper of the age. The metaphysical dualism of matter and spirit became an acceptable assumption fo r most men. A fter gen­ e ra tio n s of s c ie n tif ic speculation, theory, and demon­ stration which culminated in Newton's Principia, the episteroological problem of how the mind can know the world simply became conflated with scientific issues and 1 5 7 scored off as a matter to be dealt with, if dealt with at all, by a science of optics, or anatomy, or physiology.1 9 Though Berkeley, Hume, and Kant would eventually undertake Important philosophical Inquiries, metaphysical speculation for most men had fallen into disrepute. The general attitude was that earlier men had propounded grand philosophical schemes with inadequate data and had spawned c e n tu rie s of e rro r. The physical universe was a subject for scientific Investigation, and the proper ap­ proach was an empirical examination, seeking explanation In terms of simplest elements and relating those elements temporally as efficient causes. God had created the uni­ verse and endowed man with a mind adequate for under­ standing his role and duties In the world. As man under­ took his empirical investigations of that world, he could find increasing evidence of the magnificent order within It. There was much that man could learn analytically, and In so doing he could v in d icate the ways of God to man. This kind of pragmatic philosophical attitude is what Pope imparts at the beginning of the narratlo of Epistle I: Say first, of God above, or Man below, What can we reason, but from what we know? Of Man what see we, but his station here, Prom which to reason, or to which refer? Thro' worlds unnumber'd tho1 the God be known, 'Tls ours to trace him only in our own. (17-22) II

There was enthusiasm for science In Pope's day, and there was, alongside that enthusiasm, an assured confi­ dence that traditional moral and religious values were vital and Intellectually sound. What were Augustan con­ ceptions of God and his world? A. R. Humphreys has re­ cently posed that question and answered It as follows: These were, In the main, traditional: God has designed the universe; man's Intelligence must instruct him in his role of trust and duty, and his will must direct his obedience. . . . Prom the evidence of nature man perceives the Great Designer, the Ordainer of Order: this confidence goes back to classical philosophers and medieval scholastics.*3 Intellectual effort during Pope's era fostered the con­ clu sio n th a t the world, as I t became more and more the subject of empirical investigation, revealed everywhere the manifold design of intelligent creation, a point re­ peatedly emphasized in the writings of men whose minds combined scientific curiosity and Christian piety. To mention but three: Robert Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso ( 169O); John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the C reation (1691); and William Derham, Physlco-Theology: or, a Demonstration of the Being and 158 1 5 9

Attributes of God, from his Works of Creation (1713). Pope too held the conviction that both the evidence for divine order and the progress of human understanding could be increased by examining details available to em­ pirical scrutiny. That Is, one can attain truth by ex­ amining a subject in terms of its simplest elements; at the lower levels of such examination, however, man broaches the inscrutable and must accept the fact that human intelligence is limited: The science of Human Nature is, like all other sciences, reduced to a few clear points: There are not many certain truths in this world. It is there­ fore in the Anatomy ofthe Mind as in that of the Body; more good will accrue to mankind by attending to the large, open, and perceptible parts, than by studying too much such finer nerves and vessels, the conformations and uses of which will for ever escape our observation. The disputes are all upon these last, and, I will venture to say, they have less sharpened the wits than the hearts of men against each other,and have diminished the prac­ tice, more than advanced the theory, of Morality. ("The Design," TE, p. 7) In the first sentence of "The Design," which precedes the passage quoted above, Pope rev eals no m isgivings th a t he might be proceeding from arguable presuppositions: Having proposed to write some pieces on Human Life and Manners, such as (to use my lord Bacon’s ex­ pression) come home to Men’s Business and Bosoms, I thought It more saFTsfactory to begin with con- sldering Man in the abstract, his Nature and his State: since, to prove any moral duty, to enforce any moral precept, or to examine the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what condition and relation it is placed in, and what is the proper end and 160

purpose of Its being. (TE, p. 7) Here at the outset of Pope's statement of method In the Essay, the mechanistic and formistlc hypotheses are al­ ready prefigured. To his reader Pope laconically reveals that he acquiesces in that dualism so characteristic of the age, a combination of integrative and dispersive a n a ly sis. Discrete mechanism is Integratively analytic and as­ sumes that single entitles or single complexes Interre­ late within a ’'field" or circumscribed area according to some probably discoverable law. Thus regarding that c re a tu re , man, Pope declares th a t " i t Is necessary f i r s t to know what condition and relation It Is placed In." Transcendent formism is dispersively analytic and assumes that All are subsumed by One, that the multiplicity of things in the world—animal, vegetable, and mineral—are ultimately bound by a single principle and directed by divine purpose to some humanly inscrutable end. Thus like the scientists who found in the breath-taking com­ plexity of the world a positivistic faith in divine crea­ tion, Pope whose subject is morality can feel assurance that regarding man we can know "what is the proper end and purpose of its being." Formism dissolves all particularity in a higher ground of being and process. Mechanism Isolates 161 particulars in a circumscribed area to determine their interrelationship. Formism minimizes differentness and particularity to stress identity or at least similarity. Mechanism minimizes similarity to stress uniqueness, sep­ aration, and contingent circumstance. As world hypothe­ ses, formism and mechanism are contradictory. Was Pope aware that he was proceeding from contra­ dictory premises? The answer is both yes and no. The negative resides in the fact that it has been since Pope's time that we have come to recognize the genial power of language itself to generate the knowledge we 14 presume to discover. Language itself is a construct of the human imagination. And thus it is that all our cog­ nitive propositions or assertions derive from the creat­ ing urgency of the human imagination. This idea Owen Barfield finds to be insufficiently appreciated in our scientific age: Science deals with the world which it perceives b u t, seeking more and more to p en etrate the v e il of naive perception, progresses only towards the goal of nothing, because it still does not accept in practice (whatever it may admit theoretically) that the mind first creates what it perceives as objects, including the instruments which Science uses for that very penetration. It insists on dealing with 'data', but there shall no data be given, save the bare percept. The rest is imagi­ nation. Only by imagination therefore can the world be known. And what is needed Is, not only that larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should be constructed, but that the human mind should become in creasin g ly aware of 162

its own creative activity.*5 That language makes meaning, that philosophical in­ quiry must be pursued in great part through an analysis of the linguistic structures and words wherein philosoph­ ical assertions are delivered, is all a late growth in Western Intellectual history. We can, as a matter of fact, conveniently posit a date which inaugurated the study of comparative linguis­ tics, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century discipline that has provided for us insights into language and meaning that were unavailable to earlier men. In 1786, Sir Wil­ liam Jones, a former member of Dr. Johnson's circle and a brilliant Orientalist and student of languages, delivered before the Bengal Asiatic Society a paper which declared that Sanskrit bore to Greek and Latin "a stronger affin­ ity . . . than could possibly have been produced by acci­ dent; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists, . . . there is a similar reason for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtlck . . . had the same origin with the Sanscrit."1^ Jones's insight about the kinship among Indian Sanskrit and the old European languages was shortly to be pursued by subsequent philologists whose labors eventuated in the partial reconstruction of ancient 1 6 3

Indo-European. This Ur-language, it became evident, is, like its off-spring, characterized by subject-predicate formulations and clearly distinguishable parts of speech. F u rth er, i t became evident th a t A ris to te lia n lo g ic was a systematization of Greek grammar, and thus Western philo­ sophical conceptions—so substantially derivative from the Greeks—amount to the projection of subject-predicate syntactic formulations into world-schemes. As Aldous Huxley explains: . . . Aristotle's logic was a systematization of Greek grammar, which makes a certain amount of sense for those who speak an Indo-European lan­ guage, but not for those who speak Chinese or for those who have learned the artificial languages of mathematics and modem logic; and that, there­ fore, it cannot be regarded (as it was regarded for so many centuries) as Logic with a large L, the final and definitive formulation of the laws of thought. . . . the age-old preoccupation of Western philosophers with the notion of substance was the natural consequence of their speaking a language in which there were clearly distinguish­ able parts of speech, a verb "to be,” and sentences containing subjects and predicates. "'Substance,'" says Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy, "is a metaphysical mistake due to transference to the world-structure of sentences composed of a subject and a predicate." And what about "essence"? The question is relevant only in the domain of language. "A word may have an essence, a thing cannot." Consequently, except under foreign influence, Chinese philosophers have never formulated the idea of "substance," and never projected the word into the universe. Their concern has always been with the relation­ ships between things, not with their "essences"; with the "how" of experience rather than the in­ ferred "what". . . . Western science began with the ideas of essence and substance, which were implicit in the 164

Indo-European languages and had been made explicit In Greek philosophy and Latin theology; but it has been compelled, by the inner logic of the scientific process, to get rid of these notions and adopt in­ stead an up-to-date, critical version of the Chinese view of things.17 The formism-mechanism duality in Pope's Essay is the sub-surface metaphor—which is to say, the Ur-language— of that poem. Pope could not have been aware of the sub­ terranean springs of his thought. A recognition that root metaphors engender conceptual categories that deter­ mine the routes of thought has emerged in the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists, philoso­ phers, anthropologists, linguists, and literary critics who have instructed us about the eidetic nature of man's mind. We recognize man to be a creature with a mentality that continuously translates and restructures single sen­ sations and perceptions into composite symbols and pat­ terns of signification. Whatever might be in the world "out there," man restructures or invents with the algebras of his own mind, whether linguistic, mathematical, or a r t i s t i c . Pope was unaware of h is two hypotheses, fo r in his day too little was known about human mental processes. We still know too little about human mentality, but we know a g re at deal more about language and how I t shapes our world and our perceptions of that world. Our under­ standing and awareness of language is one large measure 1 6 5 of difference between Pope's philosophical sophistication and our own. All the above notwithstanding, It must nevertheless be affirmed that Pope recognized contradictions In the ideas manipulated In his poem, even if he did not see the contradictions at the most fundamental level, and that he consciously, directly, and artistically sought to bridge the dilemmas. Pope forearms his readers with the remark in "The Design" about "doctrines seemingly opposite," and at the beginning of the poem he insists that our world is rich but perplexing; we neither now, nor ever will, know it all. The paramount contradiction in Pope's view is that between the cosmic order and man's perception of it. Thus Poise's admonition, "'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole" (I, 60), like the earlier question, "can a part contain the whole?" (I, 32), implies a dilemmai immediate experiential life and certain natural phenomena are avail­ able to scrutiny (empirical analysis) only within narrow limits. And the hypothesis that there might be no cosmic order, no grand and singular design, is, of course, not even considered; its existence is assumed. In Pope's philosophy, then, there is a disjunction between the seen and the unseen, and man must simply ac­ commodate him self to co n tra d ic tio n . As a p o e t-p h ilo s­ opher Pope is able to resolve the contradictory claims of 166 formism and mechanism through two propositions that de­ rive from the respective hypotheses and are ultimately demonstrable In a single poetic image that is convincing because of its traditional appeal. Pope maintains (1) that a spirit emanates from divinity infusing the whole creation: God is the soul of the world; (2) that the world manifests reciprocities at all levels of creation. Reciprocity implies the mechanistic categories of action and response between contiguous entities. Pope's crucial image is the circle, the symbol of harmony, totality, perfection. Pope has insisted that the cosmic order is a neces­ sary order ("Whatever IS , is RIGHT"), and he has accom­ modated the claim of mechanism in describing the func­ tioning of the whole. All parts of the world are duly disposed, and their placement follows not from mechanis­ tic rigidity but from intelligent direction of mind. In section IX of the first epistle Pope asserts that the role of each part is not to be questioned but accepted, that It is absurd "to mourn the tasks or pains / The great directing MIND of ALL ordains" (11. 265- 6). At this Juncture Pope introduces the conception re­ inforcing his idea that the universe is intelligently d ire c te d : 1 6 7

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature Is, and God the soul. ( I , 267-8) Pope was fu lly aware th a t th is Idea was not s t r i c t l y o r­ thodox. Writing to John Caryll about the above lines (at a time when the authorship of the Essay had not yet been revealed), Pope remarked that the anonymous author "uses the Words God, the Soul of the World, which a t f i r s t glance may be taken for heathenism, while his whole para­ graph proves him quite Christian In his system, from Man 18 up to Seraphim. " The large difficulty in denoting God the soul of the world Is that doing so Implies that God is responsible for evil. Either God Is indirectly responsible because he permits in the world those Irregularities which occa­ sionally give rise to natural catastrophes, or else God's continuous ministrations in His system make Him directly responsible for disasters that occur. Douglas H. White defines the issues as they would have been recognized by Pope's contemporaries: If the evils are the result of the necessary limi­ tations of the creatures who are by definition less perfect than the creator, or if they are the product of inner stresses necessary to the system, then God is at least at a distance from the actual creation of pain or deformity. If, however, God not only created the world to function in the best possible way but also continues to create It in all of its actions as it functions, then each ill may seem the explicit result of God's acting. He 168

is then directly the cause of evil. Yet the alternative separation of God from Immediate involvement with the world would make it a spiritless mechanism.19 Mr. White rem arks, "No c o n tro v e rs ia lis t was lik e ly to state either of these extreme conclusions or, for that matter, to hold them." Pope gets around the problem of evil by positing Internal centers of activity in nature. God ministers through agencies that testify to his over-all direction, but such agencies are not Identical to the Deity. In Epistle I, 141 ff., for example, Pope accounts for such disasters as plagues, earthquakes, and tempests by aver­ ring that “the first Almighty Cause / Acts not by partial, but by g e n 'ra l laws" ( 11. 145-6). In E p istle IV Pope accounts both for physical and moral evil: What makes all physical or moral ill? There deviates Nature, and here wanders Will. God sends not ill; if rightly understood Or p a r ti a l 111 Is u n iv ersa l Good, Or Change admits, or Nature lets it fall, Short and but rare, 'till Man improv'd It all. (IV, 111-16) Moral evil Is ascribed to man's wandering will. Physical evil Is the result of any one of three processes in na­ ture. It may be an intimate part of God's total plan: "partial 111 is universal Good." It may be the result of changes induced In the heavens, the earth, the sea through irre g u la r co llo catio n s of atoms in movement through time 1 6 9 and space. Finally, there might be aborted growth pro­ cesses In nature which culminate in odd, Imperfect, even fre a k ish members in a sp ecies. The agent of th is process is "plastic nature," the vital principle informing all living things, a conception most notably associated with 20 Ralph Cudworth. In III, 9» Pope refers to "plastic Nature" as one of the essential forces, like gravitation, which accounts for activity in the world. Pope could feel Justified in his a^ priori assertion, that God is the soul of the world, on the grounds that the ontological fact of God's activity in the world is simply beyond man's limited ability to examine. A figure of speech, however, can render the inexplicable close enough to human understanding so that philosophical investiga­ tio n can proceed. Pope was chary about what could be a s ­ serted regarding God's universe, but he did believe that order was m anifest w ithin i t . For example, Pope declared the world a maze but asserted that it bespoke a plan. He said that we know that God exists but cautioned that we can reason about God and His universe only from limited perspective here on earth. And he insists that . . . of this frame the bearings, and the ties, The strong connections, nice dependencies, Gradations just . . . (X , 2 9 - 3 2 ) no man can look through. Thus man confronts a grand 170 mystery, and his asseverations regarding It must be verbal formulations which approximate but cannot denote directly the actuality to which they refer. All these considera­ tions legitimize an assumption that Pope, In denoting God the soul of the world, Intends his assertion metaphori­ cally. As a result Pope discerns no risk of Implying that God Is to be considered so Immediately pervasive In His creation that all irregularities and evils are to be laid directly to His charge. What the «a priori claim does, however, is to enable Pope to Image fo rth d esc rip tio n s rev ealin g our world to be infused with divine spirit over and above the mechani­ cal laws to which the world is nominally accountable. Some of the most brilliant passages in the Essay are those, occurring toward the close of each epistle, which emphasize the mutuality of the great and the small, In matter and spirit. The first of these is the verse para­ graph where Pope refers to God as the soul of the world: All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul; That, chang’d thro' all, and yet in all the same, Great In the earth, as in th' aethereal frame, Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees, Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent, Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart; As full, as perfect, in vile Man that mourns, As the rapt Seraph that adores and bums; 1 7 1

To him no high, no low, no great, no small; He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all. (I, 267-80) Here there Is tension between unexplrlng changelessness and continuous renewal. The living spirit of divinity informs all parts to integrate the macrocosm. In the Essay as a whole, the vital unity which ob­ tains from multiplicity is a paramount theme. Accord­ ingly, descriptive passages like the one above emphasize re c ip ro c a tin g movement and connection between m atter and spirit, part and whole. In another context Maynard Mack has remarked on Pope's "deep sense of reciprocities be­ tween man and man and man and nature, eventuating in a whole whose every part is responsive to every other...."21 Such reciprocities Pope describes with a series of images, the patterns of which are increasingly intensi­ fied. As this chapter will demonstrate, the pattern cul­ minates in the climactic passage IV, 361-72, where the formistic and mechanistic hypotheses are accommodated to the comprehensive principle of divine love which, in drawing harmony from discord, unity from individual sep­ arateness, and continuity of dependence and Identity from all units of matter and their spiritual forms, comprises a concordant whole out of the multitudinous many. That grand resolution is anticipated by successive stages of lesser resolutions which reveal reciprocities 172 counterpointing tensions and disunities In the world as It is construed from a partial view. Thus at the end of the second epistle the poet explains that the partiality of Individual human motivation could not guarantee moral and social harmony, were It not for the guidance of heavens 'Tls but by parts we follow good or ill, For, Vice or Virtue, Self directs it still; Each individual seeks a sev'ral goal; But HEAV'N’S great view is One, and that the Whole: That counter-works each folly and caprice; That disappoints th' effect of ev'ry vice. (II, 235-40) Mutual dependence, not individual adequacy, reinforces the divine plan of mitigating disparities to strengthen the whole: Heav'n forming each on other to depend, A master, or a servant, or a friend, Bids each on other for assistance call, 'T ill one Man's weakness grows the strength of all. (II, 249-52) Both the passages quoted above assume the formlstic hypothesis insofar as they emphasize teleology and thus hierarchy, continuity, and inclusiveness. When turning to examine reciprocities functioning In the life of the individual, Pope’s analysis proceeds from his assumption that there are antithetical elements in man's nature, the regulatory and the appetitive: 1 7 3

See some strange comfort ev'ry state attend, And Pride bestow'd on all, a common friend; See some fit Passion ev'ry age supply, Hope travels thro', nor quits us when we die. (II, 271-4) The general Idea here is that for "ev'ry state" of life (wealth, modest comfort, poverty) and for "ev'ry age" (childhood, youth, maturity, decrepitude) a person re­ ceives In reciprocation a regulatory or spiritual benefit or good and an appetitive one. Pride and Hope minister to the regulatory or mental needs in a person, comfort and passion to the appetitive. There are formistic and mechanistic valencies In the above lines; the two metaphysical hypotheses are sub­ merged, but they have a provenance in the respective subject-verb combinations: "comfort"/"attend," "Pride"/ "bestow'd," "Passion"/"supply," and "Hope"/"travels thro'." Pride and Hope are mental states, reified by the verbs "bestow'd" and "travels thro'" into actuating spir­ itual forces, a formistic conception. That is, the be­ stowal of Pride and the continuous permeation of Hope In­ duce a spiritual bouyancy which mitigates misery. With the physical conditions of life Implied by "state" and "age/1 the discrete contiguity of "comfort" and "state" and of "Passion" and "age" imply the mechanistic cate­ gories of primary qualities operative in a localized field. There is a one-to-one correspondence between 174

"state" and the "strange comfort" which attends It, and between "age" and the "fit Passion" supplied. Comfort and passion, then, like Pride and Hope mitigate the harshness Incident upon any person's condition In life. The four lines quoted above, with their subtle con­ junction of formistic and mechanistic assumptions, estab­ lish for the last two verse paragraphs in Epistle II the Ideas that each stage of life has Its attendant desires and delights (275-82) and that the happy vagaries of mind permit man a sanguine response to experience (283-94). Reuben Brower finds the end of Epistle II unconvincing: In general, it may be said that Pope demonstrates the vanity of human wishes better than the com­ forting truth that "not a vanity is giv'n In vain." After his disturbing and vivid illustrations it is hard to accept the final piece of advice, espe­ cially since it Is offered in a tone of flippancy if not Irreverence: See.' and confess, one comfort still must rise,oc3 'Tis this, Tho' Man's a fool, yet GOD IS WISE. Brower's imputation of "flippancy if not irreverence" to Pope's concluding couplet misrepresents the poet's tone and intent. The last twenty lines of Epistle II risibly depict our common human foibles of delighting in baubles, inflating our hopes to cushion our wants, puffing our pride to appease our ignorance, and conjuring a new pros­ pect as an old one is lost. Such a psychology is at least generally accurate; we know that human wants are insatiable and that we yearn 175 for what we lack. Pope's main point Is that heaven has granted man a blessing In allowing him mind over matter. The first couplet of the last paragraph In the epistle strikes a note of poignant elegance: Mean-while Opinion gilds with varying rays Those painted clouds that beautify our days. (283-4) This celestial Image Is totally consonant with Pope's contention that man's mind has been fashioned by God to enlighten human existence. Man's mind is dependent on sense and misled by fancy, but its conjurations offer re­ ciprocals of hope, pride, Joy, and even self-love to lighten the yearnings of imperfect life. As Pope moves p ro g ressiv ely toward dem onstrating that the multiple parts of the world are integrated in the cosmic one, circle images recur with increasing sig­ n ific a n c e , p a r tic u la r ly c irc u la r movement from a cen ter of vital spiritual activity. Circle images are a minor motif in the Essay and represent various degrees of or­ der and wholeness. In Epistle I, for example, circle images are invoked to remind us, alternately, of cosmic immensity and of man's appropriate positioning within the world. Thus in 11. 23-8 Pope refers to unnumbered planets which "circle other suns"; in 1_. 90 to the comprehensive vision of God that discerns equally a burst bubble or a burst world; 176

In 1J. 248-56 to Earth, planets, and suns flying lawless­ ly from their orbits if the "least confusion" were intro­ duced into the system. Circle images referring to man's placement occur notably in I, 57-60, where man is impli­ citly defined as a minor wheel in the great machine of the world; in jll. 71-4 where man is assigned a mere point within the great sphere; in JL. 86 where the poet states that each person is granted by Heaven a circle to fill; in 1L. 123-4 where pride is denounced as the error which urges all to quit their sphere; in 11. 283-5 where man is enjoined to know and accept his own point "In this or any other sphere." A notable circle image in Epistle II occurs in 11^ 23-30 where Pope mockingly asserts that to pursue metaphysics is to "tread the mazy round . . . / As Eastern priests in giddy circles run." This wobbly orbiting Induced by abstraction in abstractions contrasts with the rest and peace man can acquire in the circle of happiness, the center of which is virtue, "The only point, where human bliss stands still" (IV, 311). In Epistle III, with its examination of the social order, Its origins, workings and network of dependencies both in nature and In the society of men, circular actions of expansion and contraction signify various stages of integration. Thus, for example, among the natural pro­ cesses impelled by "the chain of Love / Combining all 177 below and all above" (11. 7-8) Is the activity of matter: See Matter next, with various life endu'd, Press to one centre s t i l l , the g e n 'ra l Good. (13-14) This geom etrical Image Joins m aterial and s p ir itu a l con­ ceptions, for the center toward which matter concentrates Is a comprehensive abstraction, "the gen'ral Good." A s im ila r Instance of c irc u la r movement occurs In sectio n III where the poet describes the force of Instinct among animals which guides the parents to nurture their young until the latter are self-sufficient—at which point: The lin k d isso lv e s, each seeks a fre sh embrace, Another love succeeds, another race. (129-30) The dissolved link and the fresh embrace (the two nouns suggest circularity) denote the succession of generations not as an act of separation but of continuity, an ever- widening circle. The paramount theme of Epistle III is that Heaven has ordained a system of mutual dependence. Toward the close of the epistle Pope aligns that theme with the common-sense truth that each individual is impelled by self-interest. Pope effects the alignment by Insisting on a paradox, namely that self-love, the essential moti­ vator in individuals, becomes a restraining force when multiplied: 178

So drives Self-love, thro' Just and thro' unjust, To one Man's pow'r, ambition, lucre, lust: The same S e lf-lo v e , in a l l , becomes the cause Of what r e s tr a in s him, Government and Laws, For, what one likes if others like as well, What serves one w ill, when many wills rebel? How shall he keep, what, sleeping or awake, A weaker may surprise, a stronger take? His safety must his liberty restrain: All Join to guard what each desires to gain. Forc'd into virtue thus by Self-defence, Ev'n Kings learn'd Justice and benevolence: Self-love forsook the path it first pursu'd, And found the private in the public good. (Ill, 269-82) This idea that the mutuality of interests requires re­ straint of the individual to abet the public good is elo­ quently reaffirmed with an image of expanding and con­ tracting circular movement: Such is the World's great harmony, that springs From Order, Union, full Consent of things.' Where small and great, where weak and mighty, made To serve, not suffer, strengthen, not invade, More pow'rful each as needful to the rest, And, in proportion as i t b le sse s, b le s t, Draw to one point, and to one centre bring Beast, Man, or Angel, Servant, Lord, or King. (Ill, 295-302) From a center of divine energy, "From Order, Union,full Consent of things," the whole breadth of creation is har­ moniously circumscribed. Reciprocally, the spiritual center is intensified by the centripetal force of mutual dependence. Pope concludes Epistle III with a vine simile denot­ ing reciprocity and a planet simile which melds formism and mechanism: 179

Man, like the gen'rous vine, supported lives; The strength he gains is from th 1 embrace he gives. On their own Axis as the Planets run, Yet make at once their circle round the Sun; So two consistent motions act the Soul; And one regards Itself, and one the Whole. Thus God and Nature link'd the gen'ral frame, And bade Self-love and Social be the same. (311-18) By likening the two planetary motions of rotation and revolution to the "two consistent motions" of the soul, self-love and love for others, Pope Joins a fact of ce­ lestial mechanics to an assumption of formlsm, i.e., that an individual is an exemplification of a norm. Thus the poet validates the abrupt conclusion that self-love and social are the same. Still, as the two tropes by their very nature signify, all this is a matter of similitude not identity. Pope has not yet posited the terms of man's perfect state. That remains for the penultimate paragraph in An Essay on Man. In Epistle IV, 361-72, Pope describes with an elab­ orated simile the comprehensive power of love to bind to­ gether all men and all creatures into a concordant uni­ verse. The simile is that of love expanding outward from the self, just as concentric circles successively radiate from the center formed by the spot where a pebble is dropped into a lake. The passage contrasts God's love, which embraces all of creation into a unity, with man's love, which must proceed step by step from self-love to 180 love for other men and other creatures up to love for the Creator of all. The passage also answers the questions raised by the poet at I, 29-32, notably the query, "can a part contain the whole?" Pope's simile announces that man as "part" can contain the whole by the sympathetic power of love which awakens regard for all creation and for Cod, enabling man to transcend his Isolated Identity to apprehend his Integration with God's cosmic providence: God loves from Whole to Parts: but human soul Must rise from Individual to the Whole. Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lakej The centre mov'd, a circle strait succeeds, Another still, and still another spreads, Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace, His country next, and next all human race, Wide and more wide, th ' o'erflo w ln g s of the mind Take ev'ry creature in, of ev'ry kind; Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest, And Heav'n beholds its image in his breast. In these lines Pope conjoins the formistic and mech­ anistic hypotheses to image an event that symbolizes the harmonization of the universe. Implied in the assertion that "human soul / Must rise from Individual to the Whole" is the formistic assumption that discrete terres­ trial species are the phenomenal representatives of a hierarchy of forms, all of which are ultimately compre­ hended by the Whole. Implied in the simile that "Self- love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, / As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake" is the mechanistic 181 assumption that an Immediate event Issues from the move­ ment of a discrete object within a delimited field of activity (the dropped stone generates concentric circles on the lake surface). Most significant, though, Is the fact that the pri­ mary detail of the formistic assumption—love extending from the self out to successive men and creatures—and the primary detail of the mechanistic assumption'—circles extending from a common center—comprise a simile which devolves into a symbol, a symbol of a concordant universe. The Twickenham note to th is passage c ite s works of other poets who have employed an image similar to Pope's: The image (though not the application to self-love) occurs in Chaucer, House of Fame, I I 280ffj Shakes., I Hen. VI I ii 133-5; Marvell', ^igst AnnTv. of the ffovt. uncTer O.C., Iff; and Pope, temple of Fame, 436ff, Dune. A, II 3T3ff. In Donne^s Love's Growth, 2IfT7 it is used in a context suggestive oi^Pope's: I f , as in w ater s t i r 'd more c irc le s bee Produced by one, love such additions take, Those like so many spheares, but one heaven make, For, they are all concentrique unto thee. (TE, p. 164) As Prof. Mack observes here, Donne's lines are "suggestive of Pope's." Donne, in stating of the circles, "Those like so many spheares, but one heaven make," explicitly invokes what Pope implies, an image of the Ptolemaic uni­ verse of concentric spheares. Pope's subtle allusion to this traditional concept of order is characteristic of 182 his poetic technique. Pope never forces a traditional Idea by mere flat. Though his judgments or assertions may derive from philosophical commonplaces, Pope freshens them through simultaneous verbal effects that lend 23 uniqueness to the traditional or the familiar. Prof. Mack has stated that "Pope was profoundly gifted at this task of bestowing Dlnglichkelt on concepts" (TE, p. lxxvlll). An Essay on Man demonstrates the truth of that observation many times over. Pope's simile is not merely illustrative; it cannot be dichotomized into vehicle and tenor. The image of circles moving upon the surface of a lake is not merely a descriptive explanation of how love radiates from the self. Rather, the two key terms function coequally to synthesize a larger conception, a model of the Ptolemaic universe, a model which, however scientifically invalid, was familiar enough to Pope's readers to stand surrogate for ideas of unity, harmony, concordance, and resolute order. Having Joined the terms of his simile, love and circles, Pope itemizes seven spheres—(l) "friend," (2) "parent," (3) "neighbour," (4) "country," (5) "all Human race," (6) "ev'ry creature," (7) "earth"—to bring us to the eighth sphere In the Ptolemaic universe, the Coelum Empyreum: "And Heav'n beholds its image in his breast." The poet has brought us, at least imaglstically and 183 metaphorically, to a recognition of God’s provident order, a diversity bound by love into a harmonized whole. The formistic and mechanistic hypotheses converge into a perceptible demonstration of cosmic order. FOOTNOTES

1 Scholars acknowledge that the unique conceptualization which Issues forth from Plato--the hypostatization of "forms" construed to be existent In a non-temporal transcendent world of Idea—can only emerge in a lite r­ a te c u ltu re , one in which the phenomenon of w ritin g has been sufficiently internalized psychologically to per­ mit a literate person to sense a split between the words of a text and the "things out there" for which they stand. Literacy induces a psychic sense of a dif­ ference between thing and id e a -o f-th in g . Phenomenon and noumenon are construed as co e x isten t, but the latter—the more abstract—is the more "real" for being unaffected by time and change. See Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l$b3), especially Chapter XI, "Psyche or the Separation of the Knower from the Known," and Chapter X II, "The Recognition of the Known as Object." W alter J. Ong, R hetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, "19717* asserts about literacy and thought: "It Is impossible in an oral cul­ ture to produce, for example, the kind of thought pat­ tern in Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric or In any compara­ ble methodical treatises—and these would include, we may as well admit, Plato's dialogues, which, with their highly linear structure, can be developed only In asso­ ciation with writing however ostentatiously oral may be the interlocutory form in which they are cast"(p. 275). 2 The issues involved in ascribing cause to phenomena have become in creasin g ly tangled over the c e n tu rie s. To recapitulate note 2 of Chapter Three, I will remind the reader that according to E. A. Burtt there have been in Western scientific philosophy "three basically distinct convictions" regarding causation: the teleo- logical, the mechanical, and the evolutionary. Defi­ ciencies in each of these have been successively demon­ strated as our knowledge has accumulated. James B.

184 185

Conant remarks that scientists up to the mid-nineteenth century were still able to believe that the world ex­ hibited, "with the passage of time, a succession of states, each connected with its predecessor and succes­ sor by what were regarded as unbreakable links of abso­ lute necessity. This was referred to as the principle of cause and effect." "The Changing Scientific Scene 1900-1950*11 The Limits of Language, ed. Walker Gibson (New Yorks H ill & Wang,“T962)7 p. 22. By 1950 such faith in the explicabllity of the world had been over-turned for many physicists, the thinkers in our time who perhaps can be accounted the most di­ rectly concerned with an empirical assault on that large ontological question, What is the nature of the universe, its origin, order, and qualitative character? (Pope, it might be noted here, was very much aware of unknowability.) Physicists had become fully aware that their fundamental working hypotheses about cause and effect are susceptible to periodic upset as new infor­ mation accumulates. In 1950 the American physicist P. W. Bridgman spelled out what he thought "may well be from the long range point of view the most revolution­ ary of the insights to be derived from our recent ex­ periences in physics, more revolutionary than the insights afforded by the discoveries of Galileo and Newton or of Darwin. This is the in sig h t th a t i t is impossible to transcend the human reference point. . . . The new insight comes from a realization that the structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it suffi­ ciently to permit us to think about it at all. We have already had an intimation of this in the behavior of very small things in the quantum domain. . . . there can be no difference of opinion with regard to the di­ lemma that now confronts us in the direction of the very small. We are now approaching a bound beyond which we are forever estopped from pushing our inquir­ ies, not by the construction of the world, but by the construction of ourselves. The world fades out and eludes us because it becomes meaningless. We cannot even express this in the way we would like. We cannot say that there exists a world beyond any knowledge possible to us because of the nature of knowledge. The very concept of existence becomes meaningless. It is literally true that the only way of reacting to this is to shut up. We are confronted with something truly in­ effable. We have reached the limit of the vision of the great pioneers of science, the vision, namely, that we live in a sympathetic world, in that it is 186

comprehensible by our minds." Quoted by Conant, pp. 21-22; Bridgman's remarks originally appeared in an essay, "Philosophical Implications of Physics," Ameri­ can Academy of Arts and Sciences, Bulletin, Vol. Ill, No. 5 (February 1950). The most recent conclusions in astrophysics have been popularly summarized by Kenneth F. Weaver, "The Incredible Universe," National Geographic, Vol. 145, No. 5 (May 1974), 589-533. Weaver refers to research directed toward galaxies beyond our own and he empha­ sizes that "now, just now, the cosmic barriers have begun to lift a little. Man has had his first glimpses of these once-secret domains, and their bizarre ways have left him stunned. . . . Small wonder that the late British scientist J. B. S. Haldane could say, '. . . the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose1" (p. 589).

The P re so c ra tic s (New York; The Odyssey P ress, 1966), p. 1. 4 The Great Chain of Being, p. 46. Subsequent quotations of Lovejoy in the next few pages of my text are from the work here cited, and they will be identified by page number following the matter quoted.

The Discarded Image (Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 3s: 6 Cfo Stephen C. Pepper: "There is a very strong tendency for formism and mechanism to combine. They fly to each other's arms for mutual support just as animism and mysticism do, and with comparable results. Formism is strong just where mechanism is weak, and both theories are sympathetically analytical, but, once together, the categories of each theory compete for domination. Bertrand Russell has been such an eclectic and his writings record a history of the warring of these two sets of categories in his breast. If ever there were an excuse for eclecticism, It would be here between these two theories; but let anyone try for himself and see if anything is gained by It" (p. 146). A few years ago biologist George Wald remarked: "... all great ideas come In pairs, the one the ne­ gation of the other, and both containing elements of 187

the truth." "Innovation In Biology," Scientific American. Vol. 199* No. 3 (September 1<)58), P« 100•

"Epitaph. Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, In Westminster Abbey, ' The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 808. 8 "Pope, God, and Man," in Writers and Their Background: Alexander Pope, ed. Peter Dixon (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1972)V P. 73.

Quoted by E. A. Burtt (op. clt., p. 82) from Galileo's dialogues Concerning the Two Great Systems of the Worldl Salusbury Translation (London, l6bl), pp. 86ff.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander <5ainpbell Fraser (London: Oxford University Press, 189^; rpt. New York: Dover, 1959)# 2 vols., II, 307 (Book IV, Chapter X, para. 1). The quotation by Fraser which immediately follows appears In his "Prolegomena," I , lxxxix.

Op. clt., pp. 5^-5.

Maurice Mandelbaum, Philosophy, Science, and Sense Perception: Historical and Critical Studies (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins Press, i9b4), points out that early scientists like Boyle and Newton assumed the validity of a principle of inductive inference which we today consider a large problem in epistemology. The prin­ ciple Is that of "transdiction" or "the question of how observed data can serve as grounds for inference to ob­ jects or events which not only have not yet been ob­ served. but which cannot in principle be observed" (p. 63). Mandelbaum s ta te s th a t fo r Boyle and Newton science and epistemology did not in fact constitute two distinct sorts of disciplines which could be sharply distinguished from another. They looked upon scientific inference as itself offering evidence for the existence of objects which are independent of sense perception, and as providing us with our most reliable knowledge of the characteristics possessed by those objects (p. 65). What such men did not distinguish 188

as a philosophical—or an epistemological—problem, an amateur philosopher such as Pope might not be expected to have distinguished. 13, "Pope, God, and Man," p. 69. 14 This is true even of science. The wide and profound sweeps accomplished by science up to our day have been impelled and abetted by "languages" devised by men to rationalize the facts, the issues, the relationships, and the problems confronting us in the universe we in­ habit. For example, the formulary of chemistry and the cryptic notation of mathematics are human inventions in and for the pursuit of knowledge. The reflective specialist knows how his thought is shaped by the lan­ guage he works in. He calls a genius the man who has reshaped and increased the formulary of his field. To mathematicians, for instance, one of the greatest accomplishments of Newton lie s in the b e a u tifu l lu c id ity of his simplified mathematical notation.

1 5 Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (London: Faber & <*wyer, 1^2bj Faber & Faber, 19$2; New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), p. 28. 16 Quoted by Thomas Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language, 2nd edition (New York: HarcourF” brace Jovanovlch, 1971), p. 86.

17 "Adonis and the A lphabet," Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Other Essays (fclew York: Harper, 1956/, pp. 195-61 18 Letter of March 3, 1733; Sherburn, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, III, 354. Newton, it may be remem- tiered, had specifically denied what Pope affirms. In the "General Scholium" of the Principia Newton states, "This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God" (pp. 544-5). In the Principia Newton the scientist had no reason to push forward into metaphysical speculation about how the divine influence extends itself to give rise to 1 8 9

those mathematically describable forces underlying the u niverse. In stead Newton could r e s t confidently on the assumption that the universe was divinely ordained and that the job of the scientist was to explain the mech­ anical principles of matter. Pope, however, seeks to "vindicate the ways of God to Man," and in declaring that God is the soul of the world, the poet lays down the c ru c ia l premise in propounding the immanence of divine spirit. Douglas H. White, Pope and the Context of Controversy, points out that there was In varying degrees ample precedent for the idea in Plato, Aris­ totle, the Stoics, Virgil, Seneca, Augustine, and Ori- genj and,in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ralph Cudworth, John Tillotson, Isaac Barrow, John Scott, and Thomas Stackhouse. See White's third chap­ ter, God as the Soul of the World," especially pp. 45-8. 19 Pope and the Context of Controversy, pp. 44-5 j the quotation lmmediateiy"Tbllowing is from p. 45. 20 Regarding plastic nature, Cudworth summarizes views of the ancients and those of himself In a series of twenty-nine propositions in an eight-page section en­ titled, "The Digression concerning Plastic Life of Nature, or an artificial, orderly, and methodical Nature," The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Bk. I , Chap. I ll', sec. 37. TTTis form idable work was first published in 1678. The edition to which I refer Is that of Thomas Birch, ed. (London: Richard Priestley, 1820), 4 vols•, I, 381-8. 21 The Garden and the City (Toronto: University of Toronto 'Press, 1909), p. 97. Prof. Mack's reference Is to the Epistle to Burlington, 181-90, of which he observes, "This passage is highly characteristic of Pope"(p. 97).

22 Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, p. 226. 23 Surely the finest brief analysis of Pope's ingenuity as a poet, his ability to state tersely but immensely, is Prof. Mack's essay, "‘Wit, and Poetry, and Pope': Some Observations on His Imagery." This essay appears in Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George 1 9 0

Sherbum (Oxfords The Clarendon P ress, 1 9 4 9)>PP. 20-40. It is reprinted in Eighteenth Century English Litera­ ture: Modem Essays in Criticism, ed. James t, C liffo rd (Mew York: Oxford University Press, Galaxy edition, 1 9 5 9), pp. 21-41. Prof. Mack dem onstrates how Pope obtains with parallelism, antithesis, puns, proper names, and adroit juxtapositions of words in series a metaphorical effect without really drawing attention to his metaphors and sometimes without being—in common parlance —metaphorical.

i CHAPTER FIVE

THE MASTERY OF TONE

In IV, 361-72, with the image of concentric wavelets on a lake surface, Pope brilliantly merges formistic and mechanistic reasoning in a manner both philosophically sound and aesthetically satisfying. In positing the in­ terdependence of a l l things under God, whose s p i r i t in ­ fuses the Whole, the two hypotheses are equally necessary. Transcendent formism accounts for God's activity in His creation. Discrete mechanism describes effects of man's most noble action, his capacity to love. Yet to say this is to distort, for in Pope's symbolic representation the two hypotheses are mutually and inextricably operative; and the conceptual integrity of the design Is itself the end of meaning. Pope offers us here a comprehensive poetic reflection, and poetic reflections, as Susanne Langer explains, "are not essentially trains of logical reasoning, though they may incorporate fragments, at least, of discursive argument. Essentially they create the semblance of reasoning; of the seriousness, strain and progress, the sense of growing knowledge, growing

1 9 1 1 9 2 clearness, conviction and acceptance—the whole experi­ ence of philosophical thinking.1,1 The poet's penultimate verse paragraph Imparts a certitude of statement along with a simplicity and clarity of Insight to elicit the reader's acceptance of the philosophic-poetic ideas which have been so skilfully brought together and summarized. Viewed rhetorically, the passage reveals a shrewd design. The first couplet employs the figure syncrisis ("which compares contrary things in contrary clauses"2) and joins a statement of fact to a statement of obliga­ tion or necessity to imply on the one hand acceptance, on the other, submission to a condition: God loves from Whole to Parts: but human soul Must rise from Individual to the Whole. (361- 2) That thesis statement is followed by a couplet which com­ bines aetilogia ("a reason given for a sentence uttered"^) and simile to offer a reason and to Introduce the expla­ nation for the thesis announced: Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake. (363-4) The remaining four couplets expand the simile to generate an image symbolizing the very unity, harmony, and concord­ ance implied in the thesis statement of the whole para­ graph: 1 9 3

The centre mov’d, a circle strait succeeds, Another still, and still another spreads, Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace, His country next, and next all human race, Vide and more wide, th 1 o'erflowings of the mind Take ev'ry creature In, of ev'ry kind; Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest, And Heav'n beholds its Image In his breast. (365-72) Briefly, then, the rhetorical pattern consists of a prop­ osition entailing a contrast, a supplied reason asserted with a simile, and a figurative demonstration of the the­ sis announced in the opening couplet. Examined thematically, 11,. 361-72 represent a veri­ table precis of the whole Essay on Man. Briefly predicat ing of God an attribute universally accepted in the cul­ ture of the Christian West, ’’God loves," Pope contrasts that assertion with another, predicating of man an oblig­ atory activity: "human soul / Must rise . . . ." God loves totally, eternally. Man, however, is a being not of perfection but of potential. Man is himself the agent of his earthly destiny, and on him rests the burden of ameliorating his own temporal state. We recall the dis­ missal of metaphysics in Epistle I, the transition to Epistle II, and particularly the admonition with which the latter begins: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. 1 9 4

Pope's examination of human psychology In Epistle II and his recourse to mechanistic explanations are synop- tically Invoked by 11. 363-4: Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake. Self-love is "the spring of motion" (II, 59)* and It "prompts, Impels, Inspires" (II, 68). Self-love and con­ sequent human action represent immaterial contiguity of cause and effect, a material analogy being the disturb­ ance of a placid lake when a pebble hits the surface. Lines 365-70, describing the successive spheres of "friend, parent, neighbour. . . allude to Epistle III, the explanation of social organization as the divinely ordained mutual dependence of all terrestrial life. The last couplet describing a beatifically smiling Earth, its image reflected in man himself, accommodates the theme of Epistle IV, namely that happiness arrives through a joyous commitment of love rendered by each man, out of c h a rity : Happier as kinder, in whate'er degree, And height of Bliss but height of Charity. (IV, 359-60)

The simile which likens the expanding influence of

love to concentric circles on the water surface Is the

core of 11. 361-72 and represents a figurative validation

for the poet's assertion, "human soul / Must rise from 1 9 5

Individual to the Whole.” The assertion and its figura­ tive explanation represent in the Essay the poetical equivalent of proposition and proof in a philosophical treatise. The passage is a signal example—prototypical is not too strong a word here—of Pope's merger of poetry and philosophy. The technical method in the passage Is that of the poet; the organizational manner, that of the philosopher. Pope's simile functions as a "proof," but it is not susceptible to the scrutiny and verification that one directs at the proof set forth in a discursive treatise. A poem is more than an argument, and a simile, logically considered, is not a mode of proof but of ex­ planation; "the force of a similitude," as Sir Philip Sidney remarked, "not being to prove anything to a con- „2i trary disputer, but only to explain to a willing hearer. A philosopher who adheres to a rigorous logic can respect a simile too, for he recognizes the elusiveness of all verbal formulations and thus the worthy significance of a good figure of speech in educing a pregnant image of tru th . Pope's simile, as was demonstrated in the last chap­ ter, is more than an explanatory trope, however. It evolves into a symbol detached from and larger than the discursive or "surface" statement that gave rise to it. Having denoted tenor and vehicle, 1 9 6

Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebhle stirs the peaceful lake, Pope describes the successive emergence of eight circles and thus accommodates the essential detail of the Ptole­ maic cosmology, a universe of eight concentric spheres. Pope transforms his explanatory trope into a comprehen­ sive symbol of cosmic order; he reifies an abstraction by linking Ptolemaic allusion to a well known physical phe­ nomenon. Reification is undoubtedly the poet's most sophistl- 15 cated ploy. It is, in fact, analogous to the essential functions of language in creating meaning. Susanne Langer, following Ernst Cassirer, explains that in language we find two intellectual functions which it performs at all times, by virtue of its very nature: to fix the pre-eminent factors of experience as entities, by giving them names, and to abstract concepts of relationship, by talking about the named entitles. The first process is essentially hypostatic; the second, abstractive. As soon as a name has directed us to a center of interest, there is a thing or a being (in primitive thinking these alternatives are not distinguished) about which the rest of the "specious present" arranges itself. But this arranging is itself reflected in language; for the second process, assertion, which formulates the Gestalt of the complex dominated by a named being, is essentially syntactical; and the form which language thus impresses on experience is discursive.6 In describing eight spheres, each denoting a rela­ tionship between the individual man and others on earth, Pope compresses in an image an analogue of "factors of 1 9 7 experience as entities." These factors are comprehensive ly subsumed and "named" by th e ir a ssim ila tio n to the im­ plied symbol of cosmic order. Pope predicates nothing about that symbol, however; he does not talk about the named entity, for it signifies a "fact" with which Pope's readers are presumably familiar. Recognizing the details of Ptolemaic cosmology, the readers obtain the surprised delight of sudden recognition. The symbol is discursive­ ly reified, but having emerged, it requires no explana­ tion. It is simply a vital projection, an avatar of meaning. The Ptolemaic hypothesis, over-ridden by Intellec­ tual change in science and philosophy, is suitable as a publicly recognized poetic symbol. But Pope is not com­ mitted by his symbol to the scientifically invalid con­ tent of the hypothesis. Susanne Langer's remark about logical argument in poetry is relevant here: The "fixation of belief" is not the poet's purpose; his purpose is the creation of a virtual experience of belief or of Its attainment. His "argumentation" is the semblance of thought process, and the strain, hesitation, frustration, or the swift subtlety of mental windings, or a sense of sudden revelation, are more important elements in it than the conclu­ sio n .? Precisely what Pope effects in his penultimate paragraph is "the creation of a virtual experience of belief, . . . a sense of sudden revelation." 1 9 8

The summarizing finality of the adverb "then" in the opening couplet of the last paragraph signals the close of the poet's argument and invites the sympathetic acqui­ escence of his interlocutor, Bolingbroke: Come then, my Friend, my Genius, come along, Oh master of the poet, and the song.1 (373-4) Successive lines imply the tentativeness of philosophical speculation, the need of proceeding in the right spirit, of adopting tones consonant with the subjects examined, tones appropriately spirited, civil, measured and urbane, tones befitting literate gentlemen whose cultivated sen­ sibilities demand the exercise of serious thought that nevertheless avoids rancor and a wrangling over quiddi­ t i e s : And while the Muse now stoops, or now ascends, To Man's low passions, or their glorious ends, Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise, To fall with dignity, with temper rise; Form'd by thy converse, happily to steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe; Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, Intent to reason, or polite to please. (375-82) As Pope implies here, tone must mediate the dichotomies between thought and statement, between abstract subject and poetic assertion. Tone is the signal of the poet's awareness of issues and of his assurance in pronouncing upon them. The subtle and various sureties of tone, the voices that articulate the vision, align the poet's 1 9 9

Insight and aim with the integrity of his motives and the success of his accomplishment. The question of tone, finally, is the paramount is­ sue in discerning what it is that Pope would impart to us in h is Essay on Man. Tone d e lin e a te s a w r ite r ’s percep­ tion of his subject; tone records the writer's attitude toward the "truth11 he describes. All the techniques and strategies which a poet employs to impart his meaning add up to modulations of tone. And the question of tone sub­ sumes other considerations in the reader's attempt to educe meaning, considerations of the choice of subject, the verse form, imagery, allusions, schemes, tropes, and figures of sound. Poetry is language tightened to resil­ iency to accommodate bold precision and subtle nuance, both at once. And in the Essay as a whole "the most characteristic uses of language," says Reuben Brower, most a p tly , "are almost always modesg of address, ways of indicating tone and shifts of tone." Judgments on the predominant or paramount tone of the Essay have understandably differed. Maynard Mack describes the over-all style^ in words acknowledging the pronounced didactic intent of the Essay. Mr. Mack de­ clares the style "anything but tentative or trance-like, a style hortatory, cajoling, persuasive, imperative"10 (TE, p. lx x v ii). F urther along, Mr. Mack d istin g u ish es 200 the essential tonal difference between Pope's Essay and a poem of similar scope, Dryden's Religio L a i d :

Dryden's poem is genuinely ratiocinative, genuinely an argument, and everything about it accords with this: its tone is thoughtful, dispassionate, exposi­ tory, like that of a man recounting what he has seen at a play; its arrangement is a series of proposi­ tions leading up to conclusions, each proposition to be phrased as vividly as may be, but having no other relation to the whole than as a stage in a logical sequence. Pope's tone in the Essay is dif­ ferent. It is that of an actor in the play, shift­ ing with the situation, not only from grave to gay and lively to severe, but from scorn to pity, humour to outrage, colloquialism to formality, persiflage to affirmation, all these moods conspiring to enact the experience that Dryden's speaker is recollect­ ing. And Pope's arrangement is also different. Propositions occur in the poem, as they do in an actor's speeches, but less as theorems than as formulations and definitions of states of mind which are to accumulate finally in inclusions, not conclusions— in an imaginatively ordered world. (TE, p. lxxix)

What Mr. Mack discerns is a wide variety of tones which together effect a dramatic immediacy for the Essay, a sense of wide-ranging and on-going thought which Intel­ lectually and imaginatively orders the world.

In accord with such a view of tone in the Essay,

Rebecca Price Parkin asserts:

The speaker of the Essay on Man is a master of persuasive rhetoric. Dealing with a subject which Is fundamentally incapable of logical demonstra­ tion, but convinced of the rightness of his ends, he gives the poem a logical facade the better to entice the eighteenth-century auditor into the building. As far as reason can be applied to re­ ligion, the speaker is careful to have reason on his side. But, as the poem Itself emphasizes throughout Epistle II, reason is a weaker ally than 201

passion. Since the Issue Is man's salvation, the Implied speaker here Is put on his mettle to state the situation as strongly as possible. The result is that the tone is principally one of passionate exhortation, with the speaker ready to avail him­ self of any rhetorical devices which will help him convince his auditors. His aim is a kind of rhe­ torical hypnosis, not conviction based on logic. 11 To Mack and Parkin the Essay is rich, various, and cosmo­ politan in tone. It is also dramatic because of the speaker's personal engagement in multiple and continuous­ ly shifting issues. It Is rhetorical because of the speaker's exploitation of argumentative strategies that will best dilate the significance of his own insights while diminishing opposing contentions. It is hortatory because of the speaker's commitment not to dogmatic prem­ ises but to the superlative human activity of philosoph­ ically broaching the large abstractions regarding God, nature, and man; impermanence and woe; experience and cognition and their ranges and limitations—all the is­ sues assailable by the inquiring mind. Both Mack and Parkin define tone without prejudging the poet's over-all intention or success. To Mack the tone is that of "an actor in the play, shifting with the situation." To Parkin the tone is that of "a master of persuasive rhetoric." Neither critic in these remarks circumscribes the range of the poet's accomplishment but instead leaves open the question of what effects the poem 202 achieves. A different perspective on tone is offered by Thomas R. Edwards whose minimal taste for didactic poetry partly sours his regard for the Essay. Mr. Edwards applauds the decorum of the invocation (I, 1-16), noting that "every detail works to define the speaker and his unheard com­ panion as eighteenth-century gentlemen of leisure and cultivation.1,12 But to Edwards the initial tone of "ur­ bane detachment" is soon "counterpointed by another sort of speech. . . . Conversation becomes oratory, a change predicted by the elevation of tone in the opening line; and it is at the oratorical level that the poem will mainly conduct its argument" (pp. 29-30). Mr. Edwards contends that the shift from a conversa­ tional to an oratorical tone "is of course not complete. The conversational beginning persists in the inner ear throughout the poem, providing an implicit context for the oratory" (p. 30). By and large, however Edwards finds the Essay predominantly pontifical, though he qual­ ifies that criticism, and his remarks warrant quotation a t length: The didactic poet runs the danger of not being able to Justify his knowledgeable tone. He must sound Just a l i t t l e lik e God, which is a l l rig h t when the subject is crop rotation or bee-keeping, something in which his expertise (or lack of it) can be assessed; but if he ventures upon high speculation, where authority is a more uncertain matter, his 2 0 3

voice may grow uncomfortable pontifical. Pope often does talk like God in the Essay. His subject com­ mits him to saying that human consciousness cannot comprehend orders of being higher than its own, and yet he must himself at times speak as if the whole hierarchy were visible to him: "All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see" (I, 289-290). The frame of conversation eases some of this pontificality. Our double id e n tity in the poem—as the sp eak er's peers and as his congregation—allows us to feel the full weight of the sermon even as we participate in its delivery. Although we take the preacher seriously, we usually can remember that he is not a fanatic but a gentleman like us. S till, our suspicions are not wholly allayed by the interplay of tones. When the voice becomes markedly aloof and judicative we tend to distrust it, and it does so too frequently to allow complete reconciliation. (pp. 30-1) Edwards' pointed criticism finally comes down to a matter of taste. He cares little for didactic poetry. In labeling the voice of the didactic poet as "uncomfort­ ably pontifical," the readers as "congregation," and the poem as "sermon;" and in referring to "our suspicions" regarding the voice, that "we tend to distrust it," Edwards adjudges the Essay a moral treatise rather than a work of art. But one must meet a poet on his own grounds. In any poem which explains complex and abstract ideas, the poet must take upon himself the role of teacher or seer. Once a poet has chosen his subject, he has assumed expertise. Whether the reader will allow the poet's assumption often depends upon the voices the poet intimates in his 2 0 4 unfolding exposition, and the voices in the Essay are far more subtly various and modulated than Edwards allows. In contrast to the pontlflcatlon which Edwards dis­ cerns and objects to, Bonamy Dobree asserts that "it is Pope's own emotion in face of the problems of existence that is moving, that gives the work its imaginative qual­ ity. It is not Pope the thinker we respond to, but Pope the ordinary puzzled human being whom we meet, like, and unavoidably echo."1^ A difference in personal taste can account for the difference between Edwards' Judgment on tone and Dobree's. Where Edwards hears the voice of a tendentious sermonizer, Dobree hears that of an ordinary puzzled man with whom we can all identify. A similarity of critical assumption, however, appears to account for the fact that both critics deliver brief, general, com­ prehensive, but contrary Judgments on tone. Their as­ sumption is that Pope the author can be readily equated with the speaker in the Essay. Such an assumption Is doubtless often valid, but it can induce hasty generali­ zation regarding the poet's meaning at any one passage In the poem. Pope has forewarned us of such an assumption in stating his intention of "steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite." Such an intention would Induce him to be at times an opponent, at times an 2 0 5 advocate, of the same body o f Ideas. For Instance, Pope's first reference to the Great Chain of Being In Epistle I, 33-4, Implies no ready assent to the concept, though In that same epistle, 11^ 237-46, he Invokes It affirmative­ ly as the "Vast chain of Being.1 which from God began" (JL. 237). Preconceptions are hazardous in reading the Essay on Man. Dennis Hoilman remarks, toward the end of his dissertation, "One primary conclusion emerges from our study which has great relevance to our understanding and enjoyment of the Essay as a work of art: in most as­ pects it Is far more subtle than is usually recognized" (p. 285). Subtlety in tone, and in meaning thereby en­ tailed, is what Parkin and especially Mack acknowledge in their unwillingness to define the tone simply by specify­ ing a few tersely defined attributes. One more critical view can be appropriately cited here. It touches on the question of tone in the Essay rather indirectly, but it Is the headnote in a well known anthology of English literature and is thus relevant for representing a point of view to which thousands of con­ temporary students are exposed. The editor summarizes the gist of each of the four epistles. He then states about Pope and h is id eas: He has given them expression in splendid language, unforgettable phrases (many have detached themselves from the poem and have become a p a rt of our d aily 206

speech), and astonishing metrical virtuosity; and though the poem is didactic, it Is richly musical and is distinguished by subtly beautiful visual im agery.14 The e d ito r emphasizes the a e s th e tic q u a litie s in the poem, its mnemonic, aural, and visual effects. Pope's Intellec­ tual subtlety receives only a guarded glance In the con­ cessional phrase, "though didactic." This brief ascrip­ tion of the quality, didactic, as If it were a simple, singular fact which we must patronizingly allow, repre­ sents a distinctly modern attitude, and the editor is perhaps only conceding to a fact of modem taste. Our world Is different from Pope's, and we have been conditioned to different assumptions about nature, man, and art. Since Pope's day philosophy has ceased to be a lib e ra tin g a r t among the l i t e r a t e and has become a p r i ­ vate preserve fo r p ro fe ssio n a ls. Nowadays a panoramic view of man and his estate Is met with automatic skepti­ cism. We tend to examine a writer for his commitment, expressed or Implied, to the ideas he ranges among; and we assign him a value according to how we agree or dis­ agree with what we presume to be his ideas. Writers have always been thus examined, of course, and a classicist like Samuel Johnson took broad exception to the Essay on Man because he found its ideas commonplace and specious. 207

We can, however, accord Pope a more sympathetic audi­ ence If we acknowledge that In his world view and In his poetic he Is closer to the renaissance than to the modern world. The renaissance assumed the world to be ordered and man to be suitably placed within it. The uneasy, post-Newtonian suspicion that man Is an alien in a vast cosmos which follows Immutable laws—mathematically traceable but ontologically mysterious—might have been a sombre reflection in the minds of some of Pope's contem­ poraries, but as the Essay makes clear, it was not a thought that badgered our poet. Aesthetically Pope subscribed to the renaissance view of art as imitation; a poem verbally renders the objective world in "a speaking picture," and the worthy poet acknowledges his debt to the men and the artifacts of past greatness; A ll th a t is l e f t us is to recommend our produc­ tions by the imitation of the Ancients; and it will be found true, that in every age, the highest character for sense and learning has been obtain'd by those who have been most indebted to them.^ Implicit in this view is that the artist is a man with a public responsibility to delineate the legacy of human verities. The post-eighteenth-century view of the artist as a man with a private vision urgently demanding expres­ sion would have been alien and obnoxious to Pope. He, like his renaissance forebears, saw writing not only as 208 a rt, something creative and humanly analogous to God's divine creation, but also as a craft or skill with prin­ ciples whose mastery requires knowledge, effort, and con­ tinuous practice. Learned in his role, then, the poet sought to teach, move, and delight (docendi, movendi, delectandl). This classical dictum informs Pope's strategy in the Essay, and readers nowadays who wince at the didacticism are failing to allow the poet his proper role. We must bear in mind Pope's admonition in his Essay on Criticism; A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit With the same Spirit that its Author writ, Survey the Whole, nor see slight Faults to find, Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind; Nor lose, for that malignant dull Delight, The gen'rous Pleasure to be charm'd with Wit. ------(233-8) In h is pronouncements and in h is p ra c tic e Pope shows an allegiance to an emphasis different from our modern one. Rosemond Tuve explains the difference between the renaissance and the modem view; Earlier theory reads as if poetry were conceived of as a relation established between a subject and a reader, though only establishable by a poet. The emphasis on poetry as interesting evidence of the relation between a subject and a particular poet is an emphasis we have learned since, and one which seems the least helpful of any to the understanding of earlier poetry. The earlier kind of polarity, with 'a reader to be affected' as one of the poles, did mean that poets are likely to plead, or com­ plain, or exhort, or argue, much too openly for modem taste, and that we can often easily detect that they intend to 'breede no little alteration 2 0 9

In man.1 'For to say truely,' says Puttenham, in discussing the sententious or rhetorical figures, 'what els is man but his mind? . . . He therefore that hath vanquished the minde of man, hath made the greatest and most glorious conquest1 ( I I I , x ix , p. 197). Modern thinking finds such emphasis upon a poet's power over ^ readers both arrogant and aesthetically improper. Pope's Essay is too easily misread if we start from the modern assumption, that of "poetry as interesting evi­ dence of the relation between a subject and a particular poet." As Pope's statements in "The Design" testify, and as this present study has sought to demonstrate, Pope is chary regarding what ideas current in his day he will forthrightly accede to. Essentially he seeks to estab­ lish a relation between his subject and his reader. Pope recognizes that contradiction hedges what he would have the reader discern, and thus the truth of what the poet asserts must rest largely on the tone of his formulations. With any assertion, tone is the index of meaning and truth; for tone must assimilate the disparate demands of logical assumption, demonstrable experience, and fervent imagination. Tone shapes contradictions into an accommodation. One more point about tone can suffice here. Pope's verse paragraphs, as critics have frequently remarked, are not arbitrary divisions but distinct units of thought. A new paragraph may signal an argumentative shift, a 210 narrative digression, an abrupt transition, or a change of mood (for example, from hortatory to bantering or from expository to interrogative, etc.)# -but any one paragraph will have a tonal quality which sets that paragraph apart from the one preceding and the one following. Such being the case, a reader can obtain quick evidence of Pope's control of tone by examining the instances in the Essay on Man where the poet sets forth a one-couplet paragraph. There is one such paragraph to each epistle, and what is signaled by these one-couplet paragraphs can be briefly noted. In Epistle I the poet, having just delivered a six­ teen-line paragraph emphasizing that man "can reason only from Things known, and judge only with regard to his own System" (Pope's note to 1J. 17ff), now points a question: Is the great chain, that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee? (33-4) The couplet paragraph is a quizzical pause tendering sus­ picion that the popular concept, the great chain of being, is a legitimate ontological principle.Immediately after this couplet Pope shifts to a denunciation of man's pre­ sumption, thus to prepare the way for the presentation in two successive paragraphs of concepts the poet considers legitimate. 211

In Epistle II the one-couplet paragraph occurs at the beginning of section IV: This light and darkness in our chaos join'd, What shall divide? The God within the mind. (203-4) The first line here summarizes the preceding section of the poem, an examination of the passions and the in te r ­ mixture of virtue and vice in man, and the combination of question and reply comprises a moral admonition that rea­ son must predominate in man. In Epistle III the one-couplet paragraph occurs at the very end: Thus God and Nature link'd the gen'ral frame, And bade Self-love and Social be the same. (317-8) The declaration seems blandly terse, but it functions as a conclusive expository version of what in the preceding six-line paragraph has been fixed Imagistically (vine and planet), namely the idea that man receives supportive love by offering It. Occurring at the end of section I of Epistle IV, the last of the one-couplet paragraphs strikes an odd note: Who thus define it, say they more or less Than this, that Happiness Is Happiness? (27-8 ) This Is bald tautology. It has been preceded, however, by eight lines defining false (because short-sighted) notions of human happiness, and Pope is saying in effect 212 that those who define happiness by a single standard are fools—an Implication rung from the tone of grammatical circularity and patent illogic. FOOTNOTES

1 F eeling and Form, p. 219.

2 The definition is that of Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., Shakespeare1s Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Pres s~T~T§U7T>" p .1 3 7 . 3 Ibid., p. 179. 4 An Apology for Poetry, in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Eliza- EeTthsn Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), I, 203. Sidney's remark on a limitation of simile would likely enough elicit ready assent from most readers, though it should be pointed out that Sidney is specifically ob­ jecting to excesses in euphuistic writing. His com plete statement is as follows: Now for similitudes in certain printed discourses, I think all Herberists, all stories of beasts, fowls, and fishes are rifled up, that they come in multitudes to wait upon any of our conceits; which certainly is as absurd a surfeit to the ears as is possible: for the force of a similitude not being to prove anything to a contrary disputer, but only to explain to a willing hearer; when that is done, the rest is a most tedious prattling, rather over­ swaying the memory from the purpose whereto they were applied, than any whit informing the judgment, already either satisfied, or by similitudes not to be satisfied. 5 Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester, Copy and Compose: A Guide to Prose Style (Englewood C liffs, N. J .: £ren- TTice UalTT Inc., T90ST, define reification as "making whatever you are talking about into a thing. The tenor

213 2 1 4

is abstract, the vehicle is concrete. Reification is one of the standard ways of establishing a figure, whether that figure is presented as a simile or a meta­ phor" (p. 72) • Weathers and Winchester cite as an ex­ ample the following sentence by J. B. Priestley: "The winds that scattered the Spanish Armada blew English Literature, which had been merely smouldering for gen­ erations, into a blaze of genius." In Pope's Essay, IV, 361-72, reification involves the hypostatIzat ion of an abstract concept. Such a technique, I strongly suspect, Is most notable in the Dunelad and greatly accounts for the bewildering den­ s ity of th a t poem. In h is book Pope' s Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 19551s TCubrey Williams remarks that Pope often "distilled Into a couplet the essence of an idea that had ramified for generations in the history of moral philosophy. This procedure, which introduces into the poem backgrounds quite distinct from any we have hitherto discussed, gives Book IV great richness of meaning at the same time that it creates a practically endless exegetical task" (p. 104). Mr. Williams is referring only to Book IV, but his remark just as well covers the whole poem. I fin d in Book I of the Dunciad a passage ap tly illustrating reification. Cibber, ensconced In his study, offers to the Goddess Dulness a prayer which includes the following invocation: As, forc'd from wind-guns, lead itself can fly, And pond'rous slugs cut swiftly through the sky; As clocks to weight their nimble motion owe, The wheels above urg'd by the load below: Me Emptiness, and Dulness could inspire, And were my Elasticity, and Fire. (I , 181-6) Significant here is the simile which likens Cibber's mental processes to clock movement. Cibber Is thereby dehumanized and made a mere mechanical contrivance. But the transmogrification of Cibber also depends upon an­ other feature of these lines: the oblique reference to Cartesian categories. Given the machine imagery, we can justifiably align Pope's paired terms, Emptiness and Dulness, Elasticity and Fire, with the two sub­ stances which Descartes posited as primary in the uni­ verse: matter and spirit, with their corresponding at­ tributes of extension and thought (Pope's "Elasticity and Fire"). Cibber Is an entity conceived in Cartesian 215

terras, his matter being Emptiness, his spirit Dulness. By such alignment both Cibber and Descartes are deni­ grated, one In terms of the other.

6 Peeling and Form, pp. 236-7. 7 Ibid.. p. 243. 8 Alexander Pope; The Poetry of Allusion, p. 213.

9 Here I do not mean to conflate or confuse style and tone. Tone is a function of style, and style is the more comprehensive term. Tone Is the quality of voice, in a proposition or series of propositions, which inti­ mates to the reader the writer's perception of and at­ titude toward the matter he is pronouncing upon. Style is the individualized garb by which thoughts are clothed for the world's reception and recognition. In adverting here to the "garment of style” metaphor, I do not mean to suggest that style is merely adsciti- tious or supplemental, a sine qua non for beautifying what is otherwise pedestrian or commonplace. I mean instead to imply that style results from conscious weaving of thought and expression to win attention for the unique presence of an idea or observation. A literary style, insofar as it is unique enough to sustain definition, is the coincidence of manner and form in verbal response to living experience. A writer might be in his manner joyful, gay, dolorous, pensive, hesitant, amused, angry, or indifferent. He might be in his form paradoxical or oxymoronic, indicative, interrogatory, impulsively or deliberatingly assertive, or cryptically figurative. But the writer's emotional and intellectual pose, on the one hand, and his mode of pronouncement, on the other, constitute his "style" of expression. 10 This description occurs after a point where Mr. Mack has been explaining that "the Essay on Man is a public, social, and classical poem" in contradistinction to poetry like Tintem Abbey and The Prelude, poetry of the brooding wonder of Wordsworth when he grapples with the problems of man's destiny and mind (TE, p. lxxiv). Mr. Mack points out several differences 216

between the poetry of Wordsworth and that of Pope. Not the le a s t of these is th a t Pope and Wordsworth saw man's relationship to nature differently. Pope could feel assured that nature manifested a divine order, and his descriptive language continuously reinforces an acknowl­ edged sense of the polity of the universe and the evi­ dence of the divine plan. Wordsworth wrote at a time when mechanistic philosophy had fairly well undercut Pope's kind of faith in metaphysical order. To impart his deep-felt sense that the world was not merely a flux of atoms in motion but instead a living creation informed and suffused by divine spirit, Wordsworth de­ tails his personal experience as a sensibility con­ fronting nature, an experience, as Mr. Mack explains, "likely to be charted in terms of its sensory, almost physiological influences: 'sensations sweet, Pelt in the blood, and felt along the heart,—And passing even into my purer mind—With tranquil restoration'; and it is his own individual experience, felt in his blood, along his heart, passing into his mind" (TE, p. lxxv). By comparison to Wordsworth in his subjecinVe, pensive and brooding wonderment, Pope is admonitory and intends to remind men what they are presumed to know. That is Mr. Mack's point in his description of the style of the Essay as "hortatory, cajoling, persuasive, imperative."

11 The Poetic Workmanship of Alexander Pope, p. 19.

This Bark Estate . . . , p. 29. The subsequent quota­ tions of fedwards are from the work cited here and will be identified by page reference in my text.

English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, p. 545.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed, M. H. Abrams, et a i., 3rd EHTtion, 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton &TSoTT 1974), I, 2185.

*"The Preface of 1717*" The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. x x v ll. 217

16 Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (University of Chicago Ere's~ l W ;rpfcT TKqenixEdition, 1961), p. 189. The te x t of Puttenham cited by Prof. Tuve is The Arte of English Poesle, ed. Gladys Wlllcock: and Alice Walker {Cambridge, 1936).

\ CONCLUSION

Even critics sympathetic to Pope have often been cautious about crediting him with much success as a poet- philosopher. Their objections have implied one or a com­ bination of the following points: (1) that philosophy and poetry are not truly miscible, for they entail different modes of perceiving and responding to experience, philo­ sophy being a discursive intellectualization and exposi­ tion of abstract ideas, and poetry an ostensive defini­ tion of a cognitive event or series of events in language which deliberately exploits nuance, suggestion, and aural and mnemonic effects that contravene philosophical rigor­ ousness; (2) th a t Pope was u n fitte d as a th in k er to under­ take the kind of survey implied by an essay on man; (3) that Pope is eloquent throughout his poem but finally his ideas do not and cannot hang together with any thorough coherence; (4) that thought and word are not always con­ gruent in the Essay; that Pope is variously flippant when he should be serious, or superficial when he ought to acknowledge complexity, or moralistic and preachy when his empirical grounds for assertion are weak, or too

218 2 1 9 given to optimism and grand generalization to be credited with much by the way of philosophic insight. These crit­ icisms are refutable. To refute the notion that philosophy and poetry are somehow or other contrary modes of w ritin g , one can a r ­ gue that philosophers and poets both seek the same end: to make human experience comprehensible by reducing enig­ ma to verbal formulation. In the best philosophical writing and in the best poetry the style is the message— "style" now in the broad sense which includes the w riter's choice of subject, his predisposition to one type of is­ sue rather than another; his sense of his audience, i.e., the perception which helps him determine his mode of ad­ dress, his technique of analyzing and defining the issues, demonstrating and proving his contentions, and drawing connections between the parts of his argument; and final­ ly his manner of pronouncement, his manipulation of syn­ tax and diction to educe for the reader a sense of en­ lightenment, mystery, wonder, irony, or whatever. If it is granted that philosophers and poets share the same goal, that of using their language skills to enlighten readers, is it not possible to insist, never­ theless, that there is an inescapable difference between philosophic writing and poetic writing? Given a prose philosophical treatise on the one hand and on the other 220 a poem on the same subject, might there not be an essen­ tial difference which we can label "philosophical state­ ment" or "poetic statement"? The answer to these ques­ tions is that we can lay claim to such a difference only if we can validate a clean cut between "substance" and

"style". But such dichotomization would violate the

"texture" of the statement and thus the basic principle of language that the most worthily pregnant meanings de­ rive from the choice marriage of thought to word. This principle is continually evident in the Essay on Man.

According to Dennis R. Hoilman, Pope's manuscript revi­

sions of the Essay indicate that the change of a single word usually has both doctrinal and poetic consequences;

substance and style are not divisible. Thus to distin­ guish "philosophical statement" from "poetic statement"

is to distinguish spuriously and bootlessly.

Regarding Pope's qualifications as a thinker, we can recognize that our poet had a clear sense of the dilemma he faced, even though he was likely unapprised of the

roots of that dilemma. In "The Design" Pope tells us

that he was obliged to deal with slippery and contradic­

tory ideas and that he had to strike a balance between perspicuity and poetic gracefulness. By shrewdly estab­

lishing at the very outset a conversational motif (though

the putative interlocutor is not necessarily the same 221 person or persons at all times), Pope secures the rhetor­ ical advantage of ranging among complex ideas as would congenial, educated gentlemen pursuing philosophical is­ sues of mutual interest, steering "From grave to gay, from lively to severe," and in the process avoiding pon­ derous pontification and pedestrian exposition. Pope is explicitly and deliberately not setting forth a philo­ sophic system of his own but rather seeking to define the grounds for concurrence among the conflicting ideas of his day, and his knowledge of his subject is continually evident in his allusions to classical literature, the

Church tradition, the new science, and the speculations bandied about in his own eighteenth-century Europe.

Actually Pope occupies a fairly safe philosophical position throughout the Essay. Except for his theory of the ruling passion, an idea which, according to Bernard

Goldgar, Pope's contemporaries would likely have consid­ ered to be new, Pope makes no large affirmations that are not validated by a long ethical tradition and, usually, by common sense too. In other words Pope does not ad­ vance any dogma that might be questionable enough to necessitate his defending it. Most important, the Essay

is rhetorically very subtle, and we must be wary about assigning to Pope himself whatever ideas appear to be

advanced by the speaker in the poem. As readers we have 222 been invited to "Expatiate free o'er all this scene of

Man;" the poet, then, will set forth a few a_ priori assertions, but the argumentation in the Essay is mostly

a goad to reflection, the poet attempting to establish a relationship between his subject and his reader. Among the ;a priori assertions, however, are the two contradictory metaphysical hypotheses; and their presence in the Essay has provided a strain of complexity inducing some critics to allege that, whatever the eloquence in the poem, the ideas do not f in a lly hang to g eth er. Pope wa3 sufficiently aware of the contradiction to go at the problem directly and at the very outset, i.e., in the

first couplet of the narratlo of EpistleI:

Say first, of God above, or Man below, What can we reason, but from what we know? (X, 17-8)

Here Pope cites the two main subjects of his philosophi­

cal investigation, God's order and man himself. (I say

"God's order" because His existence is not questioned,

but rather His will, His justice, His immanence or direct

influence in the world already created.) The question

demands of the interlocutor or the reader immediate as­

sent to the cognitive method that will be employed in

examining these two subjects. The implication is that

our knowledge— presumably derived from the senses— can

serve as the base for deductive Inference about man and, 2 2 3

limitedly, about God. "LlmItedly,, because as the para­ graph goes along, Pope Implies a distrust of grand asser­ tions about God by means of any deductive or analogical rationalization. Having introduced the subjects central to an attempt to "vindicate the ways of God to Man," Pope sh o rtly thereafter summarizes what the age assumes to be true regarding "Systems possible" (11. 43-50) and man (11^. 51- 60), summaries which rest on the formistic and mechanis­ tic hypotheses respectively. As we have seen in Chapter III, the root metaphor of transcendent formism, plan and material, and the root metaphor of discrete mechanism, lever-like action and reaction, emerge intermittently throughout the Essay. Quite significantly the two meta­ phors are intimately conjoined in the one conception that can be adjudged original with Pope, that of the ruling passion. In the penultimate paragraph of the Essay (IV, 361-72) Pope derives from a conjunction of the formistic and the mechanistic metaphors one traditional symbol of a universe divinely harmonized and sustained. Such a dramatic resolution of the philosophical dilemma Inform­ ing the thought of his era epitomises the brilliance of Pope1s performance in the Essay on Man. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M. H., et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 3rd ed. 2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974. I> 2185. Aiken, Henry D. The Age of Ideology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957. Arnold, Matthew. "The Study of Poetry." Essays In

Criticism: Second Series. IV. London: MacMillan, 1903. Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study In Meaning.

London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928; rpt. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.

Brett, R. L. Reason and Imagination: A Study of Form and

Meaning in Four Poems. London: Oxford University

Press, i 960. Brower, Reuben. Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959. B u rtt, E. A. The M etaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. New York: Doubleday Anchor edition, 1954. Cameron, J. M. "Doctrinal to an Age: Notes Towards a Revaluation of Pope's Essay on Man." Essential

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