Essay on Man

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An Essay on Man.
Moral essays and satires
by Alexander Pope.
INTRODUCTION.
Pope's life as a writer falls into three periods, answering fairly enough
to the three reigns in which he worked. Under Queen Anne he was an
original poet, but made little money by his verses; under George I. he
was chiefly a translator, and made much money by satisfying the
French-classical taste with versions of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey."
Under George I. he also edited Shakespeare, but with little profit to
himself; for Shakespeare was but a Philistine in the eyes of the
French-classical critics. But as the eighteenth century grew slowly to its
work, signs of a deepening interest in the real issues of life distracted
men's attention from the culture of the snuff-box and the fan. As Pope's
genius ripened, the best part of the world in which he worked was
pressing forward, as a mariner who will no longer hug the coast but
crowds all sail to cross the storms of a wide unknown sea. Pope's
poetry thus deepened with the course of time, and the third period of
his life, which fell within the reign of George II., was that in which he
produced the "Essay on Man," the "Moral Essays," and the "Satires."
These deal wholly with aspects of human life and the great questions
they raise, according throughout with the doctrine of the poet, and of
the reasoning world about him in his latter day, that "the proper study
of mankind is Man."
Wrongs in high places, and the private infamy of many who enforced
the doctrines of the Church, had produced in earnest men a vigorous
antagonism. Tyranny and unreason of low-minded advocates had
brought religion itself into question; and profligacy of courtiers, each
worshipping the golden calf seen in his mirror, had spread another form
of scepticism. The intellectual scepticism, based upon an honest search

for truth, could end only in making truth the surer by its questionings.
The other form of scepticism, which might be traced in England from
the low-minded frivolities of the court of Charles the Second, was
widely spread among the weak, whose minds flinched from all earnest
thought. They swelled the number of the army of bold questioners upon
the ways of God to Man, but they were an idle rout of camp-followers,
not combatants; they simply ate, and drank, and died.
In 1697, Pierre Bayle published at Rotterdam, his "Historical and
Critical Dictionary," in which the lives of men were associated with a
comment that suggested, from the ills of life, the absence of divine care
in the shaping of the world. Doubt was born of the corruption of society;
Nature and Man were said to be against faith in the rule of a God, wise,
just, and merciful. In 1710, after Bayle's death, Leibnitz, a German
philosopher then resident in Paris, wrote in French a book, with a title
formed from Greek words meaning Justice of God, Theodicee, in
which he met Bayle's argument by reasoning that what we cannot
understand confuses us, because we see only the parts of a great whole.
Bayle, he said, is now in Heaven, and from his place by the throne of
God, he sees the harmony of the great Universe, and doubts no more.
We see only a little part in which are many details that have purposes
beyond our ken. The argument of Leibnitz's Theodicee was widely
used; and although Pope said that he had never read the Theodicee, his
"Essay on Man" has a like argument. When any book has a wide
influence upon opinion, its general ideas pass into the minds of many
people who have never read it. Many now talk about evolution and
natural selection, who have never read a line of Darwin.
In the reign of George the Second, questionings did spread that went to
the roots of all religious faith, and many earnest minds were busying
themselves with problems of the state of Man, and of the evidence of
God in the life of man, and in the course of Nature. Out of this came,
nearly at the same time, two works wholly different in method and in
tone -- so different, that at first sight it may seem absurd to speak of
them together. They were Pope's "Essay on Man," and Butler's
"Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and
Course of Nature."

Butler's "Analogy" was published in 1736; of the "Essay on Man," the
first two Epistles appeared in 1732, the Third Epistle in 1733, the
Fourth in 1734, and the closing Universal Hymn in 1738. It may seem
even more absurd to name Pope's "Essay on Man" in the same breath
with Milton's "Paradise