Ver. 19. Ask for the learn'd, &c.] He begins, from ver. 18 to 29, with detecting the false notions of happiness. These are of two kinds, the philosophical and popular. The popular he had recapitulated in the invocation, when happiness was called upon, at her several supposed places of abode: the philosophical only remained to be delivered:
Ask of the learn'd the way? The learn'd are blind;
This bids to serve, and that to shun mankind:
Some place the bliss in action, some in ease;
Those call it pleasure, and contentment these.
They differed as well in the means, as in the nature of the end. Some placed happiness in action, some in contemplation; the first called it pleasure, the second ease. Of those who placed it in action and called it pleasure, the route they pursued either sunk them into sensual pleasures, which ended in pain; or led them in search of imaginary perfections, unsuitable to their nature and station, see Ep. i., which ended in vanity. Of those who placed it in ease, the contemplative station they were fixed in made some, for their quiet, find truth in every thing; others, in nothing:
Who thus define it, say they more or less
Than this, that happiness is happiness?
The confutation of these philosophic errors he shows to be very easy, one common fallacy running through them all, namely this, that instead of telling us in what the happiness of human nature consists, which was what was asked of them, each busies himself in explaining in what he placed his own.
Ver. 29. Take natures path, &c.] The poet then proceeds, from ver. 28 to 35, to reform their mistakes; and shows them that, if they will but take the road of nature, and leave that of mad opinion, they will soon find happiness to be a good of the species, and, like common sense, equally distributed to all mankind.
Ver. 35. Remember, man, &c.] Having exposed the two false species of happiness, the philosophical and popular, and announced the true; in order to establish the last, he goes on to a confutation of the two former.
I. He first, from ver. 34 to 49, confutes the philosophical, which, as we said, makes happiness a particular, not a general good. And this two ways; 1. From his grand principle, that God acts by general laws; the consequence of which is, that happiness, which supports the well-being of every system, must needs be universal, and not partial, as the philosophers conceived. 2. From fact, that man instinctively concurs with this designation of Providence, to make happiness universal, by his having no delight in any thing uncommunicated or uncommunicable.
Ver. 49. Order is heaven's first law;] II. In the second place, from ver. 48 to 67, he confutes the popular error concerning happiness, namely, that it consists in externals. This he does, first, by inquiring into the reasons of the present providential disposition of external goods,—a topic of confutation chosen with the greatest accuracy and penetration. For, if it appears they were given in the manner we see them distributed, for reasons different from the happiness of individuals, it is absurd to think that they should make part of that happiness. He shows, therefore, that disparity of external possessions among men was for the sake of society: 1. To promote the harmony and happiness of a system; because the want of external goods in some, and the abundance in others, increase general harmony in the obligor and obliged. Yet here, says he, mark the impartial wisdom of heaven; this very inequality of externals, by contributing to general harmony and order, produceth an equality of happiness amongst individuals. 2. To prevent perpetual discord amongst men equal in power, which an equal distribution of external goods would necessarily occasion. From hence he concludes, that as external goods were not given for the reward of virtue, but for many different purposes, God could not, if he intended happiness for all, place it in the enjoyment of externals.
Ver. 67. Fortune her gifts may variously dispose, &c.] His second argument, from ver. 66 to 73, against the popular error of happiness being placed in externals, is, that the possession of them is inseparably attended with fear; the want of them with hope; which directly crossing all their pretensions to making happy, evidently shows that God had placed happiness elsewhere. And hence, in concluding this argument, he takes occasion, from ver. 72 to 77, to upbraid the desperate folly and impiety of those who, in spite of God and nature, will yet attempt to place happiness in externals: