Ver. 157. Who knows but He, &c.] The sublimity with which the great Author of Nature is here characterized, is but the second beauty of this fine passage. The greatest is the making the very dispensation objected to, the periphrasis of his title.
Ver. 174. And little less than angels, &c.] "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour." Psalm viii. 5.
Ver. 202. And stunned him, &c.] This instance is poetical, and even sublime, but misplaced. He is arguing philosophically in a case that required him to employ the real objects of sense only: and, what is worse, he speaks of this as a real object, If nature thundered, &c. The case is different where, in ver. 253, he speaks of the motion of the heavenly bodies, under the sublime conception of ruling angels: for whether there be ruling angels or no, there is real motion, which was all his argument wanted; but if there be no music of the spheres, there was no real sound, which his argument was obliged to find.
Ver. 209. Mark how it mounts, to man's imperial race,] M. du Resnel has turned the latter part of the line thus,
Jusqu'à l'homme, ce chef, ce roi de l'univers.
"Even to man, this head, this king of the universe," which is so sad a blunder, that it contradicts the poet's peculiar system; who, although he allows man to be king of this inferior world, yet he thinks it madness to make him king of the universe. If the philosophy and argument of the poem could not teach him this, yet methinks the poet's own words, in this very Epistle, might have prevented his mistake:
So man; who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown.
If the translator imagined that Mr. Pope was speaking ironically where he talks of man's imperial race, and so would heighten the ridicule of the original by ce roi de l'univers, the mistake is still worse; for the force of the argument depends upon its being said seriously; the poet being here speaking of a scale from the highest to the lowest in the mundane system.
Ver. 224. For ever separate, &c.] Near, by the similitude of the operation; separate, by the immense difference in the nature of the powers.
Ver. 226. What thin partitions, &c.] So thin, that the atheistic philosophers, as Protagoras, held that thought was only sense: and from thence concluded, that every imagination or opinion of every man was true; Πασα φαντασια εστιν αληθης. But the poet determines more philosophically that they are really and essentially different, how thin soever the partition be by which they are divided. Thus (to illustrate the truth of this observation) when a geometer considers a triangle, in order to demonstrate the equality of its three angles to two right ones, he has the picture or image of some sensible triangle in his mind, which is sense; yet, notwithstanding, he must needs have the notion or idea of an intellectual triangle likewise, which is thought; for this plain reason, because every image or picture of a triangle must needs be obtusangular, or rectangular, or acutangular; but that which, in his mind, is the subject of his proposition, is the ratio of a triangle, undetermined to any of these species. On this account it was that Aristotle said, Νοηματα τινι διοισει, του μη φαντασματα ειναι, η ουδε ταυτα φαντασματα, αλλ' ουκ ανευ φαντασματων. "The conceptions of the mind differ somewhat from sensible images; they are not sensible images, and yet not quite free or disengaged from sensible images."