Now hear the translator, who is not for mincing matters:
Seroit-il en naissant au travail condamné?
Aux douceurs du répos seroit-il destiné?
and these are both wrong, for man is neither condemned to slavish toil and labour, nor yet indulged in the luxury of repose. The poet says,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast.
i.e. He doubts, as appears from the very next line, whether his soul be mortal or immortal; one of which is the truth, namely, its immortality, as the poet himself teaches, when he speaks of the omnipresence of God:
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part.—Epist. i. 275.
The translator, as we say, unconscious of the poet's purpose, rambles as before:
Tantôt de son esprit admirant l'excellence,
Il pense qu'il est Dieu, qu'il en a la puissance;
Et tantôt gémissant des besoins de son corps,
Il croit que de la brute, il n'a que les ressorts.
Here his head, turned to a sceptical view, was running on the different extravagances of Plato in his theology, and of Descartes in his physiology. Sometimes, says he, man believes himself a real God; and sometimes again, a mere machine: things quite out of the poet's thought in this place. Again, the poet, in a beautiful allusion to Scripture sentiments, breaks out into this just and moral reflection on man's condition here,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err.