[985] Pascal's Thoughts, translated by Dr. Kennet, 2nd ed., 1727, p. 288: "If a man did but begin with the study of himself he would soon find how incapable he was of proceeding further. For what possibility is there that the part should contain the whole?"
[986] I should have pointed out the expression and great effect of this line as illustrating the subject it describes; but Ruffhead says "it is the most heavy, languid, and unpoetical of all Pope ever wrote, and that the expletive 'to' before the verb is unpardonable."—Bowles.
[987] An allusion to the golden chain of Homer, which the poet represents as sustained by Jove, with the whole creation appended to it.—Wakefield.
[988] "Why one reason," says Wakefield, "should be harder than the other I am unable to discern." The passage is taken, as Warton pointed out, from Voltaire's remarks on Pascal's Thoughts, but Voltaire put the questions on the same footing, and did not pretend that the second was harder to solve than the first. "You are astonished," he says "that God has made man so contracted, so ignorant, and so unhappy. Why are you not astonished that he has not made him more contracted, more ignorant, and more unhappy?" Neither question ought to have presented any difficulty to Pope, since it was "plain" to him that "the best possible system" required that "there should be somewhere such a rank as man." All who admit the attributes of the Deity must allow that every portion of the world, sentient or insensible, is the consummation of wisdom with reference to its place in the infinite and eternal scheme. "God," says Leibnitz, "does not even neglect inanimate things; they are unconscious, but God is conscious for them. He would reproach himself with the least real defect in the universe, although no one perceived it."
[989] Wakefield quotes Milton, Par. Lost, iii. 460, where the phrase "those argent fields" is applied to the heavens.
[990] This word is commonly pronounced in prose with the e mute in the plural, as in the singular, and is therefore only of three syllables; but Pope has in the plural continued the Latin form and assigned it four. I think, improperly.—Johnson.
[991] Pope says that we cannot tell why Jupiter's satellites are less than Jupiter. Any mathematician could have shown him that if Jupiter was less than his satellites they would not revolve round him.—Voltaire.
Warburton, to evade Voltaire's criticism, put a strained and paraphrastic interpretation upon Pope's lines. Their natural meaning is, that man is too ignorant to comprehend why he is not less instead of greater,—nay, that he cannot even tell why oaks are taller than weeds, why Jupiter's satellites are less than Jupiter, and all his investigations into the earth and the heavens will not supply him with the answer.
[992] Pope did not generally condescend to the artificial inversion which places the adjective after the substantive. Here, in a passage where simplicity was an object, we have "systems possible" followed by "wisdom infinite,"—combinations, too, which have the effect of producing a disagreeable monotony, occurring in the same part of the lines to which they respectively belong.—Conington.
[993] Bolingbroke, Fragment 43: "Since infinite wisdom not only established the end, but directed the means, the system of the universe must necessarily be the best of all possible systems."—Wakefield.