[994] There must be no interval, that is, between the parts, or they will not cohere.
[995] Bolingbroke, Fragment 43: "It might be determined in the divine ideas that there should be a gradation of life and intellect throughout the universe. In this case it was necessary that there should be some creatures at our pitch of rationality."—Wakefield.
The theory of a chain of beings was adopted by Bolingbroke and Pope from Archbishop King's Essay on the Origin of Evil. Arguing from the analogy of our own world, King contended that a universe fully peopled with superior natures would leave room for an inferior grade, and these for lower grades still, in a continuously descending scale. There must either be inferior creatures, or else voids in creation, and we may presume that the maximum of existence is most conducive to the ends of benevolence and wisdom.
[996] MS.:
Is but if God has placed his creature wrong.
[997] Bolingbroke, Fragment 50: "The seeming imperfection of the parts is necessary to the real perfection of the whole."—Wakefield.
The sentence quoted by Wakefield was copied by Bolingbroke from Leibnitz. Lord Shaftesbury adopted the same hypothesis in his Inquiry concerning Virtue. If, he says, our earth is a part only of some other system, and if what is ill in our system makes for the good of the general system, then there is nothing ill with respect to the whole. Rousseau, who heartily embraced the doctrine, remarks that "we cannot give direct proofs for or against, because these proofs depend on a complete knowledge of the constitution of the universe, and of the ends of its author."
[998] Bolingbroke, Fragments 43 and 63: "We labour hard, we complicate various means to bring about some one paltry purpose.—In the works of men the most complicated schemes produce very hardly and very uncertainly one single effect: in the works of God one single scheme produces a multitude of different effects, and answers an immense variety of purposes."—Wakefield.
How clearly and closely is this sentiment expressed by Pope, and yet how difficult to render into verse with precision and effect.—Bowles.
In the first line the phrase "one single," for "one single movement," is especially inelegant. Bowles might have selected many couplets from the Essay on Man more deserving of the commendation. The thought which Pope owed to Bolingbroke, Bolingbroke owed to Leibnitz, who says in his Théodicée, "Everything in nature is connected, and if a skilful artizan, engineer, architect, statesman, often makes the same contrivance serve for several purposes, we may affirm that God, whose wisdom and power are perfect, does so always." Hence Pope contends that what is defective in man considered separately, may be advantageous in relation to the hidden ends he is intended to serve.