Why has not man a microscopic sight?
For this plain reason, man is not a mite:
Say what th' advantage of so fine an eye?
T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the sky.
Pope owed the thought, and the expression "microscopic eye" to Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, bk. ii. chap. 23, sect. 12: "If by the help of microscopical eyes, a man could penetrate into the secret composition of bodies, he would not make any great advantage by the change if he could not see things he was to avoid at a convenient distance."
[1066] The abbreviated language of the last four lines, which are not legitimate composition, makes it difficult to follow the construction: "Say what the use were finer touch given if, trembingly alive all o'er, we were to smart and agonise at ev'ry pore? Or what the use of quick effluvia darting through the brain, if we were to die of a rose in aromatic pain?"
[1067] Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, bk. ii. chap. 23, sect. 12: "If our sense of hearing were but one thousand times quicker than it is, how would a perpetual noise distract us. And we should in the quietest retirement be less able to sleep or meditate than in the middle of a sea-fight."—Warton.
Butler, Hudibras, ii. 1, 617.
Her voice, the music of the spheres,
So loud, it deafens mortal ears.—Wakefield.
It was an ancient fancy that the planets rolled along spheres, emitting music as they went. Pope's supposition that the music would stun us, alludes to the remarks of Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, that the crash of harmony is so tremendous that human ears cannot receive it, just as human eyes cannot gaze at the sun. Warburton remarks that Pope should not have illustrated a philosophical argument by the example of an unreal sound.
[1068] First edition:
Through gen'ral life, behold the scale arise
Of sensual and of mental faculties!
Vast range of sense from man's imperial race
To the green myriads, etc.
A very little observation would have satisfied Pope that "green" is not the prevailing hue of the "myriads in the peopled grass." Wakefield says that the expression "man's imperial race," in ver. 209, is from Dryden's Virg. Geo. iii. 377, and that the general argument is from Bolingbroke's Fragments: "There is a gradation of sense and intelligence here from animal beings imperceptible to us for their minuteness, without the help of microscopes, and even with them, up to man." This is what Leibnitz called "the law of continuity." "Nature," he said, "never proceeds by leaps."