[1140] Ed. 4:
Who saw the stars here rise, and here descend?—Pope.
[1141] The comparison is pointless. Newton knew far more of his end,—of his mission and ultimate destiny,—than of the purpose and fate of comets, and did not know less of his own beginning than of the origin of the heavenly bodies. Man is incapable of conceiving the mode by which a single atom of the universe was called into being, nor can he penetrate to the essence of a single law or particle of matter any better than to the essence of mind. After ver. 38 there is this couplet in the MS.:
Or more of God, or more of man can find,
Than this that one is good, and one is blind?
There is a kindred antithesis in the last verse of the Epistle, but the exaggeration of the statement is less strongly marked.
[1142] "Alas," says Pope, "what wonder" that Newton should be unable to "explain his own beginning and end," since "what reason weaves is undone by passion." But this cannot be the cause of our inability to unfold the creative process, for when passion is not permitted to interfere with reason we make no advance towards an explanation of our "own beginning." Passion does often interfere with the just perception of our proper "end," and with the practice of the duties we perceive, only Pope should have known that to rise superior to passion is the daily discipline of hosts of men. "It seems," says Pascal, "to be the divine intention to perfect the will rather than the understanding," and of the two we can approximate nearer to moral perfection than to universal science.
[1143] MS.:
Unchecked may mount thy intellectual part
From whim to whim,—at best from art to art.
[1144] MS.:
Joins truth to truth, or mounts
There mounts unchecked, and soars from art to art.