[1158] MS.: "nature." "Grace" here signifies the Divine assistance vouchsafed to the natural powers of man in his efforts after goodness. Pope's original reading,—"grace and nature"—was a censure of the attempts to define the respective influences exerted by the nature of man, and the grace or intervention of God. The substitute of "virtue" for "nature," obscures the meaning, but the poet apparently had still in his mind the long controversies on the share which appertained to "grace" in the production of "virtue." He may have thought that it was needless to try and settle the precise part which belonged to grace, since nature and grace are both gifts of the same Almighty Being.
[1159] Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato divided the faculties into "sense and reason," and the classification passed from the ancients to the schoolmen. "Sense" comprised the five senses, with every act of the mind which was supposed to depend on bodily sensations. Under this head were included the passions and desires, and "sense," in its moral signification, was the equivalent of what Pope calls "self-love."
[1160] MS.:
Let metaphysics common reason split.
[1161] In the MS. this couplet follows:
Too nice distinctions honest sense will shun,
Know pleasure, good, and happiness are one.
[1162] MS.:
Both fly from pain, to pleasure both aspire,
With one aversion, and with one desire.
Pope charges the schoolmen with being at war about a name when they distinguished between "sense" and "reason," and the distinction is a capital article in his own moral creed. He charges them with maintaining that sense and reason were not merely separate, but contending powers, and he too has insisted on the universality of the strife. "Sense," or, in his language, "self-love," "looks," ver. 73, to "immediate," "reason" to "future good," and in this difference of view the "temptations" of self-love "throng thicker than the arguments" of reason. The contest is the subject of a long disquisition further on, and Pope laments, ver. 149-160, that passion should conquer in the fight. When he interjected the paragraph, in which he contradicted himself, he rested his case on the proposition that reason, which pursues interest well-understood, and self-love, which gratifies present passion, "aspire to one end,—pleasure." But the pleasure sought by reason and self-love respectively is not the same pleasure, and so incompatible were the two pleasures in his estimation that he calls one, ver. 92, "our greatest evil," the other "our greatest good."
[1163] MS.: