The idea expressed in the couplet is an adaptation of a passage in the first chapter of Genesis. As God in the chaos of the world "divided the light from the darkness," so the God within us, which is our reason, does the same with the chaos of the mind. The chaos, on Pope's system, was in the actions, and not in the motives. The sweet water and the bitter flowed from the same tainted fountain,—from ambition, pride, sloth, etc.
[1221] MS.:
Extremes in man concur to gen'ral use.
Pope's meaning seems to be that in all terrestrial things, except man, extremes or contraries produce opposite and uncompounded effects. In man, extremes, in the shape of virtue and vice, join and mix together. There is no force in the distinction. Hot water, for instance, mixes with cold, and a mean temperature is the result.
[1222] "Great purposes," says Warburton in explanation of this passage, "are served by vice and virtue invading each other's bounds, no less than the perfecting the constitution of the whole, as lights and shades, in a well wrought picture, make the harmony and spirit of the composition." By this rule virtue dashed with vice is more "spirited and harmonious" than virtue without alloy. Warburton allowed himself to be deluded by a metaphor. Black paint has no resemblance to black morals,—shadows in a picture to hatred, avarice, and so on.
[1223] Too nice, that is, to permit us to distinguish where ends, etc. The ellipse goes beyond any poetical licence which is consistent with writing English.
[1224] The lines from ver. 207 to 214 are versified from Clarke's Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion, 10th ed., p. 184: "As in painting two very different colours may, from the highest intenseness in either extreme, terminate in the midst insensibly, so that it shall not be possible to determine exactly where the one ends, and the other begins, and yet the colours may differ as much as can be, not in degree only but in kind, so, though it may, perhaps, be very difficult in some nice cases to define exactly the bounds of right and wrong, yet right and wrong are totally different, even altogether as much as white and black, light and darkness." The argument of Clarke was directed against Hobbes, and his disciples, who denied that there was any inherent difference between good and evil, and supported their paradox by pleading the impossibility of drawing a line between the two.
[1225] Here follows in the MS.:
To strangle in its birth each rising crime
Requires but little,—just to think in time.
In ev'ry vice, at first, in some degree
We see some virtue, or we think we see.
Our vices thus are virtues in disguise,
Wicked but by degrees, or by surprise.
Of the last couplet there is a second version: