Note 1075 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel:
Great wits are sure to madness near allied And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
Pope is illustrating his proposition that there must be grades of capacity for animal to be subject to animal, and all animals to man. The application of the couplet to his argument is obscure, and the couplet itself very vague. The "remembrance" closely "allied to reflection" appears to be the effort of attention by which we recall the dormant stores of memory. "Thought" is a dubious term, but seems to be put by Pope for the acts of mind which take their rise in the mind itself, as willing, imagining, reasoning, etc., in contradistinction to seeing, feeling, taste, etc., which are produced by the operation of external things upon the senses.