Note 1162 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)

MS.:

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."