Pope’s An Essay on Man, a discourse on the underlying philosophies of The Age of Reason, contends that humans, as the sole possessors of reason, are God’s greatest creation. The first epistle begins with the metaphor of the universe as “a mighty maze.” Pope suggests that man is capable of navigating through this maze because he is endowed with the God-given faculty of Reason:
Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of Man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer? (l. 17-20)
Pope addresses the issue of man’s folly as a question of fundamental evil. Within his description of the universal chain of being there lays an impressive resolution that, though order is important, a certain amount of disorder is necessary to maintain the delicate balance of nature. Therefore, if man is so presumptuous as to seek perfection he runs the risk of throwing off the balance of the universe. The absurdity of man is not caused by the presence of evil but by his inability to accept the evil, by refusing to understand that “Passions are the element of Life” (l. 170). Man, by nature, is an imperfect creature and that is his assigned place in the general order of nature. Animals want for nothing more than their assigned instincts, unlike man who is in want of knowing “Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind” (l. 36).
Each beast, each insect, happy in it’s own;
Is Heav’n unkind to Man, and Man alone?
Shall he alone, whom rational we call,
Be pleas’d with nothing, if not blessed with all?” (l.184-187)
Pope’s conclusion of the first epistle demonstrates how every single aspect of nature, Reason, passion and instinct, is necessary for the completion of the whole. Just as a puzzle is assembled through the meticulous placement of its pieces, the dark and the light parts, jagged-edged elements that alone are worthless, so too is the universe assembled:
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, Universal Good;
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, ‘Whatever Is, is Right.’ (l.289-294).
Although Jonathan Swift was a fellow Augustan and good friend of Alexander Pope, his critique of the essence and flaws of human nature, as found in the fictitious travelogues of Gulliver’s Travels, does not ring as optimistic as Pope’s Essay on Man. In Gulliver’s third voyage to the land of Laputa, Swift seems to share Pope’s assertion that there lies a danger in the wastefulness of pride in human nature; however, by his fourth voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms, Swift paints a far more cynical picture of mankind as he reveals the barbarism of humanity.
With Gulliver’s arrival in Laputa, Swift aims his satirical artillery at eighteenth century academia. The device of an island that floats above the rest of the world represents Swift’s belief that an excess of speculative reasoning disconnects man from the practical realities of life. The Laputans employed servants, known as “flappers,” to strike them upon the mouths and ears in order to prompt their conversations. Gulliver realizes that “the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they can neither speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing” (161). Because the thoughts and minds of these people were so disengaged they were unable to perform simple tasks such as navigating through a room or even remaining balanced upon their own two feet. The ridiculousness of this overly intellectual culture demonstrates the negative aspect of a community so absorbed by their own personal illusions that they fail to serve the advancement of their society.
Further absurdities as a result of frivolous and wasteful pride in human reason can be seen in Gulliver’s visit to The Grand Academy of Lagado. Here, Swift targets the Enlightenment’s view that science and technology will eventually solve all of man’s problems. Gulliver witnessed ridiculous experiments in speculative science and speculative learning, none of which accomplished any beneficial result other than the employment of the scientist: a dog is killed by the very treatment employed to cure him, a project to reduce, and ultimately disregard, language threatens to abolish all abstract thought, and students are made ill by ingesting mathematical equations in an attempt to escape traditional learning. These are but a few examples Swift uses to reinforce his assertion that the search for rational solutions to all problems could be foolish. Gulliver, upon the completion of his tour of the Academy, recognizes the nation’s deficiency of common sense and states, “I saw nothing in this country that could invite me to a longer continuance, and began to think of returning home to England” (197).
The fourth and final voyage in Gulliver’s Travels is to the land of the super-rational Houyhnhmns. This is the section of the novel where Swift delivers his extremely cynical, if not misanthropic, critique of mankind. Gulliver discovers a utopian society of horses who live their lives with perfect reason unimpeded by irrationality or excessive emotion. In contrast to voyage three, where there is an obvious suspicion of excess reason, Voyage four seems to glorify this equestrian society by critically comparing it to the barbaric society of Yahoos. Initially, Gulliver refuses to identify with the Yahoos, maintaining that his distinguishing feature is his ability to think rationally. This surprises the Houyhnhmns who, out of curiosity, invite Gulliver to give an account of European life. With brilliant irony Gulliver begins to tell of the follies and evils of European man, not recognizing the Yahoo qualities in his descriptions. Gulliver was horrified when he “could no longer deny that [he] was a real Yahoo in every limb and feature” (279). Rather than reasonably accepting his place in the chain of being, he is disgusted by his own species and chooses to identify with the Houynhmn culture, where he “enjoyed perfect health of body, and tranquility of mind” (289).
With Gulliver’s expulsion from the land of the Houyhnhms, it appears Swift is defending his initial argument that man’s follies are a part of nature that cannot be simply reasoned away. It is only rational that the Houynhmns can exist without passion and emotion because they are horses; Gulliver, after all, is a human. The cynical twist, however, occurs when Gulliver returns to England. His refusal to reintegrate into human society suggests that the extent of mankind’s barbarism and lack of Reason renders them undeserving of any sympathy. Gulliver confesses, “so horrible was the idea I conceived of returning to live in the society and under the government of Yahoos…degenerating into the vices and corruptions of my own species”(297).
Pope’s An Essay on Man and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels both serve as a discourse on the capabilities and limitations of human Reason. The differences however, lay in the extent in which the two authors believe this Reason benefits society. While Pope strongly maintains, “Whatever is, is Right,” Swift, as seen through the emotional demise of Gulliver, suggests what is, is terribly wrong; that the human race is barbaric and hopeless.
