The confession which he made to Warburton will be a sufficient
indication of his qualifications as a student. He says (in 1739) that he
never in his life read a line of Leibnitz, nor knew, till he found it in
a confutation of his Essay, that there was such a term as
pre-established harmony. That is almost as if a modern reconciler of
faith and science were to say that he had never read a line of Mr.
Darwin, or heard of such a phrase as the struggle for existence. It was
to pronounce himself absolutely disqualified to speak as a philosopher.
How, then, could Pope obtain even an appearance of success? The problem
should puzzle no one at the present day. Every smart essayist knows how
to settle the most abstruse metaphysical puzzles after studies limited
to the pages of a monthly magazine; and Pope was much in the state of
mind of such extemporizing philosophers. He had dipped into the books
which everybody read; Locke's Essay, and Shaftesbury's Characteristics,
and Wollaston's Religion of Nature, and Clarke on the Attributes, and
Archbishop King on the Origin of Evil, had probably amused his spare
moments. They were all, we may suppose, in Bolingbroke's library; and if
that passing shower commemorated in Pope's letter drove them back to the
house, Bolingbroke might discourse from the page which happened to be
open, and Pope would try to versify it on the back of an envelope.[20]
Nor must we forget, like some of his commentators, that after all Pope
was an exceedingly clever man.
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