TO THE AUTHOR OF THE ESSAY ON MAN. BY MR. SOMERVILE. WAS ever Work to such perfection wrought! 5 To humble man's proud heart thy great design: But who can read this wondrous work divine, So justly plann'd, and so politely writ, And not be proud, and boast of human wit? 10 Yet just to thee, and to thy precepts true, To praise him for each gracious boon bestow'd, The Muse which should instruct now entertains 15 29 Be it thy task to set the wand'rer right, 25 When the bench frowns in vain, and pulpits fail. 30 Made wise by thee, whose happy style conveys The purest morals in in the softest lays, As angels once, so now we mortals bold Shall climb the ladder Jacob view'd of old; 36 AN ESSAY ON MAN. EPISTLE I. Of the Nature and State of Man with respect to the Universe. THE ARGUMENT. OF Man in the abstract. I. That we can judge only with regard to our own system, being ignorant of the relations of systems and things, v. 17, &c. II. That man is not to be deemed imperfect, but a being suited to his place and rank in the creation, agreeable to the general order of things, and conformable to ends and relations to him unknown, v. 35, &c. III. That it is partly upon his ignorance of future events, and partly upon the hope of a future state, that all his happiness in the present depends, v. 77, &c. IV. The pride of aiming at more knowledge, and pretending to more perfection, the cause of Man's error and misery. The impiety of putting himself in the place of God, and judging of the fitness or unfitness, perfection or imperfection; justice or injustice, of his dispensations, v. 115, &c. V. The absurdity of conceiting himself the final cause of the creation, or expecting that perfection in the moral world which is not in the natural, v. 131, &c. VI. The unreasonableness of his complaints against Providence, while, on the one hand, he demands the perfections of the angels, and, on the other, the bodily qualifications of the brutes; though to possess any of the sensitive faculties in a higher degree would render him miserable, v. 173, &c. VII. That throughout the whole visible world an universal order and gradation in the sensual and mental faculties is observed, which causes a subordination of creature to creature, and of all creatures to Man. The gradations of sense, instinct, thought, reflection, reason; that reason alone countervails all the other faculties, v. 207. VIII. How much further this order and subordination of living creatures may extend above and below us; were any part of which broken, not that part only, but the whole connected creation must be destroyed, v. 233. IX. The extravagance, madness, and pride, of such a desire, v. 259. X. The consequence of all, the absolute submission due to Providence, both as to our present and future state, v. 281, &c. to the end. |