Pope is expressing a widely held belief among eighteenth-century intellectuals. The prevailing Enlightenment philosophy held that the natural world was an object to be studied, measured, and exploited for the good of humankind. But the natural world in itself was not worthy of serious study, certainly not by artists and writers. The Romantic notion of nature as a force in its own right, something of intrinsic power, worth and value, was wholly alien to the eighteenth-century mindset. If nature was invoked in poetry or landscape painting, for example, then it was only to the extent that it had been shaped by human beings. Pope's own pastorals, for example, taking Virgil's Eclogues as their guiding spirit, value nature only insofar as its interactions with human figures provide moral instruction and general insights into the human condition.
In An Essay On Man, Pope is keen to highlight our God-given place in the universe and how little we really know despite the enormous strides made by natural science. Pope isn't hostile to science; he simply thinks that it is insufficient to provide us with knowledge of ourselves as humans. Science has given us great power over the natural world, but at the expense of an overweening arrogance that makes us behave as if we were gods. In other words, science has made us increasingly ignorant of what it really means to be human. By recognizing our place in the great chain of being, however, we can begin to recover the appropriate degree of humility to God and his creation, and by extension, a deeper, fuller knowledge of humankind.
For Pope, there is a huge qualitative difference between man and nature. We are part of the natural world, but at the same time, not of it. Our unique intellectual endowments separate us from our environment and from other animals. We should, then, refrain from seeing ourselves simply as one object among many, to be studied accordingly. Instead, we should turn away from scientistic hubris, and concern ourselves with the study of man as part of an intricate, divinely created order with its own God-given rules and standards. This endeavor, argues Pope, is the proper study of man.
As well as being an important poem expressing Pope's own moral beliefs, Pope's "Essay on Man" is in many ways a reaction to Milton's "Paradise Lost." Pope begins Epistle II with the couplet:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
This couplet asserts several anti-Miltonic ideas. First, it is a direct response to Milton's claim that "Paradise Lost" serves to "justify the ways of God to man." Pope is arguing that God is perfectly capable of doing his own job and that it is arrogant of a human poet to presume to fully comprehend God and to, in essence, usurp God's position by rewriting the Bible in verse. Instead, Pope suggests that the business of the human writer to to deal with human matters. The phrase "Know then thyself" suggests Socrates as a model of the scope of human inquiry.
Next, Pope is opposing his own Enlightenment rationality and toleration to what he sees as Milton's narrow, dogmatic Puritanism. In the wake of a period of great religious wars and upheavals that had caused untold suffering in Britain and Europe, Pope's "Essay on Man" is a model of an Augustan tolerance which tries to find universal human moral values rather than narrow points of theological difference.
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