SOURCE: “‘Steering betwixt extremes’: An Essay on Man,” in The Unbalanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion, Harvester Press, 1986, pp. 64-94.

In the following essay, Ferguson links the dialectic of An Essay on Man to its poetic form, emphasizing philosophical and literary dimensions of the concept of discordia concors.

In the preceding chapters I have made note of two very generalised but significant anticipations of the Essay on Man's philosophy some years before any detailed plans for the work had been laid down by Pope; the first of these is the emphasis on the terms ‘grace and nature, virtue and passion’ developed in Eloisa to Abelard, and the second the note to Book XVII of the Iliad (n.5) which refers the contrasting temperaments of Achilles and Patroclus to the balancing of contrary principles within the scheme of Providence. In either case the links may perhaps appear...