is introduced as speaking.

He afterwards, 1734, inscribed to lord Cobham his Characters of Men,
written with close attention to the operations of the mind and
modifications of life. In this poem he has endeavoured to establish and
exemplify his favourite theory of the "ruling passion," by which he
means an original direction of desire to some particular object; an
innate affection, which gives all action a determinate and invariable
tendency, and operates upon the whole system of life, either openly, or
more secretly by the intervention of some accidental or subordinate
propension.

Of any passion, thus innate and irresistible, the existence may
reasonably be doubted. Human characters are by no means constant; men
change by change of place, of fortune, of acquaintance; he who is at one
time a lover of pleasure, is at another a lover of money. Those, indeed,
who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit: for
excellence is not often gained upon easier terms. But to the particular
species of excellence men are directed, not by an ascendant planet or
predominating humour, but by the first book which they read, some early
conversation which they heard, or some accident which excited ardour and
emulation.

It must be, at least, allowed, that this "ruling passion," antecedent to
reason and observation, must have an object independent on human
contrivance; for there can be no natural desire of artificial good. No
man, therefore, can be born, in the strict acceptation, a lover of
money; for he may be born where money does not exist: nor can he be
born, in a moral sense, a lover of his country; for society, politically
regulated, is a state contradistinguished from a state of nature; and
any attention to that coalition of interests which makes the happiness
of a country, is possible only to those whom inquiry and reflection have
enabled to comprehend it.

This doctrine is, in itself, pernicious, as well as false; its tendency
is to produce the belief of a kind of moral predestination, or
overruling principle which cannot be resisted; he that admits it is
prepared to comply with every desire that caprice or opportunity shall
excite, and to flatter himself that he submits only to the lawful
dominion of nature, in obeying the resistless authority of his "ruling
passion[135]."

Pope has formed his theory with so little skill, that, in the examples
by which he illustrates and confirms it, he has confounded pass