ut of the question.
The laborious and patient meditation which brings a converging series of
arguments to bear upon a single point, was to him as impossible as the
power of devising an elaborate strategical combination to a dashing
Prince Rupert. The reasonings in the Essay are confused, contradictory,
and often childish. He was equally far from having assimilated any
definite system of thought. Brought up as a Catholic, he had gradually
swung into vague deistic belief. But he had never studied any philosophy
or theology whatever, and he accepts in perfect unconsciousness
fragments of the most heterogeneous systems.

Swift, in verses from which I have already quoted, describes his method
of composition, which is characteristic of Pope's habits of work.

Now backs of letters, though design'd
For those who more will need 'em,
Are fill'd with hints and interlined,
Himself can scarcely read 'em.

Each atom by some other struck
All turns and motions tries;
Till in a lump together stuck
Behold a poem rise!

It was strange enough that any poem should arise by such means; but it
would have been miraculous if a poem so constructed had been at once a
demonstration and an exposition of a harmonious philosophical system.
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;