Arthur Lovejoy

Essays in the History of Ideas

One of the principal events in European thought in the eighteenth century was the rapid growth of a tendency towards a deliquescence of all sharp distinctions, resulting from the introduction of this assumption that all things must be regarded as parts of a qualitative continuum—the assumption embodied in the maxim Natura non facit saltus. Since all gaps thus disappeared from nature, there could be none between man and the other animals. He could differ from them only in degree, and from the higher animals in an almost insensible degree, and only with respect to certain attributes. No link in the Chain of Being, moreover, is more essential than another, or exists merely for the sake of another. The lower creatures are no more means to the convenience of man than he is a means to their convenience. Thus, so long as man remained normal, i.e., in the state of nature, he assumed no grand airs of superiority to the creatures of the field and wood:

Pride then was not, nor arts that pride to aid;
Man walked with beast joint-tenant of the shade.

In its most significant aspect, then, 'pride' gets its meaning for eighteenth-century thought from this group of conceptions. It is, in Pope's words, the 'sin against the laws of order,' i.e., of gradation; it is the vice which causes man to set up pretensions to a place higher in the Scale of Being than belongs to him.

Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

The virtue which is its opposite lies in a contented recognition of the limitations of the human lot and the littleness of man's powers;

The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)
Is not to act or think beyond mankind.

Thus the eighteenth-century denunciations of pride are often, at bottom, expressions of a certain disillusionment of man about himself—a phase of that long and deepening disillusionment which is the tragedy of a great part of modern thought. True, the conception of the Chain of Being owed its vogue largely to its use in the argument for (so-called) optimism; and it had its cheerful aspects. But it clearly implied the dethronement of man from his former exalted position. In the bitter spirit of Swift this disillusionment, though for other reasons, already touched its extreme; the Yahoo is not merely brought nearer to the other animals, he is placed below them. The most detestable and irrational of beings, he crowns his fatuity by imagining himself the aim and climax of the whole creation. Yet Swift had been anticipated in his opinion of the Yahoo by Robert Gould:

What beast beside can we so slavish call
As Man? Who yet pretends he's Lord of all.
Whoever saw (and all their classes cull)
A dog so snarlish, or a swine so full,
A wolf so rav'nous, or an ass so dull?
Slave to his passions, ev'ry several lust
Whisks him about, as whirlwinds do the dust;
And dust he is, indeed, a senseless clod
That swells, and yet would be believ'd a God.