It all too often appears to us that "virtue starves, while vice is fed. A set of characteristics distinctive of a species is known as the Greek term, Phusis. Made for his use all creatures if he call, Say what their use, had he the powers of all? Pope exemplifies this acceptance of weakness in the last lines of Epistle 1 in which he considers the incomprehensible, whether seemingly miraculous or disastrous, to at least be correct, if nothing else.
Human beings are the subject of a specific phenomenology which belongs to them only, and whose origin raises critical questions when considered in the context of their habitat, of the Earth, and in the larger sense of things; the universe.
The good must merit God's peculiar care; But who but God can tell us who they are? A kingdom of the just then let it be: But first consider how those just agree.
Pope counters the notorious greed of Man by illustrating the pointless emptiness that would accompany a world in which Man was omnipotent. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau talks about the natural human state and is transition to its current civilized state.
Of man what see we but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer? It is therefore in the anatomy of the mind, as in that of the body; more good will accrue to mankind by attending to the large, open, and perceptible parts, than by studying too much such finer nerves and vessels, the conformations and uses of which will for ever escape our observation.
The gradations of Sense, Instinct, Thought, Reflection, Reason: that Reason alone countervails all the other faculties, verseetc. Who calls the council, states the certain day, Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way? There is a ratio of good to bad that man must reach to have a well balanced mind.