Swift's Satire on "Science" and the Structure of Gulliver's Travels

Author(s): Douglas Lane Patey

Source: ELH , Winter, 1991, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 809-839
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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SWIFT'S SATIRE ON "SCIENCE" AND THE
STRUCTURE OF GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

BY DOUGLAS LANE PATEY

When the philosophers of the last age were first congregat

the Royal Society, great expectations were raised of the sudden
progress of useful arts; the time was supposed to be near when
engines should turn by a perpetual motion, and health be se-
cured by the universal medicine; when learning would be facil-
itated by a real character, and commerce extended by ships
which could reach their ports in defiance of the tempest.
But improvement is naturally slow. The society met and parted
without any visible diminution of the miseries of life. The gout
and stone were still painful, the ground that was not plowed
brought no harvest, and neither oranges nor grapes would grow
upon the hawthorne. At last, those who were disappointed began
to be angry; those likewise who hated innovation were glad to
gain an opportunity of ridiculing men who had depreciated, per-
haps with too much arrogance, the knowledge of antiquity. And
it appears from some of their earliest apologies, that the philos-
ophers felt with great sensibility the unwelcome importunities of
these who were daily asking, "What have ye done?"
-Samuel Johnson, Idler 88 (1759)

Long before Marjorie Nicolson and Nora Mohler demonstrated

the topical referentiality of Swift's satire in book 3 of Gulliver,
readers understood that among its targets is what we have come to
call the "new science" of the Royal Society.' When writing Idler 88
in 1759 (a year when both science and travel writing occupied
much of his attention), Johnson had Gulliver clearly in mind. Here
are Swift's targets, from efforts at perpetual motion to Bishop
Wilkins's "real character"; here (in Johnson's characteristically
gentler manner) is Swift's satire on the "philosophers' " failure to
achieve their much-advertised practical results ("utility"). What es-
pecially links Idler 88 and Gulliver is Johnson's characterization of
these "philosophers" as Moderns-proponents of "progress" who
arrogantly depreciate "the knowledge of antiquity." But from
Johnson's time to ours, there has been little agreement about the
precise substance of Swift's supposed objections to science or the
function of those objections in the Travels as a whole. Has Johnson,
like many critics since, read too literally Munodi's deliberately

ELH 58 (1991) 809-839 C) 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 809

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overstated remark that "as for himself, being not of an enterprizing
Spirit, he was content to go on in the old Forms; to live in the
Houses his Ancestors had built, and act as they did in every Part of
Life without Innovation"?2
Debate over the range of Swift's satire in book 3 in fact began
among Gulliver's first readers: to the Earl of Orrery's claim that
book 3 was "in general written against chymists, mathematicians,
mechanics, and projectors of all kinds," Deane Swift replied: "Cer-
tainly DR. SWIFT has laughed egregiously in the voyage to
Laputa, and exerted a vein of humour, not against the whole tribe
of chymists, projectors, and mathematicians in general; but against
those, and those only, who despise the useful branches of science,
and waste their lives in the pursuit of aerial vanities and
extravagances."3 The debate between Orrery and Deane Swift per-
sists, with the difference that among Orrery's twentieth-century
descendants Swift has become the enemy of "science" tout court.
Thus, for instance, despite the warnings of many modern Deane
Swifts, R. G. Olson argues in a new essay on "Tory-High Church
Opposition to Science" that "what began for Arbuthnot as one sci-
entist's concern for the unintended errors and excesses of his col-
leagues, in the hands of Jonathan Swift turned into a full-blown
antagonism to the scientific enterprise," with the result that "A Tale
of a Tub and Gulliver ... contain classic statements of conservative
antiscientific sentiment."' Predictably, such extreme argument
generates equally implausible defenses of Swift's "scientific" sym-
pathies and attainments-indeed, of his proficiency even in tech-
nical mathematics and physics.5
What is needed to resolve this controversy, especially in its mod-
ern form, is not so much a more careful reading of the Travels as its
fuller contextualization. We must place Swift's satire more securely
within the conceptual terrain of the early eighteenth century, at-
tending to the ways the disciplines of knowledge were divided in
Swift's time, and to Swift's particular concern, as an Ancient, over
certain nascent shifts in those divisions. For it is only in the eigh-
teenth century, in the context of the quarrel between Ancients and
Moderns, that our notions of "science"-of the "sciences" as dis-
tinct from and opposed to the "arts" and "humanities," and of
"science" as distinctively progressive-begin to emerge.6 Like his
fellow Ancient Pope, Swift is aware of this shift and satirizes the
new division of knowledge from the point of view of an older one.

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 We may note that neither Orrery nor Deane Swift (nor for that
matter Johnson or Swift himself) speaks of "science" in its modern
sense; for them, the term still means, first of all, knowledge in
general. Neither has a word with which to separate out "the whole
tribe of chymists, projectors, and mathematicians in general";
Johnson has only "philosopher." In book 3 Swift uses "science"
only in its widest sense, speaking for instance of "an Analogy be-
tween the two Sciences" of mathematics and politics (164); his
experimenters are not "scientists" but "artists." Nor does Swift
possess what was only emerging in this time, a distinct concept of
what were coming to be understood as "fine" arts. It has been most
tempting to read a modern distinction (and opposition) between
science and art (or the sciences and the humanities) into Gulliver's
famous summary of Laputan deficiencies:

Imagination, Fancy, and Invention, they are wholly Strangers to,

nor have any Words in their Language by which those Ideas can
be expressed; the whole Compass of their Thoughts and Mind,
being shut up within the two forementioned Sciences ["Mathe-
maticks and Musick"]. (163-64)

But Gulliver does not adduce this lack of imagination in the context
of poetry or painting, the arts of beauty or the realm of taste; he is
speaking much more generally, and in fact dwells here on Laputan
unimaginativeness specifically in politics ("They are very bad Rea-
soners, and vehemently given to Opposition ... passionately dis-
puting every Inch of a Party Opinion"). The Grand Academy of
Lagado, finally-to some extent like the early Royal Society-freely
mixes "scientific" with political and even what we would call ar-
tistic concerns, just as the projector whose machine combines
words at random predicts that his device will be equally fruitful in
the production of "Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law,
Mathematicks and Theology"; the Academy distributes its build-
ings not between schools of science (or even "natural philosophy")
and politics, but between practical and "speculative Learning"
(182-84).
I do not mean to argue that Gulliver contains no satire on science
because (modern) "science" did not yet exist-though in important
ways this is true (the "natural philosophy" of Swift's time differs
from modern science both extensionally and intensionally, in both
range and meaning). Swift indeed means, as many readers have

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noted, to protest the illegitimate importation of "scientific" meth-
ods into "arts" where they do not belong; but he does not mean by
these terms what we do. He does not, that is, use these terms as
they were redefined by the Moderns; rather, he uses them to mark
a division of knowledge familiar since Aristotle (a figure the Travels
more than once defends). Swift's science is still what centuries of
thinkers would have recognized as the realm of certainty, whose
instrument is logical demonstration; his arts are not the fine arts or
humanities, but the older arts of prudence-those fields in which,
because of the limitations of the human mind, demonstrative cer-
tainty is not to be had. The arts of prudence comprise not science
but opinion; they can aspire only to probability. Here, traditionary
authority must largely supplant logical proof; the instrument of
such arts is therefore not demonstration but imitation. Swift's vi-
sion of the proper conduct of natural philosophy thus emerges from
and supports his belief in the limitedness of human capacity (of
human nature)-limitedness that makes the method of imitation not
merely an "aesthetic" choice but an epistemic necessity: imitation
is the necessary means of cultural transmission under conditions of
uncertainty. His account of science is thus not far distant from the
theory of proper criticism propounded by Pope in the Essay on
Criticism, which argues that since demonstrative knowledge of
critical "rules" is impossible, both critic and poet must proceed by
merely probable methods, in particular by imitation.7
Once we recover the division of knowledge Swift takes as nor-
mative, we will not only be able to make better sense than hereto-
fore of the faults of the Laputans; we will find that Swift's com-
ments on science, in book 3 and elsewhere, are more various and
acute, and more fully integrated into the fabric of the Travels as a
whole, than has commonly been realized. Of course, most state-
ments about the Travels "as a whole" are eventually exploded.
Readers by now generally agree not to identify Swift's book as a
"novel," and so do not look to it for the kinds of consistency and
progressive development of character and narrative that we expect
in longer works by Fielding, Richardson, and even Defoe. Instead,
the Travels are satire, more specifically satire in the form of (fic-
tional, even mock) travel literature.8 These identifications lead us
to look elsewhere for the work's unity, to Swift's themes and more
particularly to the rhetorical procedures he uses in elaborating
them. But, I will argue, the travel genre itself embodies for Swift as
for other Augustans a certain view of experience and knowledge, a

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view we might call probabilism. When seen in this larger context,
Swift's comments on science not only provide additional ordnance
in his attack on human pride; they outline a satiric alternative to the
epistemological and moral commitments implied by the travel form
itself.

GULLIVER AGAINST THE DOGMATISTS

That heavy Bodies descend by gravity, is no better an-account

than we might expect from a Rustick: and again; that Gravity is
a quality whereby an heavy body descends, is an impertinent
Circle, and teacheth nothing.

-Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661)9

One of the most familiar banners of the "new science" and the
Royal Society was their rejection of what Hobbes called "insignifi-
cant speech," including especially such scholastic terminology as
"occult quality," "substantial form," and "intelligible species."'0
These terms became objectionable particularly when used (as they
were designed to be) in explanations, as in the example made fa-
mous by Moliere: Why does opium produce sleep? because of its
dormitive power (vis dormitiva). To the new scientists, such expla-
nations and terms were the relics of an earlier kind of science, a
demonstrative scientia which supposed it possible to know the
"real qualities" of things (such as their "powers")-to know them
either directly or by a mysterious kind of "scientific induction"
(different from the problematic induction of later science)-and so
to invoke them as explanations for particular effects (qualitas in its
scholastic sense meaning a cause of the attributes of bodies). But
with the seventeenth-century revival of a distinction between pri-
mary and secondary qualities, we are cut off from direct knowledge
of such real qualities and can only conjecture them from their ef-
fects; such knowledge of causes is not demonstrative, but only hy-
pothetical (probable). (We might select as a historical turning point
in this development Descartes's Optics of 1637, which argues in
chapter 5 that our ideas are only nonresembling signs of their ob-
jects.) From such new theories of epistemology and perception
emerges, for instance, Locke's doctrine of the unknowability of
"real essences"; natural science itself changes from demonstrative
scientia (wherein underlying natures can be known) to the proba-
bilistic study outlined by Gassendi, Mersenne, and Locke with

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which we are familiar today. In this new context, the old explana-
tions through qualities appear circular and ad hoc, the objectiona-
ble terms tautologous restatements of the effect. As Newton put it,
"To tell us that every Species of Things is endow'd with an occult
specifick Quality by which it acts and produces manifest Effects, is
to tell us nothing"; and Glanvill devotes an entire chapter of The
Vanity of Dogmatizing to the circularity of "Peripatetick Explana-
tions.""1
I do not mean to attribute all this philosophy to Swift, to turn him
into a Locke or a Glanvill; but neither is he simply the Luddite
antagonist of science some have imagined. Swift read widely and
enjoyed lifetime friendships with many natural philosophers; and
more important, the conceptual shift outlined above was intelligi-
ble to any attentive observer of seventeenth-century thought, such
as the author of Gulliver demonstrably was. It is in fact in his
treatment of contemporary canons of scientific explanation that
Swift's satire on science is most knowing and sly. Swift shares with
Moliere the new scientists' complaint against the old, but turns it
against them by suggesting that, with their own new entities and
forces, the new scientists are as guilty as the old of using insignifi-
cant speech to frame explanations that do not explain. Swift chooses
his examples for making this point carefully, from among the most
celebrated subjects of inquiry by the new science: gravity, magne-
tism, and the new emphasis on the world's government by a few
simple, regular "laws of nature."
In Brobdingnag "three great Scholars" seek to provide some ac-
count of Gulliver; with that pride everywhere visible in the Travels
which seeks always to take the measure of others' coats by the
height, depth, and breadth of one's own, they find that Gulliver
"could not be produced according to the regular Laws of Nature."
He must then be (in the technical sense) a monster, though he
appears neither "an Embrio, or abortive Birth" nor a dwarf.'2 In-
stead:

After much Debate, they concluded unanimously that I was only

Remplum Scalcath, which is interpreted literally Lusus Naturae,
a Determination exactly agreeable to the Modern Philosophy
[i.e., the new science] of Europe: whose Professors, disdaining
the old Evasion of occult Causes, whereby the Followers of Ar-
istotle endeavour in vain to disguise their Ignorance; have in-
vented this wonderful Solution to all Difficulties, to the unspeak-
able Advancement of human Knowledge. (104)

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Swift's point here is first that, consigned as we are to reason by
analogy, which is limited (we can and do reason but from what we
know), claims to the discovery of nature's laws must be uncertain
and often premature; and second, that explanations drawn from
such "laws" are in these circumstances no better than the old ref-
erences to occult causes. (We should note, too, that Gulliver shields
Aristotle from censure, criticizing only his scholastic "Followers.")
Swift parodies the same kind of non-explanation again in book 3,
when Gulliver blandly reports the Laputans' theories why their
island cannot "rise above the Height of four Miles" or "move be-
yond the Extent of the Dominion below":

For which the Astronomers (who have written large Systems

concerning the Stone) assign the following Reason: That the
Magnetick Virtue does not extend beyond the distance of four
Miles, and that the Mineral which acts upon the Stone . . . is not
diffused through the whole Globe, but terminated with the Lim-
its of the King's Dominion. (170)

These explanations are no better than references to a "dormitive

power" not merely because they rely on terms (such as "Magnetick
Virtue") of which, as the new philosophers would say, their users
have "no clear idea"; they are ad hoc in presuming more knowl-
edge of nature-a more certain knowledge of its "regular laws"-
than the explainers can justly lay claim to. Since these examples
come (by way of parody) not from the old but the "new" science,
Swift means them as instances of modern dogmatizing.'3
Swift makes the point most comprehensively in the famous scene
in Glubbdubdrib wherein Gulliver calls up the spirits of scientists
both ancient and modern:

I then desired the Governor to call up Descartes and Gassendi,

with whom I prevailed to explain their systems to Aristotle. This
great Philosopher freely acknowledged his Mistakes in Natural
Philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon Conjec-
ture, as all Men must do; and he found, that Gassendi, who had
made the Doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the
Vortices of Descartes, were equally exploded. He predicted the
same Fate to Attraction, whereof the present Learned are such
zealous Asserters. He said, that new Systems of Nature were but
new Fashions, which would vary in every Age; and even those
who pretend to demonstrate them from Mathematical Principles,
would flourish but a short Period of Time, and be out of Vogue
when that was determined. (197-98)

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The passage reveals the responses of an acute mind to contempo-
rary science and the polemics surrounding it. Swift does more here
than predict that Newton's gravity will go the way of Gassendi's
Epicurean atomism and Descartes's circular motion .n a plenum:
he suggests why this will be so. Each is a "system," a loaded term
by which Swift implies a fanciful body of explanations that goes
beyond what is given in experience; as such, each account of causes
can be only "conjectural" (probable). And again shielding Aristotle
from Modern abuse, Swift in a surprising reversal identifies Aris-
totle as the proponent of probabilistic science (one who knows it
must "proceed upon Conjecture"), the Moderns as claimants to
certainty (for instance, in his echo of the title of Newton's Philoso-
phiae naturalis principia mathematical, which purports to
"demonstrate" "from Mathematical Principles." The new scientists
are unmasked as old-fashioned scholastic Aristotelians, while Aris-
totle himself appears the cautious empiricist, a kind of forerunner of
the author of Conjectures and Refutations, Sir Karl Popper.14
To understand the passage, we need to keep in mind the excited
claims of the new scientists to have broken with the past and so
provided a new beginning for knowledge, a great instauration.
Through its new methods, polemicists from Bacon and Hartlib on-
ward claimed, science was finally to achieve a secure foundation.
(This is the spirit of renewal we hear, for instance, in Dryden's
epistle to Dr. Charleton.) It was in fact on the basis of appeal to such
methods that Modern polemicists grounded their new distinction
between the (cumulatively progressive) "sciences" and the (merely
traditionary) "arts." And what of the new methods themselves?
Descartes had claimed to prove his most fundamental physical
principles, including the doctrine of the plenum, with certainty,
through an a priori physics. Newton himself, despite his different
metaphysical commitments, had still his supposedly "crucial" (de-
monstrative) experiments and his famous claim not to feign mere
hypotheses. Even Bacon had argued that his new method of induc-
tion would eventually yield certain knowledge of the "simple
natures" of things (in effect, their real essences).'5 All this while
criticizing the "dogmatism" of their benighted forebears. New sci-
entists in fact criticized old precisely for failing to move beyond the
evidence of their senses. Thus for instance in his Experimental
Philosophy (1664), Henry Power castigates the Aristotelians as
"Sons of Sense" while himself recommending inquiry into a more
"hidden" level of reality; as Glanvill writes, "While we know but

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[nature's] more sensible ways of working, we are but vulgar Phi-
losophers, and not likely to help the World to any considerable
Theories"; "For by [the peripatetic] way of disquisition there can
be no more truly comprehended, than what's known by every com-
mon Ignorant."'16
Twentieth-century students too seldom realize that the familiar
posture of the new scientists in rejecting previous authorities was
less often an attempt to clear away past errors in order to make room
for a new probabilistic experimental science than to clear away the
probabilism of Renaissance humanists in order to make room for a
new philosophic and scientific certainty. Little wonder then that
some old-fashioned Aristotelians such as Thomas White should join
the new scientists in arguing their master to have been in fact more
an empiricist than those who sought to dethrone him-or that Swift,
always skeptical of high claims, should identify a contradiction in
those being made for the "new" science.17 In its largest sense, then,
Swift's satire on contemporary canons of explanation is grounded in
a suspicion that Modern method is not really so new after all, and
hence that Modern divisions between science and art-between
the realms of progress and tradition-are finally ill-grounded.

SCIENCE AND THE ARTS OF PRUDENCE IN LAPUTA

Practical experience in life, gained through the examples of our

ancestors, together with the knowledge of present-day affairs
makes a man, as the Greeks name him, a Polyhistor as much as to
say multiscius (a many-sided man). Such a man, however, we,
following a better nomenclature, term a man of practical wisdom
(prudens) and his province we call practical wisdom (prudentia).

-Juan Luis Vives, De tradendis disciplinis (1530)18

We all know what Swift finds wrong with the natural philoso-
phers of Lagado. Gulliver witnesses experiments that serve no
practical human use, or that would do harm by inverting the uses o
nature (breeding sheep without wool); in seeking to reverse the
order of nature (extracting sunshine from cucumbers, returning ex-
crement to its original food), Lagadan projects are utopian-the
external equivalent, we might say, of the failure to know one's self.
And if throughout the Travels the customs of nations seem to follow
ad exemplum regis, the prince who misguides this nation flies over-
head in an island disconnected both literally and metaphorically
from the earth below; Swift was fond of the maxim first used of

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Thales, that the philosopher who fixes his eyes always on the heav-
ens may find his lower parts seduced into a ditch.'9
More generally, Swift organizes his portrayal of the Laputans
around a distinction crucial to intellectual debate in his time, es-
pecially to the theories of mind and education that by the end of the
seventeenth century divided the Ancients from the Moderns. The
Laputans "were indeed excellent in two Sciences," mathematics
and music-with the exception of that friend of Munodi, out of favor
at court, whose tutors could not "without extreme Difficulty teach
him to demonstrate the most easy Proposition" (173); they fail mis-
erably at the practical, applied, and "mechanic." The Laputans-
like all Moderns, Swift argues-have forgotten the ancient distinc-
tion between the sciences of demonstration and the arts of pru-
dence. I do not mean simply to point to their misguided worry over
such distant and unlikely eventualities as the collision of comets
with the earth or what nineteenth-century scientists such as Lord
Kelvin would call "heat death" (the extinction of the sun), contin-
gencies the Laputans could in any case do nothing about-though
such worries are symptoms of their failure of prudence. In a larger
way, Swift suggests, they have mistaken the nature and limits of
human knowledge.
In Aristotle's famous maxim, we should expect no more certainty
in any field that its subject matter permits:

The same exactitude is not to be looked for in all fields of knowl-

edge, any more than in all kinds of crafts. It is the mark of an
educated mind to accept just that exactitude in any subject that
the nature of the matter permits. For it is unreasonable to accept
merely probable arguments from a mathematician, or to demand
formal demonstrations from an orator.20

As Swift learned at university, only some subjects are capable of

yielding to human minds scientia in its truest sense (demonstrative
knowledge of causes, or at least knowledge reducible to axiomatic
form); in others we must rest content with probability. From Aris-
totle's time until the seventeenth century, mathematics-in partic-
ular geometry-was the paradigm of demonstrative science. Other
subjects (called by historians "high" sciences) might be assimilated
to the methods of geometry, most notably theology, some parts of
physics, and music (the theoretical part of music, in effect the arith-
metic of ratios, as distinct from musica practical. When Swift pairs
music with mathematics in Laputa, then, he is not merely recalling

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(as many readers have noted) the mystical musicology of earlier
thinkers such as Kepler (the last great scientist to believe in that
literal music of the spheres the Laputans claim to hear). He would
have learned at Trinity that if study of integers belongs to arithme-
tic, fractions are the domain of music; even Moderns such as
William Wotton-who unlike Swift does subscribe to the new
division of arts and sciences, though without yet possessing ade-
quate terms for it-continue to think of music as a special branch of
mathematics. Wotton writes of what he calls the "Physical
Sciences" in his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning
(1694):

These are Things which have no Dependence upon the Opin-

ions of Men for their Truth; they will admit of fixed and undis-
puted Mediums of Comparison and Judgment: So that, though it
may be always debated, who have been the best Orators, or who
the best Poets; yet it cannot always be a Matter of Controversie,
who have been the greatest Geometers, Arithmeticians, As-
tronomers, Musicians, Chymists, Botanists, or the like.2'

From all these fields were distinguished the "low" (or "empiri-
cal") sciences-medicine, mineralogy, etc.-not scientiae in the
truest sense. Further, down the epistemic scale come the various
"arts" (as that term had been understood since Aristotle), the arts of
making by rule-governed imitation of nature, from horsemanship,
tailoring, cookery, and conversation to poetry, architecture, military
strategy, and statesmanship. In all these fields where true science
is impossible, knowledge must proceed from "opinion" (probabil-
ity). And in the formulation of two millennia of textbooks, "That
Axiome is probable which seems so to all, to many, or them that are
wise"; the probable includes especially the "common sense" of
mankind, traditionally approved examples (models for imitation,
from which rules may be educed), and other forms of traditionary
authority.22 As Vico was to put it, in the probable arts of living we
depend on "common sense supported by erudition."23 We must
proceed, that is, as Pope advises the poet and critic in An Essay on
Criticism: by conjecture. Because we cannot reason in these fields
a priori, we must infer probabilistically from successful examples
to the general "rules" they embody: "Just Precepts thus from great
Examples giv'n"; "Thence form your Judgment, thence your Max-
ims bring."24
John Locke thus takes a revisionary stance when he argues in the
Essay concerning Human Understanding that while "natural

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Philosophy" (physics, chemistry, etc.) "is not capable of being
made a science," ethics can be known demonstratively.25 Locke
here recalls the more startling claim his fellow Modern Hobbes had
made earlier in the century, that whereas the world had before
known only one science-geometry-he would be the first to give
it a second: politics. Swift has the author of Leviathan (among oth-
ers) in mind when Gulliver offers the king of Brobdingnag that
standard item in the trinity of Modern inventions, gunpowder;
when the king refuses this means of becoming "absolute Master of
the Lives, the Liberties, and the Fortunes of his People," Gulliver
reflects: "I take this Defect among them to have risen from their
Ignorance; by not having hitherto reduced Politicks into a Science,
as the more acute Wits of Europe have done" (135).26
Thus in chapter 2 of book 3, having established that the Laputans
make the demonstrative sciences of mathematics and music the
measures of all things, Swift proceeds to survey their failures and
ignorance, producing what any humanist reader would recognize as
a catalogue of the arts of prudence. The Laputans fail not only in
what we would call fine arts, but also in "practical Geometry"-
tailoring and building, "which they despise as vulgar and
mechanick"; they fail in all the arts which should guide "the Com-
mon Actions and Behavior of Life" (including those arts so dear to
Swift, conversation and cookery). Most of all, as we have seen, they
fail in politics:

But what I chiefly admired, and thought altogether unaccount-

able, was the strong Disposition I observed in them towards
News and Politicks; perpetually enquiring into publick Affairs,
giving their Judgments in Matters of State; and passionately dis-
puting every Inch of a Party Opinion. (164)

It is in this context that Gulliver diagnoses the Laputans's failure of

"Imagination, Fancy, and Invention"; lacking these, the Laputans
lack the faculties that in Renaissance divisions of knowledge guide
all the arts of prudence, including especially the chief of such arts,
politics. Thus George Puttenham writes in The Arte of English
Poesie:

Of this sorte of phantasie are all good Poets, notable Captaines

stratagematique, all cunning artificers and enginers, all Legisla-
tors Polititiens and Counsellours of estate, in whose exercise the

820 Swift's Satire on "Science"

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 inuentiue part is most employed and is to the sound and true
Judgment of man most needful.27

Hence the significance, too, of those particular areas of knowl-

edge about which the Laputan king "discovered not the least
Curiosity"-"the Laws, Government, History, Religion, or Man-
ners of the Countries where [Gulliver] had been"-instead confin-
ing "his Questions to the State of Mathematics" (166). The list was
a familiar one: it is a syllabus of the topics of the humanist theory of
travel as education and of the prudential arts educational travel was
to foster.28 What Swift has in fact done in Laputa is to recreate a
special skirmish in the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, as
that quarrel entered the educational philosophy of his time. In the
second half of the seventeenth century a number of educators sym-
pathetic to the new science, such as Arnauld, Nicole, and Bernard
Lamy, following the Cartesian rejection of rhetoric and probability
in favor of demonstrative methods, created a self-consciously Mod-
ern educational program. The chief pedagogic texts of the move-
ment include the Port Royal Logic and Grammar and especially
Lamy's Entretiens sur les sciences (1683), which argues in its cen-
tral chapter (titled "Idee de la logique") that logic must replace
rhetoric, mathematics replace history, and demonstrative methods
replace topical in the education of the young. (Lamy even laments
youthful enthusiasm for books of travel.) Elements of this program
underpin Locke's defense of a "single method" of knowledge in
later works such as his Conduct of the Understanding.29 The pro-
gram was thus a rejection of humanist educational theories in place
since the time of Vives and Valla; it had already been opposed by
such Ancients as Obadiah Walker in his immensely popular Of
Education (1683) and most powerfully by Vico, who argued in his
inaugural dissertation On the Study Methods of our Time (1709)
that the Modern educational program (which he calls "criticism")
destroys "imagination," "invention," and "prudence" in its pupils,
and hence also those fields in which the ancient world excelled, the
probable arts. Which are we to choose, Vico asks bluntly, Arnauld
or Cicero? Laputans choose the former, Vico and Swift the latter.30
The debate was to continue throughout the century, especially in
France, where the Modern program remains most clearly identified
with Cartesianism's esprit de geometrie; thus in 1741 the Abbe Du
Resnel argues in a discourse presented in the Academie des In-

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scriptions et Belles-Lettres, "the Disadvantages Caused by the Ex-
clusive Taste Which Seems to be Established in Favor of Mathe-
matics and Physics":

We must be careful not to confuse the philosophical mind with

the calculating mind.... We will not hide the fact that our cen-
tury is beginning to lose sight of this distinction; that in taking
pride in geometry-or rather, in its desire to reduce everything
to calculation, to apply that method everywhere, or to erect it is
a universal instrument-our century has practically ceased to be
philosophical.

Du Resnel's solution is a balancing of "geometry" with "eru-

dition," gained especially through study of Ancient "letters": "By
maintaining the taste for truth which the Ancients gave us, letters
... will teach us to contain [the calculating mind] within its
limits."31
The debate on education brings into high relief those elements of
the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns that most concern Swift
in Gulliver's Travels. Replacing imitation with logic, Moderns and
Laputans would extend demonstrative methods through all educa-
tion and knowledge, thereby ruining prudence and its arts, whereas
for the Ancients, because there can in these arts be no "high priori
Road," we must rely on probability in the form of traditionary au-
thority. Such authority does not preclude progress: Prudence in the
familiar artistic iconography looks ahead as well as forward and
behind; the discipline of imitation meant to the Augustans both
preserving a tradition and correcting it from within. In the arts of
living as of writing, "good imitation is continual invention"; one
should always seek, as the king of Brobdingnag puts it, to make two
blades of grass grow where only one grew before (135).32 But be-
cause traditional authority usually takes the form of approved ex-
amples, models that each generation must laboriously imitate,
educing relevant precepts (maxims) from examples in order to
guide its own practice, there is always the danger, to which Swift is
sensitive throughout the Travels, of degeneration. A society may
decay by failing to be guided by or live up to its examples (as
Gulliver finds both of Lilliput and of Europe's nobility), or it may
go mad by rejecting them altogether (like the Laputans). Once
again the Essay on Criticism provides an instructive parallel. Pope
explains how criticism has become corrupted through improper
imitation and improper models; he provides a list of models and
instruction in their imitation so that criticism may regain the use-

822 Swift's Satire on "Science"

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fulness it had when it functioned according to its proper nature (in
accord with limited human nature).
For Swift as for Pope, then, progress is possible, but not in the
Modern way: human capacity being limited, progress comes not of
rejecting but of embracing (imitating) inherited forms. Thus in book 3
Swift concentrates his opposition to the Laputans in the approved
example of Munodi, a gifted conversationalist and preserver from
decay whom Gulliver celebrates specifically for his "Prudence."
And it is Munodi who, explaining how his allegiance to traditionary
authority has resulted in his low esteem at court, explicitly connects
the concerns of book 3 with the conflict of Ancient and Modern,
begun "about forty years ago" (175, 176). A master of the arts of
living, Munodi imitates proper models and so is a proper model for
imitation himself. It is through such imitation, Swift believes, that
we realize ourselves-our proper dignity-and so by rejecting Mu-
nodi and the arts of prudence, the Laputans have in effect defeated
themselves, resigned their proper humanity: their science is in-
deed the external equivalent of a failure to know one's self. That
certainty which humans can only sometimes reach through demon-
stration is possible in all things only for God, or (as Swift sometimes
portrays them) for God-like Houyhnhnms; Modern Laputans in ef-
fect proudly claim for themselves the powers of unfallen, angelic
reason. Theirs is a version of the vice Walker Percy calls
"angelism," a pride near allied to the madness that overtakes
Gulliver at the end of book 4.33

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF TRAVEL

By the way it will not be amiss to take notice, that as there is no

new thing under the Sun, so neither any new action; but the
same are represented over again under varying circumstances; so
that he, who intends to be a wise man, must endeavour to dis-
tinguish the Action (as Physicians do in judging diseases) from
the circumstances; that he may be able to give a good judgment
and prognostick; and afterwards to frame a generall rule, which
may stand him in stead at other times and occasions.

-Obadiah Walker, Of Education (1683)34

I have argued that Swift's references to science in Gulliver's

Travels comprise an attack not on the new science itself but on
strident claims for its method and on the new division of knowledge
the Moderns were erecting on those claims. Swift's notions of sci-

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ence turn out to be not so different from those of Locke, who argued
that natural philosophy "is not capable of being made a Science."
Nowhere in fact is Swift more a Lockean than in his choice of the
travel genre itself. We have long recognized among the Augustans
a renewal of the ancient connection between travel (and travel
writing) and education, and between both and empirical philoso-
phy. At bottom, what held all these concerns together, giving Au-
gustan travels their characteristic rhetorical procedures and shape,
were the new accounts of perception developed in the seventeenth
century, most notably Locke's "way of ideas."35 Both the extraor-
dinary vitality of Augustan travel writing and the assimilation of
travel procedures into literary forms from lyric to novel-from pros-
pect poetry to the educational journeys of Fielding and Smollett-
reveal alike the way in this period, in the context of new theories of
mental functioning, travel can serve as metaphor for fundamental
principles of how the mind operates and how education proceeds.
The literary form of travel writing thus implies fundamental epi-
stemic commitments, including especially a kind of probabilism;
Swift makes his commitment to this view clearest in his remarks on
science, but in fact it underpins the structural procedures of
Gulliver as a whole.
Let us first review the epistemic commitments the travel form
embodies. The Lockean mind gathers its "ideas" in "sensation"
and proceeds to inspect and compare them in the act of "reflection"
(Locke identifies the comparison of ideas as "judgment"). From the
first conception ultimately stems the perceptual basis of so much
Augustan writing and its reliance on procedures of spatial extent;
converted into narrative, survey or prospect become travel (move-
ment through a natural or human landscape), wherein we encoun-
ter varied ideas for comparison (on which to exercise judgment).36
Comparison implies grounds of similarity in the objects compared,
and so travel writing tends toward repetition, repetition of the same
sorts of actions or events in differing guises: in Walker's words,
"The same are represented over again under varying circum-
stances." Thus the travel form becomes useful especially for enact-
ing the procedure of "abstraction," of canvassing varied particulars
in order to abstract from them what is essential to the type. This is
how Locke himself makes use of the evidence of travelers in the
Essay concerning Human Understanding. In book 1, addressing
the question whether the idea of deity is culturally constructed or
innate, Locke turns not merely to a priori reasoning but to the

824 Swift's Satire on "Science"

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accounts of voyagers who have seen humanity differently diversi-
fied by varying cultures. Some travelers report societies innocent of
any conception of deity, so the idea cannot be innate; it is not
essential to human nature, but only accidental. Locke's procedure
here reminds us of the probabilistic basis of the investigation, and
by extension of the travel form itself: we cannot reason to essential
human nature a priori but must descend to things, conjecturing
from the signs observable in varied instances, because the "real
essences" of things are beyond the limits of our knowledge.37
By positioning their readers as surrogate travelers, Augustan au-
thors dramatize this view of mind and so create works structured so
that the very activity of reading them enacts a process of education
(a process which is often also their explicit subject). Thus in Rod-
erick Random-organized, as John Barrell has argued, as a prospect
or "georgic of society"-Smollett uses the travel form to present a
repetitive sequence of situations, partly the same, partly different,
whereby readers can sort out accidentals and so infer the essential
nature of the "gentleman" and his role in society; in Joseph An-
drews, Fielding uses the same procedure to enact (and so teach) the
process by which we assemble complex concepts such as the nature
of charity.38
Gulliver's Travels too uses this form to provide varied contexts
for discrimination and inference, comparisons that have in fact
formed the basis of nearly all interpretations of Swift's book. Books
1 and 2 (which are richest in references to optical instruments)
present what might be considered a series of controlled laboratory
experiments based on comparisons of size: differences in size per-
mit parallel situations, both within and between books, through
which we are led to compare (most memorably) man's physical
body with his pretensions (to beauty, power, wisdom, etc.).39 In
book 4 the lines of comparison run not Lilliputian-Gulliver-
Brobdingnagian, but Yahoo-Gulliver-Houyhnhnm. We compare
conditions in Houyhnhnmland with those in Brobdingnag, Lilli-
putians with Lagadans. And travel itself becomes a ground of com-
parison: the kings of Lilliput and Laputa are not concerned to ask
Gulliver about his voyages, whereas their ministers do so; Munodi
asks "to be informed of the Affairs of Europe, the Laws and Cus-
toms, the Manners and Learning of the several Countries where
[Gulliver] had travelled," demonstrating a proper understanding of
the uses and practice of travel which he shares with the King of
Brobdingnag and Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master.40

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 In its largest purposes Gulliver uses the epistemic procedures of
the travel form to explore human nature itself, to abstract away
accidentals until we have a view of the essential. Because in Swift's
Christian view we are moral creatures, defined by what it is our task
to become (that best self we must realize), a better name for what
Swift seeks to isolate is that used by writers from Pico della Miran-
dola to Alexander Pope: the "proper dignity" of man. And because
like his predecessors Swift understands improper pride as at root a
failure of self-knowledge, the question as to what is essential hu-
man nature becomes equivalent to the question: of what can human
beings properly be proud? Under what aspects can we examine
ourselves without (to use one of Gulliver's favorite words) mortifi-
cation? Through Swift's play with perspective (relative size and its
implications) in books 1 and 2, this search is enacted as the ques-
tion: what is there in us that survives comparison-what that cannot
be rendered ludicrous, shameful, or disgusting when magnified to
Brobdingnagian proportions or shrunk to Lilliputian?
Books 1 and 2 establish, along with much else, that physical
beauty ("pride of the body," as churchmen put it) does not survive
comparison, nor do those dreams of human power and importance
which appear so foolish when embodied in a Lilliputian; our
proper dignity must reside elsewhere. Where that is comes clearest
in a striking passage in book 2, chapter 6, at the moment when the
king of Brobdingnag begins to take Gulliver seriously as a fellow
being, and so as a potential source of wisdom (as a traveler who may
provide useful comparative contexts on which the king may exer-
cise his judgment, perhaps even suggesting models for imitation):
I one day took the Freedom to tell his Majesty, that the Contempt
he discovered towards Europe, and the rest of the World, did not
seem answerable to those excellent Qualities of Mind, that he
was Master of. That, Reason did not extend itself with the Bulk
of the Body: On the contrary, we observed in our Country, that
the tallest Persons were usually least provided with it. That
among other Animals, Bees and Ants had the Reputation of more
Industry, Art, and Sagacity than many of the larger Kinds. And
that, as inconsiderable as he took me to be, I hoped I might live
to do his Majesty some signal Service. The King heard me with
Attention; and began to conceive a much better Opinion of me
than he had ever before. He desired I would give him as exact an
Account of the Government of England as I possibly could; be-
cause as fond as Princes commonly are of their own Customs (for
so he conjectured of other Monarchs by my former Discourses)

826 Swift's Satire on "Science"

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 he should be glad to hear of any thing that might deserve Imi-
tation. (127)
Comparison proves that reason, unlike beauty or strength, does not
"extend itself with the bulk of the body"; here, at the conclusion of
Swift's laboratory experiments based on differences of size, we find
it is reason that survives comparison, and so is essential to human
nature, not accidental. Our proper dignity, that which would sur-
vive comparison even if instanced in men the size of insects, is
predictably our moral intellect (for Swift's "reason" is of course not
merely the calculating faculty defined by Hobbes or Hume, but
ratio recta, an orderly psyche embodying knowledge of ends as
well as means). Books 3 and 4 proceed much more explicitly than 1
and 2 to investigate this faculty, especially its limitations and weak-
nesses-first of all in its application to the sciences. Book 3 exam-
ines the misuses of human reason (how, as the name Laputa sug-
gests, it can be prostituted), book 4 its imperfections (since unlike
Houyhnhnms, we are fallen human creatures).
SWIFTIAN PHYSICO-THEOLOGY: THE NECESSITY OF ART

As in the figure, so in the Stature and Size of Man's Body, we

have another manifest Indication of excellent Design. Not too
Pygmean, nor too Gigantick; either of which Sizes would, in
some Particular or other, have been incommodious to himself, or
to his Business, or to the rest of his Fellow-Creatures. Too Pyg-
mean would have rendered him unfit to manage the inferior
Creatures; would have exposed him to the Assaults of the Weak-
est Animals, to the ravening Appetites of voracious Birds, and to
have put him in the Way, and endangered his being trodden into
the Dirt by the larger Animals.
-William Derham, Physico-Theology: or, a Demonstration of
the Being and Attributes of God from his Works of Crea-
tion (1712)40

"Physico-theology" is of course the term William Derham coined

for that most Augustan form of natural theology (of the argument
from design), which looks through nature up to nature's God by
examining in scientific detail how throughout the natural world
means conduce to ends, parts to a harmonious whole, revealing (to
paraphrase the title of John Ray's great botanical text) the wisdom
of God manifested in the works of creation. Physico-theology was
central to Augustan thinking about the relation of God to nature,
providing scientific insight into the role of Providence in human

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affairs. In Augustan literature physico-theological argument found a
natural home in prospect and survey poems, and in their parent
genre, the georgic-a genre devoted to celebrating such harmoni-
ous wholeness and to recreating it through poetic form. This geor-
gic impetus contributed, for example, to a century of imitations of
that most famous rhetorical representation of such unity, the
Thames couplets from Denham's Coopers Hill; the same passage,
suitably deformed, could serve equally well in satire, the Augustan
obverse of georgic, the genre devoted to treatment of fragmentation
and disunity. But Swift rarely produces either straightforward phys-
ico-theology or straightforward georgic. As is well known, he found
echoes of Denham tiresome, and he delights, as in his mock-georgic
"Description of a City Shower," in transforming the familiar geor-
gic topos of unity in variety into what Ralph Cohen has called "a
harmony of garbage":

Here various Kinds by various Fortunes led,

Commence Acquaintance underneath a Shed.

Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,

Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drenched in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.42

Such passages resemble the zany lists Swift is so fond of, lists gen-
erally used to survey (and convey) wild disorder. Swift's practice of
turning the georgic procedure of e pluribus unum on its head is
rooted in his suspicion of harmonies too easily asserted-of order
simply found, unearned, in a fallen world rather than achieved
through hard moral work-which manifests itself equally in Gulli-
ver's satire on science used in the service of religion.
Swift carries out this part of his satire on science by subjecting
Gulliver himself to physico-theological scrutiny, especially in
books 2 and 4, in nations whose inhabitants are generally wiser
than he. In both cases, the familiar argument (in the title of Galen's
famous treatise) de usu partium corporis humani reveals not har-
mony but deficiency, means that by themselves do not conduce to
ends. Thus the Brobdingnagian scholars

agreed that I could not be produced according to the regular

Laws of Nature; because I was not framed with a Capacity of
preserving my Life, either by Swiftness, or climbing of Trees, or
digging Holes in the Earth. They observed by my Teeth, which
they viewed with great Exactness, that I was a carnivorous Ani-
mal; yet most Quadrupeds being an Overmatch for me; and

828 Swift's Satire on "Science"

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 Field-Mice, with some others, too nimble, they could not imag-
ine how I should be able to support myself. (103-4)
Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master assembles an even longer catalog of
malfunctions and malformations, comparing human skin, nails,
hands, feet, face, nose, eyes, and joints with those of other animals
(especially himself) to show that "considering the Frame of our
Bodies, and especially of mine, he thought no Creature of equal
Bulk was so ill-contrived, for employing that Reason in the common
Offices of Life" (242). This is physico-theology in reverse, a pros-
pect not of benevolent design but painful limitations. All these
physico-theologians reveal their own limitations (their limited
point of view) through the way they judge others' coats only by
their own, but we cannot doubt that Swift's irony here cuts two
ways-that he intends as well to ridicule the easy self-celebration
of such writers as Derham, Dr. Bentley, and the other Boyle lec-
turers.
At the root of Swift's objections to physico-theology, then, is his
suspicion that its harmonies are too easy; they are found rather than
made. Bentleys and Derhams fail properly to emphasize that other
element of georgic, crucial to the form since Virgil: culture-
georgic striving, which produces order in recalcitrant fallen nature
through human labor, human art. Swift's inversion of natural the-
ology can best be compared with Voltaire's in a work that has strong
affinities to Gulliver: Candide. That work converts the argument
from design into an argument from disaster to show the hollowness
of metaphysical optimism. But Voltaire no more than Swift doubts
the role of Providence in human affairs. Rather, Voltaire means to
short-circuit those misuses of the design argument which feed hu-
man pride (we might think here of Jack's personal and ad hoc ap-
peals -to Providence at the end of A Tale of a Tub), and especially
those misuses of it that discourage human striving. Voltaire under-
stands with special acuity the usefulness of arguments from provi-
dential design in defenses of the existing social order and of po-
litical quietism. But more generally, Candide is a defense of the
georgic values of human industry, art, and labor, in the form of a
journey through a series of symbolic gardens to the final garden that
Candide and his friends agree to cultivate.43
Swift makes clear the connection between his larger satire on
science (including physico-theology) and his belief in the necessity
of art in a complex passage that occurs toward the end of book 2. In
chapter 7-at the center of the Travels, just before he leaves Brob-

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dingnag and before Swift turns his attention from pygmies and
giants to the different procedures of books 3 and 4-Gulliver
spends a long paragraph describing a small book. The passage has
received little attention, perhaps because it is so much in keeping
with all that surrounds it, and because Gulliver himself dismisses
the "little old Treatise" as cliche:

I have perused many [Brobdingnagian] Books, especially those

in History and Morality. Among the latter was I much diverted
with a little old Treatise, which always lay in Glumdalclitch's
Bedchamber, and belonged to her Governess, a grave elderly
Gentlewoman, who dealt in Writings of Morality and Devotion.
The Book treats of the Weakness of Human Kind; and is in little
esteem except among Women and the Vulgar. This Writer went
through all the usual Topicks of European Moralists ... [and]
drew several moral Applications useful in the Conduct of Life,
but needless here to repeat. (137)

Gulliver's dismissive tone is a warning: Swift delights in sweeping

aside as trivial and hackneyed those truths which in reality he be-
lieves most deeply. And if the book is "in little Esteem except
among Women and the Vulgar," these are often in Swift's satire
wiser than the learned (in Laputa it is the "Wives and Daughters"
who "lament their Confinement on this Island," while Gulliver
foolishly thinks it "the most delicious spot of Ground in the World"
[165]). Might we even speculate that Swift, the friend and educator
of young women, the writer who enjoys impersonating common
folk (especially women), is in some part of his mind casting himself
as Glumdalclitch's "governess, a grave elderly Gentlewomen, who
dealt in Writings of Morality and Devotion"?
So many parallels connect this little book with the larger one
which surrounds it that the treatise appears to be a microcosm of the
Travels as a whole. Both illustrate

how diminutive, contemptible, and helpless was Man in his own

Nature; how unable to defend himself from the Inclemencies of
the Air, or the Fury of wild Beasts: How much he was excelled
by one Creature in Strength, by another in Speed, by a third in
Foresight, by a fourth in Industry. (137)

Like Gulliver itself, this is a book whose lessons have been gath-
ered through comparison. But ironically, its lessons soon go wrong,
and begin to sound no wiser than those of the Brobdingnagian
scholars:

830 Swift's Satire on "Science"

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 He added, that Nature was degenerated in these declining Ages
of the World, and could now produce only small abortive Births
in Comparison of those in ancient Times. He said, it was very
reasonable to think, not only that the Species of Men were origi-
nally much larger, but also that there must have been Giants in
former Ages; which, as it is asserted by History and Tradition, so
it hath been confirmed by huge Bones and Sculls casually dug up
in several Parts of the Kingdom, far exceeding the common dwin-
dled Race of Man in our Days. He argued, that the very Laws of
Nature absolutely required that we should have been made in
the Beginning, of a Size more large and robust, not so liable to
Destruction from every little Accident of a Tile falling from an
House, or a Stone cast from the Hand of a Boy, or of being
drowned in a little Brook.

Swift completes our sense of the passage as a representation in little

of the Travels as a whole by adding another, final ironic turn in the
form of Gulliver's response to what he has read:

From this Way of Reasoning the Author drew several moral Ap-
plications useful in the Conduct of Life, but needless here to
repeat. For my own Part, I could not avoid reflecting how uni-
versally this Talent was spread of drawing Lectures in Morality,
or indeed rather Matter of Discontent and repining, from the
Quarrels we raise with Nature. And, I believe upon a strict En-
quiry, those Quarrels might be shewn as ill-grounded among us,
as they are among that People. (137-38)

In one way Gulliver is right; quarrels with nature, "Discontent and

repining" at the state in which God has placed us, are ill-grounded
expressions of pride. But again Swift's irony cuts two ways. To the
extent that the treatise's "moral Applications" really are "useful in
the Conduct of Life," Gulliver's flip rejection of them constitutes a
misunderstanding of his own nature, and so another form of pride.
The conclusion of this passage thus parallels that of book 4, another
"Lecture in Morality," at whose end we find Gulliver proudly quar-
reling with his own human nature.
When the little treatise (like Gulliver itself) speaks of "how di-
minutive, contemptible, and helpless was Man in his own Nature,"
the operative phrase is "in his own Nature." This is the nature man
was born with-nature unassisted by grace, unaugmented by art
(for Swift as for Pope, the two are related). In Swift's inverted physi
co-theology, all the limitations cited in humankind-in "Man in his
own Nature"-instance weaknesses that must be overcome by hu-
man labor, human art. To defend himself from the "Inclemencies of
the Air" he must invent shelter; against the beasts he needs weap-

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ons; to acquire the "Strength" and "Speed" of other creatures he
needs tools: everywhere he must exert (in the sense outlined
above) "Imagination, Fancy, and Invention." Just as the "Bees and
Ants" (whose "Industry, Art, and Sagacity" Gulliver recalls to the
king of Brobdingnag) are models of such qualities in Virgil's Geor-
gics, the model that Swift presents in book 3 of humanity best
pursuing its purposes-best realizing its proper nature-is the ag-
ricultural cultivator Munodi, a kind of georgic hero.44 Swift inverts
physico-theology because, like Voltaire, he sees in the misusers of
such argument (as in the scientists of Laputa) the enemies of geor-
gic striving, which is itself, as Virgil had argued, the parent of the
prudential arts. And finally, because it is our task in realizing our
proper nature to strive to cultivate these arts, the human deficien-
cies pointed up by inverse physico-theology can themselves be-
come grounds in an argument for providential design. The argu-
ment was first made by Virgil himself in the so-called "Jupiter
theodicy" in book 1 of the Georgics. That Swift could share Virgil's
view is made clear by an entry in his Thoughts on Various Subjects,
a paraphrase of the Jupiter theodicy ending in a quotation from it:

One Argument used to the Disadvantage of Providence, I take to

be a very strong one in its Defense. It is objected, that Storms
and Tempests, unfruitful Seasons, Serpents, Spiders, Flies, and
the like Kind, discover an Imperfection in Nature; because hu-
man Life would be much easier without them: But the Design of
Providence may clearly be perceived in this Proceeding. The
Motions of the Sun and Moon; in short, the whole System of the
Universe, as far as Philosophers have been able to discover and
observe, are in the utmost Degree of Regularity and Perfection:
But wherever God hath left to Man the power of interposing a
Remedy by Thought or Labour, there he hath placed Things in a
State of Imperfection, on purpose to stir up human Industry;
without which Life would stagnate, or indeed rather could not
subsist at all: Curis acuens mortalia corda.45

The Brobdingnagian author thus goes wrong in arguing-like the

most extreme proponents of the Ancients-that "the Species of
Men were originally much larger," that "there must have been
Giants in former Ages." Not only does his "little" book (huge to
Gulliver) raise the ludicrous possibility of a kind of infinite titanic
regress, it fails to recognize the relation between human limitation
and the arts: need spurs progress Oust as at a later stage of devel-
opment luxury may still it). In rejecting the Brobdingnagian's ar-
gument, Swift makes clear his own stance in the debate on decay

832 Swift's Satire on "Science"

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that had occupied Ancients and Moderns in the late seventeenth-
century phase of their Quarrel and which so often surfaces in
Gulliver's Travels. The Moderns had then defended the possibility
of cumulative progress by rebutting the Ancient view, found in
polemics such as Godfrey Goodman's Fall of Man (1619), that the
whole earth, including the human frame, had been degenerating
since ancient times; some extreme Moderns, such as Thomas Bur-
net in his Telluris theoria sacra (1681), even argued that the physi-
cal world itself continually improves.46 On this issue Glumdal-
clitch's book sides with the most extreme Ancient proponents of
decay. But we should no more identify its views here with Swift's
than we should identify Swift with the Brobdingnagian scholars
whom the passage echoes. Swift characteristically enjoys taking
even his own views to extremes, meeting the enemy, as it were, on
his own foolish terms; and as we have seen, Swift no more than
Pope is the enemy of "progress" properly understood-as must of
course be true of authors so much given to advancing their own
suggestions for social improvement.
Swift's own views would appear to be those of Gulliver in
Glubbdubdrib, where he observes "how much the Race of human
Kind was degenerate among us, within these Hundred Years past,"
such that even our bodies have "shortened" (201). Such decay,
Gulliver finds, has resulted not from any global natural processes
but from simple human "Vice" (in this passage, from that vice so
many of Swift's so-called "dirty" poems preach against: fornication,
resulting in "the Pox"). Characteristically, Swift analyzes the old
debate on progress down to the level of individual moral choice-
the same individual moral choice Swift appeals to in kings, minis-
ters, or gentlefolk when he himself turns serious projector in such
works as A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Ref-
ormation of Manners (1709), A Proposalfor Correcting the English
Tongue (1712), or A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manu-
facture (1720), all of which begin with diagnoses of recent ills and
go on to suggest prudent techniques (arts) by which decay may
probably be reversed. If Swift's approach as projector changes dur-
ing his career, it is in the same direction that both his politics and
his views of science change: just as the Examiner focuses most on
problems of corruption (failure to live up to valued established
institutions), the Drapier on the more general problem of tyranny,
earlier proposals begin with reviews of particular corruptions, later
ones with larger ills; so too Gulliver generalizes the concern of

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A Tale of a Tub with particular "corruptions in religion and
learning" to a more philosophically searching exploration of the
limitations of the human mind, limitations that create for us at once
the division between the realms of prudence and certainty, and the
necessity of artful imitation in the transmission and progress of
culture.

Smith College

NOTES

I would like to thank Professor Paul Pickrel for his thoughtful comments on the
argument of this essay.
1 Marjorie Nicolson and Nora Mohler, "The Scientific Background of Swift's Voy-
age to Laputa," Annals of Science 2 (1937): 299-334.
2 The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1959), vol. 11, Gulliver's Travels, 177. All subsequent references are to
this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
3 John Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan
Swift (London, 1752), 147; Deane Swift, Essay on the Life, Writings and Character,
of Dr. Jonathan Swift (London, 1755), 214.
4 Richard G. Olson, "Tory-High Church Opposition to Science and Scientism in
the Eighteenth Century: The Works of John Arbuthnot, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel
Johnson," in John G. Burke, ed., The Uses of Science in the Age of Newton (Berke-
ley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), 182, 185; Olson even repeats the canard about
Swift's poor performance in "science" courses in college (184). See also John
Sutherland: "Swift does more than attack the excesses of would-be scientists: he
attacks science itself ... he recognized that man's analytic use of his intellect in an
attempt to examine and manipulate the natural world was one of the best possible
examples of the sin of pride in action" ("A Reconsideration of Gulliver's Third
Voyage," Studies in Philology 54 [1957]: 46). More recent treatments of book 3 in
this vein include: John Hill, "Corpuscular Fundament: Swift and the Mechanical
Philosophy," Enlightenment Essays 6 (1975): 37-49; Dennis Todd, "Laputa, the
Whore of Babylon, and the Idols of Science," Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 93-120;
and Eric Rothstein, "Gulliver III: or, the Progress of Clio," Proceedings of the First
Munster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann Real and Heinz J. Vienken
(Mtinchen: Wilhelm Fink, 1985), 216-31.
The scholar probably most influential in keeping Orrery's view alive among lit-
erary critics in our century has been Richard Foster Jones, whose view of Swift
follows from his larger theory of the antiscientific stance of the Ancients in the
quarrel between Ancients and Moderns (see for instance "The Background of the
Attack on Science," in Pope and his Contemporaries, ed. James L. Clifford and
Louis Landa [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949], 96-113). Jones's influence among
critics persists despite widespread dissatisfaction among historians of science them-
selves with that theory (see especially Peter Mathias Rattansi's review of Jones's
Ancients and Moderns, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18 [1967]:
250-55).
5 Such implausible defenses include S. H. Gould, "Gulliver and the Moons of
Mars," Journal of the History of Ideas 6 (1945): 91-101, which would make Swift a
careful student of both Kepler's System of the World and Newton's Principia, and
Colin Kiernan, "Swift and Science," The Historical Journal 14 (1971): 709-22,
which tends to construe Swift's satire as a straightforward scientific treatise. A much

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more trustworthy survey of Swift's lifelong interest in the sciences is George
Reuben Potter, "Swift and 'Natural Science,'" Philological Quarterly 20 (1941):
97-118.
6 roots of the new division of knowledge have been traced by Paul 0. Kris-
teller, "The Modern System of the Arts," Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951):
496-527; 13 (1952): 17-46; Ronald S. Crane, "The Idea of the Humanities," in The
Idea of the Humanities and Other Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chi-
cago Press, 1967), 1:3-170; and Douglas Lane Patey, "The Eighteenth Century
Invents the Canon," Modern Language Studies 18 (1988): 17-37.
7 For readings of Pope's Essay along these lines, see David B. Morris, "Civilized
Reading: The Act of Judgment in An Essay on Criticism," in The Art of Alexander
Pope, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Anne Smith (London: Vision Press, 1979), 15-
39, and Douglas Lane Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory
and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1984), 126-33.
8 See most recently J. Paul Hunter, "Gulliver's Travels and the Novel," in The
Genres of Gulliver's Travels, ed. Frederik N. Smith (Newark: Univ. of Delaware
Press, 1990), 56-74, and on the generic construction of book 3 in particular, Jenny
Mezciems, "The Unity of Swift's 'Voyage to Laputa': Structure as Meaning in Uto-
pian Fiction," Modern Language Review 72 (1977): 1-21.
9 loseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), 171. Glanvill adds:
"The accounts that this [Aristotelian] Philosophy gives by other Qualities, are of the
same Gender with these: So that to say that the Loadstone draws Iron by magnetick
attraction ... were as satisfying as these Hypotheses, and the solution were as
pertinent" (171-72).
10 See for instance Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chaps. 4-5; John Locke, Essay, ed.
Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 3.10 ("Of the Abuse of Words");
Glanvill (note 9), chap. 16; and Gulliver himself of the Brobdingnagians: "As to
Ideas, Entities, Abstractions and Transcendentals, I could never drive the least
Conception into their Heads" (136).
11 Isaac Newton, Cambridge Univ. MS, quoted in Richard S. Westfall, Force in
Newton's Physics (London: Macdonald, 1971), 386; Glanvill, chap. 18.
12 Monsters, understood as nature's teleological failures (beings that mix forms or
incompletely realize a single form), were the subject of the science of teratology; see
for instance Ambroise Pare's treatise of 1573, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis
L. Pallister (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982).
13 Swift could easily have learned such arguments by attending to the conduct of
internecine debate among the new scientists themselves. Leibniz had notoriously
accused Newton of reintroducing occult qualities into philosophy (see Nicholas
Jolley, Leibniz and Locke [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19881, 56), and accusations like
the following, made in 1709 by the Cartesian mathematician Antoine Parent, be-
come typical:

[Newton] aime bien consid6rer la pesanteur comme une qualit6 inher-

ente dans les corps, et ramener les idees tant d6criees de qualit6 occulte
et d'attraction. II ne faut pas nous flatter que dans nos recherches de
physique nous puissons jamais nous mettre au-dessus de toutes les dif-
ficult6s; mais ne laissons pas de philosopher toujours sur des principes
clairs de mechanique; si nous les abandonnons, toute la lumiere que
nous pouvons avoir est eteinte, et nous voila replonges de nouveau dans
les anciennes t6nebres du p6ripat6tisme, dont le ciel nous veuille pre-
server. (Memoires de l'Academie royale des Sciences [Paris, 17091, 149)

Newton likes to consider gravity as a quality inherent in matter, and so to

revive the much-decried notions of occult qualities and of attraction. We

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 should not deceive ourselves that in our physical researches we can ever
overcome all difficulties; but let us always philosophize upon clear me-
chanical principles; if we abandon these, all the light that we might
achieve is extinguished, and we are thereupon plunged once again into
the ancient peripatetic shadows, from which heaven preserve us. (trans-
lation mine)

14 Such treatment of Aristotle can be traced to the beginnings of humanism, which

already with Vives distinguishes the revered ancient writer from the accretions of
his scholastic commentators. See Elaine Limbrick's remarks in her introduction to
Francisco Sanches, That Nothing Is Known (Quod Nihil Scitur) (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1988), 28-29.
15 On Bacon's method of certainty in discovering "simple natures," see Mary
Hesse, "Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Science," in Essential Articles for the Study
of Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Hamden: Archon Books, 1968), 114-39.
16 Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy (London, 1664), preface; Glanvill (note
9), 170, 172.
17 See Thomas White, An Exclusion of Scepticks From all Title to Dispute: Being
an Answer to the Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1665), 55-56.
18 Foster Watson, Of Education: A Translation of the "De Tradendis Disciplinis"
ofJuan Luis Vives (1913; reprint, Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1971), 42-43. The
term "prudence" enters Western discussion especially with Cicero, who used pru-
dentia (which he defines as "knowledge of what should be done and what avoided")
to translate Aristotle's phronesis, a practical wisdom of which we read in the Rhet-
oric: "The young may be experts in geometry, mathematics, and other similar
branches of knowledge, but phronesis requires a knowledge of particular cases,
which comes from experience, which a young man does not possess, since experi-
ence is the fruit of years" (Cicero, De Officiis 1.43; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.1.1355bl5;
translation mine).
19 Jonathan Swift, "A Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the
Spirit," in Prose Works (note 2) 1:190; Cf. Gulliver on the higher class of Laputan:
"He is always so wrapped up in Cogitation, that he is in manifest Danger of falling
down every Precipice, and bouncing his Head against every Post" (159-160).
20 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.3.1-4, 1094b (translation mine).
21 William Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (London,
1694), 78.
22 Thomas Spencer, The Art of Logick (London, 1628), 288; and more generally
Patey, Probability (note 7), chap. 1.
23 Quoted in Yvon Belaval, "Vico and Anti-Cartesianism," in Giambattista Vico:
An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1969), 82.
24 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 98, 126. The term "maxim" (prob-
ably a shortening of maxima sententia, a proverb or formulation of "common sense"
possessing authoritative weight) had of course a long history in ethics, rhetoric, and
all the "low" sciences (such as medicine) wherein general rules of universal appli-
cation cannot be had, nor can rules be demonstrated; "maxims" thus possess only
what St. Thomas called a "probable certitude." See Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen
Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1988), 252-53 and passim.
25 Locke (note 10), 4.12.10. This claim for ethics is of course a direct challenge to
Aristotle (for example, Eth. Nic., 6.5.1-4, 1140a-b; 7.7, 1141b; 12.1-6, 1144b).
26 Jeffrey Bergner presents a fine account of Hobbes's claims in The Origins of
Formalism in the Social Sciences (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), chap. 1.
At about the same time as Hobbes, both Pufendorf and Pascal argue that ethics can

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be known demonstratively (can be a science): Pufendorf even writes his early Ele-
mentorum jurisprudentiae universales (1658) in the manner of Spinoza and later
Newton, more geometrico; and under the influence of Descartes, Pascal writes of
ethics in his fifth Provinciale (1656): "I am not satisfied with probability. I want
certainty" (The Provincial Letters, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer [Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins Univ. Press, 1967], 81). On gunpowder in the trinity of modern inventions
(including also printing and the compass), see Roy S. Wolper, "The Rhetoric of
Gunpowder and the Idea of Progress," Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970):
589-98.
27 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 35; see also
Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits (London, 1594): "From a good imagi-
nation spring all the Arts and Sciences, which consist in figure, correspondence,
harmonie, and proportion; such are Poetrie, Eloquence" but also "the governing of
a Commonwealth" and "the art of Warfare" (103).
28 See George B. Parks, "Travel as Education," in The Seventeenth Century, ed.
Richard Foster Jones et al., (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1951), 264-90.
29 Bernard Lamy, Entretiens sur les sciences, dans lesquels on apprend comment
l'on doit 6tudier les sciences, & s'en servir pour se faire l'esprit juste et le coeur
droit (edited with an introduction which discusses the educational context by Fran-
cois Girbal and Pierre Clair [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966]); John
Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Francis William Garforth (New
York: Columbia Univ. Teachers College Press, 1966), 69, 123. See also in general
Howard Clive Barnard, The French Tradition in Education: Ramus to Mme Necker
de Saussure (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922), chap. 5, and Geoffrey H.
Bantock, Studies in the History of Educational Theory, I: Artifice and Nature (Lon-
don: Allen & Unwin, 1980), 215-27.
30 See Ernesto Grassi, "Topical Philosophy or Critical Philosophy? Meditations
on the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione," in Giambattista Vico (note 23), 39-
50, and more generally Joseph Levine, "Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between
the Ancients and the Moderns," Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991): 55-79.
Obadiah Walker's Of Education, Especially of Young Gentlemen (Oxford, 1683) was
the most popular treatise on the subject to appear in England until Locke's Thoughts
on Education; it reached six editions before 1700 and was the model for the Tris-
trapxdia in Tristram Shandy.
31 Quoted in Jean Starobinski, "From the Decline of Erudition to the Decline of
Nations: Gibbon's Response to French Thought," in Edward Gibbon and the De-
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Glenn Warren Bowerstock et al. (Cam-
bridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), 146. See also on the continuing French debate
Jean Seznec, "Le Singe antiquaire," in Essais sur Diderot et l'antiquitg (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1957), 79-96.
32 The equation of imitation with invention is the Chevalier de Jaucourt's, from
his entry "Imitation" in the Encyclopedie (1765, 8:568).
33 Walker Percy, Love Among the Ruins; the Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a
Time near the End of the World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971). On the
consistency of Swift's portrayal of the Houyhnhnms, see Irvin Ehrenpreis, "Swiftian
Dilemmas," in Satire in the 18th Century, ed. John Dudley Browning (New York:
Garland, 1983), 214-31.
Swift goes to some trouble in characterizing Houyhnhnm intellect. Theirs is not so
much the immediate intuition of angels as the perfection of human discursive rea-
son, that is, a perfectly orderly psyche in which all faculties remain within proper
bounds: "Neither is Reason with them a point problematical as with us, where Men
can argue with Plausibility on both Sides of a Question; but strikes you with imme-
diate Conviction; as it must needs do where it is not mingled, obscured, or disco-
loured by Passion and Interest" (267). All thought for them thus possesses the cer-

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tainty of demonstration; they cannot "understand the Meaning of the Word
Opinion" (opinion of course being the status of merely probable knowledge). Theirs
is thus the condition of intellect generations of thinkers had attributed to Adam
before the Fall: prelapsarian man had no "opinions." (As Cowley wrote in 1656 of
"The Tree of Knowledge," its "Apples were demonstrative"; but eating them gave
us not "Science" but only "Opinions," "Probabilities," "Rhetoric," and "Fallacies."
On the tradition of differences between man's prelapsarian and fallen intellect, see
Patey (note 7), 12-13). For fallen man, as Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master points out,
"Natural Philosophy" can be only a "Knowledge of other Peoples Conjectures"-of
probabilities (267-68).
What to do with the Yahoos is for the Houyhnhnms a matter of debate, "indeed,
the only Debate that ever happened in their Country" (271), again because of the
analogy Swift has set up between Houyhnhnm and unfallen man. Like unfallen man
the Houyhnhnms possess "no Conceptions or Ideas of what is evil in a rational
Creature" (267): Having no knowledge of evil (knowledge in this case requiring
acquisition of the quality, a kind of learning by doing), they can neither explain nor
understand it. We might say, taking into account what Swift tells us of their religious
views, that the Houyhnhnms possess (as all men may) natural theology, but that
since they have not fallen (and so have no need of regeneration), they can neither
understand nor explain the problem of evil. "Nature and Reason" may be "sufficient
guides for a reasonable Animal," but not for one in whom that faculty is "corrupted"
(248). (We can draw a useful analogy here between Swift and Defoe: Robinson
Crusoe finds natural theology sufficient to instruct Friday only until Friday raises
the problem of evil, asking "Why God no kill the Devil?" Natural theology [reason]
alone cannot help Crusoe with this question; he must turn to revelation.)
34 Walker (note 30), 175.
35 See Ray William Frantz, The English Traveler and the Movement of Ideas,
1600-1732 (1934; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967), chaps. 1-2, and
Charles L. Batten, Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-
Century Travel Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978).
36 The pioneer work on Augustan procedures of spatial extent is Ralph Cohen's
"The- Augustan Mode in English Poetry," Eighteenth-Century Studies 1 (1967):
3-32.
3 On the idea of deity, see Locke, Essay (note 10), 1.4.8-17; on real vs. nominal
essences, 3.3.15-20.
38 John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730-1780: An Equal, Wide Survey
(New York: St. Martin's, 1983), chap. 3; on Joseph Andrews, see Probability and
Literary Form, chap. 7.
- In book 2, where because of his (relatively) small size, Gulliver acts as a kind of
human microscope, examining natural details (especially of the human body) too
small for the unaided eye normally to see, Swift is of course capitalizing on the
unsettling discoveries made with the first microscopes only a few decades earlier,
but we too often forget the reasons why natural philosophers found these discoveries
so unsettling. That previously unknown creatures might be discovered seemed to
conflict with Genesis 2:19-20, where Adam is said to have named all the creatures
(though this could be handled by attributing special acuity to Adam's prelapsarian
senses). Much more disturbing, it had been a central tenet of scholastic philosophy
that no animal or other matter can exist below the threshold of our senses: as Aqui-
nas wrote, "It is not possible that there should be certain parts of flesh and bone
which are non-sensible because of smallness" (Commentary on Aristotle's Physics,
trans. Richard J. Blackwell [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963], 340). To be-
lieve otherwise was to challenge the cardinal doctrine, rooted in both philosophy
and theology, of the completeness of our senses. The new science, with its invisible
material mechanisms, had of course to challenge this doctrine, prompting comments

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such as Montaigne's: "I make a question whether man be provided of all naturall
senses, or not." (Essayes, trans. John Florio [London, 1886], 302). For Swift (as for
Pope in An Essay on Man), we might say, the senses are mercifully incomplete.
40 GT, 127, 166, 173-74, 243. Fielding similarly makes differing views of travel a
context for discrimination in Joseph Andrews.
41 William Derham, Physico-Theology: or, a Demonstration of the Being and At-
tributes of God from his Works of Creation (London, 1732), 288, quoted in Eric
Rothstein, "In Brobdingnag: Captain Gulliver, Dr. Derham, and Master Tom
Thumb," Etudes anglaises 37 (1984): 131-32. Rothstein points out the popularity of
such argument: Physico-Theology was in its sixth edition in 1726, John Ray's Wis-
dom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) in its eighth.
42 Cohen (note 36), 7; The Poems ofJonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 137, 139; see also the conclusion of Swift's "grand
Survey" in "The Lady's Dressing Room": "Such Order from Confusion spring, /
Such gaudy Tulips rais'd from Dung" (530) and the echo of Denham (identified by
Swift in a note) in "Strephon and Chloe": "Her Hands the softest ever felt, / Tho'
cold would burn, tho' dry would melt" (585). Swift condemns over-frequent use of
Denham's formulation in "Apollo's Edict": "For know I cannot bear to hear, / The
Mimickry of deep yet clear" (271). Swift expresses this view specifically of poems
celebrating political harmony, for example that of "ANNA'S happy Reign"-poems
such as Pope's Windsor-Forest, a georgic containing satiric passages built around
straightforward and deformed versions of the rhetoric of unity in variety. Pope ech-
oes Denham most audibly in this poem in lines 225-26. Throughout his poetry,
though, when he wishes to express a conception of harmony or unity, Pope habit-
ually turns to the techniques of georgic, and especially to prospect poetry; see for
instance the many inset passages of prospect poetry used to explain the nature of
literary unity in the Essay on Criticism, a poem which argues that proper reading is
itself a kind of physico-theology, of tracing "the Muses upward to their Spring"
(extended examples of such "prospects" occur at lines 158-60, 171-75, and most
famously in the simile of the Alps, 220-32). Among his frequent uses of the Den-
ham's lines in a satiric context, see especially the famous echo at Dunciad (1729)
3.163-66.
43 See William F. Bottiglia, "Voltaire's Candide: Analysis of a Classic," Studies on
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 7 (1959): 88-113.
44 See Margaret Doody's splendid essay on Swift's use of Virgil, "Insects, Vermin,
and Horses: Gulliver's Travels and Virgil's Georgics," in Augustan Studies: Essays
in Honor of Irvin Ehrenpreis, ed. Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan (New-
ark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), 145-74.
45 Swift, Prose Works (note 2), 4:245. The Jupiter theodicy, through which Virgil
explains the origin of human arts, occurs in Georgic 1, lines 121-46. Swift's quota-
tion comes from line 123, and is translated by Dryden: "And [God] whetted Humane
Industry by Care." For further connections between the passage and Gulliver's
Travels, see Doody (note 44).
46 See Ernest Tuveson, "Swift and the World-Makers," Journal of the History of
Ideas 11 (1950): 54-74.

Douglas Lane Patey 839

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