St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq.

London

1754

But when we enter into a serious and impartial detail concerning this knowledge, and analyse carefully what the great pretenders to it have given and give us daily for knowledge, we shall be obliged to confess, that the human intellect is rather a rank than a fertile soil, barren without due culture, and apt to shoot up tares and weeds with too much."

When we take such a general view of human knowledge, and represent to ourselves all the objects that our minds pursue, and in the pursuit whereof we pretend not only to reason on less or greater grounds of probability, but most commonly to demonstrate, we are apt to entertain an high opinion, and to make extravagant encomiums of our intellect. But when we enter into a serious and impartial detail concerning this knowledge, and analyse carefully what the great pretenders to it have given and give us daily for knowledge, we shall be obliged to confess, that the human intellect is rather a rank than a fertile soil, barren without due culture, and apt to shoot up tares and weeds with too much. By such combinations of ideas as I have been mentioning, we shorten and facilitate the operations of our minds, as well as the communication of our thoughts. Our knowledge becomes general, and our intellect seems to be less dependent on sense. From which observations philosophers have entertained false notions of what they call pure intellect, and have flattered themselves that they could extend their knowledge, by the power the mind exercises in framing complex ideas and notions, very far beyond the narrow bounds to which it is limited by simple ideas, over which the mind has not the least original power, and which must therefore, let the mind compose, combine, and abstract them as it pleases (for it cannot make any), determine the extent of our complex ideas and notions.
(Essay I, §4; vol. iii, p. 409)

Plant::Soil Plant::Tares Plant::Weeds

Reading

At least 5 entries in ESTC (1754, 1777, 1793).

See "Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq." in the third volume of David Mallet's The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (London : [s.n.], Printed in the Year 1754). <Link to ESTC><Link to ESTC>

Text from the third volume of The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (Dublin: Printed by P. Byrne: 1793). <Link to Google Books>

Reading also in the 1967 reprint of The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1844).

03/14/2014