ABSTRACT
Swift's satire rests on a traditional assumption about the human condition: that it is a prey to subversion and unhappiness from within, that men are by mental constitution restless, irrational and unsatisfied, congenitally prone to false needs and driven to supererogatory and destructive satisfactions. Many of Swift's arguments for limiting the toleration of Dissenters, in sober discourses like the Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man as well as in ironic fantastications like the Digression on Madness and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, emphasise the snowballing threat posed by sectarian leaders. Swift's repudiating mimicry of the subversive intensities of the human mind clearly proceeded from a certain inwardness of understanding. Even in the Sentiments, however, Swift hedges the allowability of 'Alterations' with heavy reservations; and the proposal easily turns into its repudiated Whiggish counterpart, which urges Protestant unity in language very close to Martin's or the Church-of-England Man's.
