ABSTRACT
A good deal has been made of what are thought to be clear indications in the Voyage itself that Swift wanted his readers to take a much more critical view than Gulliver does of ‘the virtues and ideas of those exalted Houyhnhnms’ and a much less negative view of human possibilities. The characterization of Swift’s age and of Swift himself as a part of that age in our critics derives its apparent exhaustiveness from a pattern of general terms which these critics clearly owe to the ethical and historical speculations of Irving Babbitt and his school. The essential character of the Houyhnhnms is that they are creatures ‘wholly governed by reason’; the essential character of the Yahoos is that ‘they are the most unteachable of brutes,’ without ‘the least tincture of reason.’ The logicians had more to offer Swift than the great authority which they undoubtedly conferred on the definition ‘rational animal.’.
