The most valuable element in the content of Gulliver's travels is the general comment that it makes on human life. This comment is expressed by viewing humanity from four diferent standpoints. The first is about a physically superior being, who sees mankind as ridiculously small. The second is about an inferior being, who sees mankind as grotesquelly large. The third is the standpoint of common sense, from which the vast majority of mankind appear crazy and wicked. The forth is about a rational animal, which is the whole human race as irrational and bestial.

    In part one the human race is viewed in miniature, and at firsts seems rather charming; but the tiny creatures soon turn out to be treacherous and cruel. They are ready to sacrifice all human feeling whether towards Gulliver or the Blefuscudians, to their own petty ambitions.

    In part two the human race appears coarse and callous.Gulliver is revolted by the Brobdingnagians huge bodies, by their smell, their table-manners, and their physical habits. He is caused great pain by the thougtlessness of the first the man who picks him up, and worked almost to death by the farmer whose chief interest is money.

    In part three Gulliver views human behaviour through the eyes of common sense, and sees the gift of reason everywhere misused, either for playing futile intellectual games. In Glubbdubdribb he reads in human history the depressing lesson that crime does pay and that human nature is becoming worse and worse.
    In Luggnagg he finds the lesson confirmed, first by the example of a cruel tyranny, and secondly by the Struldbrugs, who illustrate not only the general miseries of human life, but in particular the constant tendency of human beings to take advantage of one another.

    In part four human beings, viewed by those rational animals, appear as Yahoos, dirty, greedy, vicious, lecherous and stupid. The  European described by Gulliver to his master are exactly like the Yahoos, except that they are more intelligent; but this only makes then worse.
    From each of these four viewpoints the human race presents an unattractive picture but the pictures are not identical, nor does any one picture claim to be complete. To choose a trivial illustration: in part one the human beings have "the fairest complexion in the world", in part two their complexions are "rough and coarse, and ill coloured".
    Neither of these statements about human skin is offered as absolutely true.
 

    The four pictures form a series, in which the view grows gradually darker; that is, they represent stages in Gulliver's desillusionment.
    The last few chapters of the book show him becoming more and more unbalanced. by a number of small clues dropped in to the text, the reader is given to understand that Gulliver is going too far, that his devotion to the Houyhnhnms is becoming an obssesion, and his misanthropy a joke. Finally he turns into a figure of almost pure farce, who habitually stops up his nose with "Rue, Lavende, or Tobacco-Leaves".
    In the person of Gulliver, the misanthropic satirist is mercilessly satirized; and the climax of the process comes in his final diatribe. After demonstrating in detail his sense of superiority to the whole human race, he concludes by denouncing the pride of others in a sentence that neatly illustrates his own.

    Swift, like Gulliver found his fellow-men unsatisfactory; but he reacted rather differently. Gulliver becomes so obsessed with the generic faults of mankind, that he cannot appreciate the virtues of individuals. Swift never made this mistake.
    Gulliver weighs human beings in the balance of pure reason and finds them wanting. Swift is prepared to be more tolerant, because he does not expect people to be rational.

    The example of Gulliver, who becomes a misanthrope in Timon's manner, is designed to teach the opposite attitude, tolerance. In recognizing the influence of human behaviour of irrational animal instinct, Swift was in line with modern psychology; but to understand his thougt in its context, we must remember that he was not a modern psycholigst, but an eighteenth-century clergyman. The moral of Gulliver's travels is based on practical experience, linked with Christian theology.

    More interesting is the link with Christian ethics. The contrast between Houyhnhnm indifference and Christian loving-kindness, between Gulliver's sour misanthropy and Don Pedro's patient philanthropy, can not be fortuitous. The two men are obviously meant to represent two different ways of reacting to human frailty.
 

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