  CELEBRATED as the earliest writer of the utilitarian school of morals. At the age of fifteen he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, of which he was afterwards elected a Fellow. Scruples of conscience about the “Thirty-nine Articles” would not allow him to subscribe them and take orders, and he turned to the medical profession, in which he reached considerable eminence. His Observations on Man: his Frame, his Duties, and his Expectations, appeared in 1748. The principal interest in the book consists in the fact of its containing the germs of that school of moral philosophy of which Paley, Bentham, and Mill have been the most able expositors. He had imbibed the teaching of Locke upon the origin of ideas, which that first of English metaphysicians founded in Sensation and Reflection or Association, in contradiction to the old theory of Innateness. Although now universally received, it is hardly necessary to remark that at its first promulgation it met with as great opposition as all rational ideas experience long after their first introduction; and Locke’s controversy with the Bishop of Worcester is matter of history. It has already been stated that David Hartley was the friend of Dr. Cheyne, whom he attended in his last illness, and he numbered amongst his acquaintances some of the most eminent personages of the day. His character appears to have been singularly amiable and disinterested. His theology is, for the most part, of unsuspected orthodoxy. The following sentences reveal the bias of his mind in the matter of kreophagy:— “With respect to animal diet, let it be considered that taking away the lives of [other] animals in order to convert them into food, does great violence to the principles of benevolence and compassion. This appears from the frequent hard-heartedness and cruelty found among those persons whose occupations engage them in destroying animal life, as well as from the uneasiness which others feel in beholding the butchery of [the lower] animals. It is most evident, in respect to the larger animals and those with whom we have a familiar intercourse—such as Oxen, Sheep, and domestic Fowls, &c.—so as to distinguish, love, and compassionate individuals. They resemble us greatly in the make of the body in general, and in that of the particular organs of circulation, respiration, digestion, &c.; also in the formation of their intellects, memories, and passions, and in the signs of distress, fear, pain, and death. They often, likewise, win our affections by the marks of peculiar sagacity, by their instincts, helplessness, innocence, nascent benevolence, &c., &c., and, if there be any “This, therefore, seems to be nothing else,” he concludes, “than an argument to stop us in our career, to make us sparing and tender in this article of diet, and put us upon consulting experience more faithfully and impartially in order to determine what is most suitable to the purposes of life and health, our compassion being made, by the foregoing considerations in some measure, a balance to our impetuous bodily appetites.” Dr. Hartley is not the only theologian who has suggested the possibility or probability of a future life for all or some of the non-human races. This question we must leave to the theologians. All that we here remark is, that Hartley is one of the very few amongst his brethren who have had the consistency and the courage of their opinions to deduce the inevitable inference. |
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