Project. Thrice happy! could he ’scape their guile
Who mine, from cruel avarice, his steps:
Or with his towering grandeur swell their state—
The pride of kings!—or else his strength pervert,
And bid him rage amid the mortal fray,
Astonished at the madness of mankind.”[153]
XXII.
HARTLEY. 1705–1757.
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.