XXX.
HAWKESWORTH. 1715–1773.
BEST known as the editor of The Adventurer—a periodical in imitation of the Spectator, Rambler, &c.—which appeared twice a week during the years 1752–54. Johnson, Warton, and others assisted him in this undertaking, which has the honour of being one of the first periodicals which have ventured to denounce the cruel barbarism of “Sport,” and the papers by Hawkesworth upon that subject are in striking contrast with the usual tone and practice of his contemporaries and, indeed, of our own times.
In 1761 he published an edition of Swift’s writings, with a life which received the praise of Samuel Johnson (in his Lives of the Poets), and it is a passage in that book which entitles him to a place here. In 1773 he was entrusted by the Government of the day with the task of compiling a history of the recent voyages of Captain Cook. He also translated the Aventures de Télémaque of Fénélon. The coarseness and repulsiveness of the dishes of the common diet seldom have been stigmatised with greater force than by Dr. Hawkesworth. His expressions of abhorrence are conceived quite in the spirit of Plutarch:—
“Among other dreadful and disgusting images which Custom has rendered familiar, are those which arise from eating animal food. He who has ever turned with abhorrence from the skeleton of a beast which has been picked whole by birds or vermin, must confess that habit alone could have enabled him to endure the sight of the mangled bones and flesh of a dead carcase which every day cover his table. And he who reflects on the number of lives that have been sacrificed to sustain his own, should enquire by what the account has been balanced, and whether his life is become proportionately of more value by the exercise of virtue and by the superior happiness which he has communicated to [more] reasonable beings.”[186]
XXXI.
PALEY. 1743–1805.
WITH the exception of Joseph Butler, perhaps the ablest and most interesting of English orthodox theologians. As one of the very few of this numerous class of writers who seem seriously to be impressed with the difficulty of reconciling orthodox dietetics with the higher moral and religious instincts, Paley has for social reformers a title to remembrance, and it is as a moral philosopher that he has a claim upon our attention.
The son of a country curate, Paley began his career as tutor in an academy in Greenwich. He had entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, as “sizar.” Being senior wrangler of his year, he was afterwards elected a Fellow of his college. His lectures on moral philosophy at the University contained the germs of his most useful writing. After the usual previous stages, finally he received the preferment of the Archdeaconry of Carlisle. The failure of the most eminent of the modern apologists of dogmatic Christianity to attain the highest rewards of ecclesiastical ambition, and the refusal of George III. to promote “pigeon” Paley when it was proposed to that reactionary prince to make so skilful a controversialist a bishop—a refusal founded on the famous apology for monarchy in the Moral and Political Philosophy—is well known.
The most important, by far, of his writings, is the Elements of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785). He founds moral obligation upon principles of utility. In politics he asserts the grounds of the duties of rulers and ruled to be based upon the same far-reaching consideration, and upon this principle he maintains that as soon as any Government has proved itself corrupt or negligent of the public good, whatever may have been the alleged legitimacy of its original authority, the right of the governed to put an end to it is established. “The final view of all national politics,” he affirms, “is [ought to be] to produce the greatest quantity of happiness.” The comparative boldness, indeed, of certain of his disquisitions on Government alarmed not a little the political and ecclesiastical dignitaries of the time. His adhesion to the programme of Clarkson and the anti-slavery “fanatics” (as that numerically insignificant band of reformers was styled) did not tend, it may be presumed, to counteract the damaging effects of his political philosophy.
In his Natural Theology (1802), his best theological production, he labours to establish the fact of benevolent design from observation of the various phenomena of nature and life. Whatever estimate may be formed of the success of this undertaking, there can be no question of the ability and eloquence of the accomplished pleader; and the book proves him, at least, to have acquired a surprising amount of physiological and anatomical knowledge. It is justly described by Sir J. Mackintosh as “the wonderful work of a man who, after sixty, had studied anatomy in order to write it.” Of the Evidences (1790–94)—the most popularly known of his writings—the considerable literary merit is in somewhat striking contrast, in regard to clearness and simplicity of style, with the ordinary productions of the evidential school.