“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.”[154] 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. XXIII. CHESTERFIELD. 1694-1773. Notwithstanding his strange self-deception as to the “general order of nature,” by which he attempted (sincerely we presume) to silence the better promptings of conscience, the remarkably strong feeling expressed by Lord Chesterfield gives him some right to notice here. His early _instinctive_ aversion for the food which is the product of torture and murder is much better founded, we shall be apt to believe, than the fallacious sophism by which he seems eventually to have succeeded in stifling the voices of Nature and Reason in seeking refuge under the shelter of a superficial philosophy. At all events his example is a forcible illustration of Seneca’s observation that the better feelings of the young need only to be evoked by a proper education to conduct them to a true morality and religion.[155] As it is we have to lament that he had not the greater light (of science) of the present time, if, indeed, the “deceitfulness of riches” would not have been for him, as for the mass of the rich or fashionable world, the shipwreck of just and rational feeling. Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield, succeeded to the family title in 1726. High in favour with the new king--George II.--he received the appointment of Ambassador-extraordinary to the Court of Holland in 1728, and amongst other honours that of the knighthood of the Garter. In 1745 he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in which post, during his brief rule, he seemed to have governed with more success than some of his predecessors or successors. He was soon afterwards a Secretary of State: ill-health obliged him to relinquish this office after a short tenure. He wrote papers for _The World_--the popular periodical of the time--besides some poetical pieces, but he is chiefly known as an author by his celebrated _Letters to his Son_, which long served as the text-book of polite society. It contains some remarks in regard to the relations of the sexes scarcely consonant with the custom, or at least with the outward code of sexual morals of the present day. His sentiments upon the subject in question are as follow:--