views on this subject, or of Lord Shaftesbury's contrary doctrine of a
"moral sense," is not suited to your columns; and I only wish to say
that I think Mr. Singer has not made it sufficiently clear that Lord
Shaftesbury's remarks apply only to the speculative consequences,
according to his own view, of a denial of innate ideas; and that Lord
Shaftesbury, in another passage of the same Letters, renders the
following tribute of praise to the _Essay on the Human Understanding_:--

"I am not sorry that I lent you Mr. Locke's _Essay on the Human
Understanding_, which may as well qualify for business and the
world as for the sciences and a University. No one has done more
towards the recalling of philosophy from barbarity into use and
practice of the world, and into the company of the better and
politer sort, who might well be ashamed of it in its other
dress. No one has opened a better or clearer way to reasoning;
and, above all, I wonder to hear him censured so much by any
Church of England men, for advancing reason and bringing the use
of it so much into religion, when it is by this only that we
fight against the enthusiasts and repel the great enemies of our
Church."

A life of the author of the _Characteristics_ is hardly less a
desideratum than that of his grandfather, the Lord Chancellor, and would
make an interesting work, written in connection with the politics as
well as literature of the reigns of William and Anne; for the third Lord
Shaftesbury, though prevented by ill-health from undertaking office or
regularly attending parliament, took always a lively interest in
politics. An interesting collection of the third earl's letters has been
published by Mr. Foster (_Letters of Locke, Algernon Sidney, and the
Earl of Shaftesbury_), and a few letters from him to Locke are in Lord