A

David

Darling

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (1678–1751)

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke.

Henry Bolingbroke was an English Tory statesman who in his Philosophical Works, published posthumously in 1754, argued for the existence of "numberless worlds [which are] habitations of ten thousand millions of intellectual corporeal beings". He supported the notion of the great chain of being but suggested that the idea of advanced extraterrestrials being angels or demons had to be abandoned in favor of natural creatures "tempered in a finer clay, cast in nobler moulds, than the human ..."