William Wollaston
Born	26 March 1659 Coton-Clanford,Staffordshire, England
Died	29 October 1724(1724-10-29) (aged 65) London, England
Philosophical work
Era	18th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Enlightenment Rationalism
Main interests	Ethics,philosophy of religion
Notable ideas	Religion derived from adherence to truth[1]

William Wollaston (/ˈwʊləstən/; 26 March 1659 – 29 October 1724) was an English school teacher,Church of England priest, scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, theologian, and a majorEnlightenment era English philosopher. He is remembered today for one book, which he completed two years before his death:The Religion of Nature Delineated. He led a cloistered life, but in terms of eighteenth-century philosophy and the concept ofnatural religion, he is ranked with British Enlightenment philosophers such asLocke,Berkeley, andHume.

Wollaston's work contributed to the development of two important intellectual schools: British Deism, and "the pursuit of happiness" moral philosophy of American Practical Idealism, a phrase which appears in theUnited States Declaration of Independence.

Wollaston was born atCoton Clanford in Staffordshire, on 26 March 1659.^[2] He was born to a family long-established in Staffordshire, and was distantly related toSir John Wollaston, the Alderman andLord Mayor of London.^[3] However, his family was not wealthy. At the age of ten, he began school at a Latin school newly opened inShenstone, Staffordshire, and continued in country free schools until he was admitted toSidney Sussex College, Cambridge, at the age of 15, in June 1674.^[4] From his writings it is clear that he was an excellent scholar, "extremely well versed" in languages and literature.^[5]

In his last year at Cambridge, Wollaston published anonymously a small book,On the Design of theBook of Ecclesiastes, or the Unreasonableness of Men's Restless Contention for the Present Enjoyments, represented in an English Poem (London, 1691).^[2] Apparently embarrassed by his own work, Wollaston almost immediately suppressed it.^{[citation needed]}

After leaving Cambridge in September 1681, he became an assistant master atKing Edward's School, Birmingham and took holy orders. At this time, he becamePerpetual curate ofSt Mary's Church, Moseley from 1684 – 1686.

In 1688 his cousin William Wollaston of Shenton left him a fortune and the family estates, includingFinborough manor, Suffolk and thereversion ofShenton Hall, Leicestershire,^[6][7] and in November of the same year he settled in London. There Wollaston devoted himself to private study of learning and philosophy, seldom leaving the city and declining to accept any public employment. In retirement, he publishedThe Religion of Nature Delineated (1722) in a private edition. He wrote extensively on language, philosophy, religion, and history, but in the last few years of his life, he committed most of his manuscripts to the flames, as his health worsened and he began to feel that he would never be able to complete them to his satisfaction.

Wollaston suffered from fragile health throughout his life. Just after completingThe Religion of Nature Delineated, he broke his arm in an accident, and his strength declined and illnesses increased until his death on 29 October 1724. His body was carried toGreat Finborough in Suffolk, where he was buried beside his wife.

TheReligion of Nature Delineated was an attempt to create a system ofethics without recourse to revealed religion. He claimed originality for his theory that the moral evil is the practical denial of a true proposition and moral good the affirmation of it,^[2] writing that this attempt to usemathematics to create arationalist ethics was "something never met with anywhere". Wollaston "held that religious truths were plain asEuclid, clear to all who contemplated Creation."^[1] Newton had induced natural laws from a mathematical model of the physical world; similarly, Wollaston was attempting to induce moral laws by a mathematical model of the moral world.

More than 10,000 copies were sold in the just first few years alone^[1] with 15 imprints prior to 1800.^[8] A biography of the author was added to the 8th edition in 1750.^[2]

Wollaston's idea of aNatural religion without revelation briefly inspired and revived the movement known asDeism in England. Some today consider him a "Christian Deist",^[9] while others note that there is no "significant evidence that William Wollaston was not a more or less orthodox Christian."^[10]

Although Wollaston's ideas could be argued to have anticipated bothScottish Common Sense Realism^[11] andUtilitarianism^[12] proponents of later schools of philosophy criticised and sometimes even ridiculed Wollaston. These includedFrancis Hutcheson,David Hume,Richard Price, andJeremy Bentham.^[13]

After 1759 no further edition of his work was published in the rest of the century.

Benjamin Franklin worked as a compositor on one of the 1726 editions of the book and wrote the short pamphletA Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain in response. Later, however, he found his pamphlet "so shallow and unconvincing as to be embarrassing",^[14] and burned as many copies as he could find. Although rejecting Deism,^[15] he retained a fondness for the "pursuit of happiness", believing that God was best served by doing good works and helping other people.

It was a major influence on the American educatorRev. Dr. Samuel Johnson's college philosophy textbooks. Its focus on practice as well as speculation attracted a more mature Franklin, who commissioned and published Johnson's textbookElementa Philosophica in 1752, then promoted it in the College of Philadelphia (nowPenn University).^[16]

On 26 November 1689, Wollaston married Catharine Charlton (died 21 July 1720). They had eleven children together, four of whom died within his lifetime. They included:

• Charlton, the eldest son, died unmarried in 1729^[17]
• William, Member of Parliament for Ipswich^[17]
• Francis (1694–1774) FRS, third son^[18]
• John, fifth son, died 1720.^[19]

• John Nichols,Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (1817) p. 833
• John Clarke (1750): A Prefacecontaining A General Account of the Life, Character, and Writings of theAuthor, from the 1750 edition ofThe Religion of Nature Delineated.

EnglishWikisource has original works by or about:

William Wollaston

• Works by William Wollaston in eBook form atStandard Ebooks
• Portraits of William Wollaston at theNational Portrait Gallery, London

Attribution:

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Wollaston, William".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 776.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Stephen, Leslie (1900). "Wollaston, William (1660-1724)". InLee, Sidney (ed.).Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 62. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

• 1659 births
• 1724 deaths
• Alumni of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
• 17th-century English philosophers
• English philosophers of religion
• People from the Borough of Stafford
• Schoolteachers from Staffordshire
• Writers from Staffordshire
• 18th-century English philosophers

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