William Wollaston

Who was William Wollaston?

William Wollaston was school teacher, a Church of England priest, a scholar of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, a theologian, and an major Enlightenment era English philosopher. He is remembered today for one book, which he completed only two years before his death: The Religion of Nature Delineated. Yet despite his cloistered life and his single book, due to his influence on eighteenth-century philosophy and his promotion of a Natural Religion, he may be considered one of the great British Enlightenment philosophers, along with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. His work contributed to the development of two important intellectual schools: British Deism, and "the pursuit of happiness" moral philosophy of American Practical Idealism. It appears notably in the Declaration of Independence.