page_title: William Wollaston
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: William Wollaston / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Shenton Hall.
context_page_description: William Wollaston was a school teacher, Church of England priest, scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, theologian, and a major Enlightenment 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 of natural religion, he is ranked with British Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
  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 the United States Declaration of Independence.
context_section_description: Wollaston was born at Coton Clanford in Staffordshire, on 26 March 1659. He was born to a family long-established in Staffordshire, and was distantly related to Sir John Wollaston, the Alderman and Lord Mayor of London. However, his family was not wealthy. At the age of ten, he began school at a Latin school newly opened in Shenstone, Staffordshire, and continued in country free schools until he was admitted to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, at the age of 15, in June 1674. From his writings it is clear that he was an excellent scholar, "extremely well versed" in languages and literature.
  In his last year at Cambridge, Wollaston published anonymously a small book, On the Design of the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Unreasonableness of Men's Restless Contention for the Present Enjoyments, represented in an English Poem (London, 1691). Apparently embarrassed by his own work, Wollaston almost immediately suppressed it.
  After leaving Cambridge in September 1681, he became an assistant master at King Edward's School, Birmingham and took holy orders. At this time, he became Perpetual curate of St Mary's Church, Moseley from 1684 – 1686.
  In 1688 his cousin William Wollaston of Shenton left him a fortune and the family estates, including Finborough manor, Suffolk and the reversion of Shenton Hall, Leicestershire, 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 published The 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 completing The 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 to Great Finborough in Suffolk, where he was buried beside his wife.
caption: Shenton Hall, Leicestershire
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