Excerpt from The Ethics of William Wollaston

It has happened more than once in the history of thought that a really great and creative thinker has become the victim of a traditional interpretation, which soon became so thoroughly established that no further thought was given to his system. Instead of giving his thought the critical examination which it really deserved, each generation of thinkers and writers would simply pigeonhole it according to the traditional interpretation. I am very sure that this is just what has happened in the case of Wollaston. Even British writers on the history of ethical philosophy have, for the most part, said the traditional things about him, and that without verification as to the truth of the statements made. This may be explained by the fact that his book soon became rather rare. Very few British writers give any evidence of having read Wollaston at all carefully and those who did read his book seem to have stopped with the first two sections. We can be quite sure from internal evidence that many of his critics knew him only through secondary sources. Some attribute illustrations and even quotations to him that cannot be found in his work. Perhaps the most common of these fictitious illustrations is the one regarding a man breaking his wife's head, which is mentioned as authentic by even as great an authority on the Eighteenth Century as Leslie Stephen. "Thirty years' profound meditation had convinced Wollaston that the reason why a man should abstain from breaking his wife's head was, that it was a way of denying that she was his wife." The same can be said of the French as of the British writers in this respect.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.