The Religion of Nature Delineated

The Religion of Nature Delineated was a book by Anglican cleric William Wollaston that attempted to create a system of ethics without recourse to revealed religion. It was first published in 1722 two years before Wollaston's death. Due to its influence on eighteenth-century philosophy and his promotion of a Natural Religion, the book lays claim to Wollaston being one of the great British Enlightenment philosophers, along with John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. It contributed to the development of two important intellectual schools: British Deism, and the pursuit of happiness moral philosophy of American Practical Idealism which appears in the Declaration of Independence.

Wollaston claimed originality for his theory that the moral evil is the practical denial of a true proposition and moral good the affirmation of it, writing that this attempt to use mathematics to create a rationalist ethics was "something never met with anywhere". Wollaston "held that religious truths were plain as Euclid, clear to all who contemplated Creation." 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.

Wollaston begins his book with the proposition of three questions:

I. Is there really any such thing as natural religion, properly and truly so called?

II. If there is, what is it?

III. How may a man qualify himself, so as to be able to judge, for himself, of the other religions profest in the world; to settle his own opinions in disputable matters; and then to enjoy tranquillity of mind, neither disturbing others, nor being disturbed at what passes among them?

Wollaston defines truth thus: "propositions are true which express things as they are." His assumption is that religion and morality are identical. His most famous and often-quoted sentence defines his answers to the questions quoted:

And so at last natural religion is grounded upon this triple and strict alliance or union of truth, happiness and reason' all in the same interest and conspiring by the same methods to advance and perfect human nature and its truest definition is, The pursuit of happiness by the practice of reason and truth.

...
Wikipedia