Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 4. Deism. Virtue and Religion. Culture as a Means of Developing Character. Philosophy as the Problem of Daily Life Although condemned by contemporaries and successors as an unbeliever, Shaftesbury was nevertheless filled with a profound religious feeling. The question now comes up as to his relation to the movement of so-called deism. There is a great variety of opinion on this question. Thus, Alfred Biese, in his "Deutsche Literaturgeschichte,"41 considers Shaftesbury only as the leading propagator of the doctrines of deism. Hermann Hettner, on the other hand, considers A. Collins, W. Lyons and J. Toland as the leading deists and discusses Shaftesbury under a different head.42 Diderot strongly objects to classing Shaftesbury with the Asgils, Tindals, and Tolands, to whom he refers as " mauvais protestants et miserables ecrivains."48 T. Fowler calls Shaftesbury "a deist of the right, who was fully as much occupied in presenting the positive as the negative parts of his doctrine, the latter being rather insinuated than openly avowed."44 A. Wolf stieg, in his article " Englischer und franzosischer Deismus und deutsche Aufklarung," examines the English movement chiefly from its negative side and characterizes it as consisting of " shallow rationalism," " short sighted naturalism " and " gross free-thinking." He considers Shaftesbury as a prophet of the movement, as the one who directed the movement into the right channel.45 We may consider Shaftesbury as a deist, if we accept G. V. Lechler's definition of deism as " an elevation, by means of free investigation, of natural religion to the standard of positive religion."46 Certain it is that Shaftesbury represented the very best side of the movement, which had good and bad elements; for, whilehe was strongly opposed to theological s...