The influence of an advancing study of nature, which was stimulated if not guided by Bacon's writings, is seen in the more careful doctrines of materialism worked out almost simultaneously by Hobbes and Gassendi.
He was educated at the Malmesbury grammar school under Robert Latimer, who had numbered Thomas Hobbes among his earlier pupils, and at his schoolmaster's house Aubrey first met the philosopher about whom he was to leave so many curious and interesting details.
By this principle Ferguson endeavours to reconcile all moral systems. With Hobbes and Hume he admits the power of self-interest or utility, and makes it enter into morals as the law of self-preservation.
From these results we see that Shaftesbury, opposed to Hobbes and Locke, is in close agreement with Hutcheson, and that he is ultimately a deeply religious thinker, inasmuch as he discards the moral sanction of public opinion, the terrors of future punishment, the authority' of the civil authority, as the main incentives to goodness, and substitutes the voice of conscience and the love of God.
It is the kernel of the theories of Hobbes, Rousseau, Filmer and Locke.
