His first publication, however, dealt with a question of philosophical method suggested by the reading of Hutcheson.
The most eminent of these were the two brothers John and Charles Wesley, John Byrom the poet, George Cheyne the physician and Archibald Hutcheson, M.P. for Hastings.
Hutcheson's theory of universal benevolence and Smith's idea of sympathy he combines under the law of society.
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.
His ethical system was reproduced, though in a more precise and philosophical form, by Hutcheson, and from him descended, with certain variations, to Hume and Adam Smith.