Letters sent to his parents reveal emotional manipulation attempted by his mother in refusing to see her son unless he cut off all ties to his sickly and secluded father.

At the age of three Ashley-Cooper was made over to the formal guardianship of his grandfather Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury.

It was conducted according to the principles of Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), and the method of teaching Latin and Greek conversationally was pursued by his instructress, Elizabeth Birch.

Under a Scottish tutor, Daniel Denoune, he began a continental tour with two older companions, Sir John Cropley, 2nd Baronet, and Thomas Sclater Bacon.

[1] The following year, to escape the London environment, he purchased a property in Little Chelsea,[3] adding a 50-foot extension to the existing building to house his bedchamber and Library, and planting fruit trees and vines.

He continued to take an interest in politics, both home and foreign, and supported England's participation in the War of the Spanish Succession.

[5] The declining state of Shaftesbury's health rendered it necessary for him to seek a warmer climate and in July 1711 he set out for Italy.

Other friends among English Whigs were Charles Davenant, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, Walter Moyle, William Stephens and John Trenchard.

[3] From Locke's circle in England, Shaftesbury knew Edward Clarke, Damaris Masham and Walter Yonge.

[7] His starting point in the Characteristicks, however, was indeed such a form of ethical naturalism as was common ground for Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville and Spinoza: appeal to self-interest.

In man, he wrote, "Whoever is in the least versed in this moral kind of architecture will find the inward fabric so adjusted, [...] that the barely extending of a single passion too far or the continuance [...] of it too long, is able to bring irrecoverable ruin and misery".

[19]This version of a golden mean doctrine that goes back to Aristotle was savaged by Mandeville, who slurred it as associated with a sheltered and comfortable life, Catholic asceticism, and modern sentimental rusticity.

Around this time John Leland and Philip Skelton stepped up a campaign against deist influence, tarnishing Shaftesbury's reputation.

[27] While Shaftesbury wrote on ridicule in the 1712 edition of Characteristicks, the modern scholarly consensus is that the uses of his views on it as a "test of truth" were a stretch.

[28] According to Alfred Owen Aldridge, the "test of truth" phrase is not to be found in Characteristicks; it was imposed on the Augustan debate by George Berkeley.

[29] The influence of Shaftesbury, and in particular The Moralists, on An Essay on Man, was claimed in the 18th century by Voltaire (in his philosophical letter "On Pope"),[30] Lord Hervey and Thomas Warton, and supported in recent times, for example by Maynard Mack.

[32] From there it was taken up by Adam Smith, who elaborated a theory of moral judgement with some restricted emotional input, and a complex apparatus taking context into account.

[34] Samuel Johnson, the American educator, did not accept Shaftesbury's moral sense as a given, but believed it might be available by intermittent divine intervention.

An early example in Mary Collyer's Felicia to Charlotte (vol.1, 1744) comes from its hero Lucius, who reasons in line with An Enquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit on the "moral sense".

[36] The second volume (1749) has discussions of conduct book material, and makes use of the Philemon to Hydaspes (1737) of Henry Coventry, described by Aldridge as "filled with favorable references to Shaftesbury.

"[37][38] The eponymous hero of The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753) by Samuel Richardson has been described as embodying the "Shaftesburian model" of masculinity: he is "stoic, rational, in control, yet sympathetic towards others, particularly those less fortunate.

"[39] A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) by Laurence Sterne was intended by its author to evoke the "sympathizing principle" on which the tradition founded by latitudinarians, Cambridge Platonists and Shaftesbury relied.

[40] In 1745 Denis Diderot adapted or reproduced the Inquiry concerning Virtue in what was afterwards known as his Essai sur le Mérite et la Vertu.

Hermann Theodor Hettner stated that not only Leibniz, Voltaire and Diderot, but Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Gottfried von Herder, drew from Shaftesbury.

[41] Wilhelm von Humboldt found in Shaftesbury the "inward form" concept, key for education in the approach of German classical philosophy.