Due to its influence on eighteenth-century philosophy and his promotion of a natural religion, the book claims for Wollaston a ranking as 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 United States Declaration of Independence.
Written by a Church of England clergyman, this positive attempt at new system of ethics logically reasoned from nature struck a chord with the intellectual public of the British Empire: more than 10,000 copies were sold in the just first few years alone.
Proponents of later schools of philosophy later criticised and sometimes even ridiculed Wollaston, including Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Richard Price, and Jeremy Bentham.
Though untutored outside of two years spent in the Boston Grammar school, it provoked him to write at age 19 the short pamphlet A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain.
But he quickly found it "so shallow and unconvincing as to be embarrassing",[7] and like Wollaston's own juvenile attempt in 1691 (a poetic discourse inspired by Ecclesiastes), he disavowed it and burned as many copies as he could find.
Though Franklin rejected Deism, saying "I began to suspect the doctrine, though it might be true, was not very useful",[8] he retained a fondness for Wollaston's "pursuit of happiness" natural religion in general, believing that God was best served by doing good works and helping other people.
He agreed that there was a tendency towards Deism in Wollastson's work, writing in his own Autobiography that "Wollaston's Religion of Nature, though well meant, was a great stumbling block to many and what he could never had done without the data in Scripture, though he seemed insensible of it.
Its focus on practice as well as speculation attracted a more mature Franklin, who commissioned and published Johnson's textbook Elementa Philosophica in 1752, then promoted it in the College of Philadelphia (now Penn University).