He led a cloistered life, but in terms of eighteenth-century philosophy and the concept of natural religion, he is ranked with British Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

Wollaston's work contributed to the development of two important intellectual schools: British Deism, and "the pursuit of happiness" moral philosophy of American Practical Idealism, a phrase which appears in the United States Declaration of Independence.

[2] He was born to a family long-established in Staffordshire, and was distantly related to Sir John Wollaston, the Alderman and Lord Mayor of London.

[citation needed] After leaving Cambridge in September 1681, he became an assistant master at King Edward's School, Birmingham and took holy orders.

There Wollaston devoted himself to private study of learning and philosophy, seldom leaving the city and declining to accept any public employment.

He wrote extensively on language, philosophy, religion, and history, but in the last few years of his life, he committed most of his manuscripts to the flames, as his health worsened and he began to feel that he would never be able to complete them to his satisfaction.

Benjamin Franklin worked as a compositor on one of the 1726 editions of the book and wrote the short pamphlet A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain in response.

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).