The notebooks

An Inquiry Concerning Virtue had certainly been completed by 1698, a year marking a rupture in Shaftesbury's life. Elected to the Commons in 1695, he was in the process of making a public name for himself. However, he refused to stand in the elections of 1698 in order to adopt a life of an entirely new character. Instead of actively participating in public matters, assiduously managing the affairs of his family, and otherwise enjoying the social and intellectual life in Town and Country which accompanied his status, he went to Holland where he pursued a studious retirement. The reversal was abrupt, entire and striking. If it suggests the operations of a complicated personality, the suggestion is confirmed in the personal notebooks that he began keeping when he arrived on the Continent in 1698.

“Natural Affection” was the heading under which Shaftesbury commenced his reflections at Rotterdam in August 1698. From the start, he reiterated commitments familiar from the Inquiry, the affective basis for human action; an ideal of human moral autarky; a conception of beneficent cosmic order. He defined natural affection as “not that wch is only towards Relations; but towards all Mankind,” a universal, caring but disinterested love, informed by a wise acceptance of the overall design of nature. However, having written this, he went on to ask: “When shall this happy Disposition be fix'd, that I may feel it perpetually, as now but seldome? When shall I be intirely thus affected, & feel this as my Part grown naturall to me?” Not only did he experience natural affection only occasionally and partially, but he found reason to doubt the very naturalness of the natural affections.