This book originated, in a strange way, at a particular moment in the late 1970s when a very practical, unphilosophical question was posed to me by someone whom I admired (and still do) very, very much. As I fumbled about for a dissertation topic (while studying at Columbia University in New York City) my professor and adviser Mary Mothersill asked, “Why not do something in the history of ethics?” I must have had grand delusions of solving the riddle of consciousness (or something) and she must have sensed, not that I might turn out to have some natural talent for writing about the history of moral philosophy but rather that the general subject might be relatively “easy” enough for me, given my slow-to-develop philosophical comprehension. Almost right away I discovered D. D. Raphael's two volume British Moralists 1650–1800 on the shelves of the seventh floor lounge of Philosophy Hall, and that, as they say, was that. Hobbes, Butler, Mandeville, Hutcheson – they were talking about real people, about questions people actually ask themselves concerning how to live, about real life, about you and me. I went on to write the dissertation about Shaftesbury and his rather curious notion of a natural affection and equally exceptional idea that the natural affections are somehow or other “the springs and sources of all actions truly good.” And now, so many years later, that essentially is what the present book is still about (though none of it is recycled, I assure you).