 Grean claims that Shaftesbury’s forms are “determined by the means of persuasion” more than argumentative rigor, which poses a challenge for interpretation (Grean 1967: xviii). Carey says, “we cannot look to his work for an argument structured by premises and logical deductions” (Carey 2006: 106). To complicate matters, Shaftesbury adopts different personae in different literary performances, and there are significant interpretative questions about the extent to which we ought to identify the views of Shaftesbury’s first-person narrators with Shaftesbury himself—especially when one persona explicitly distinguishes himself from another (C 2.263 and 3.12; see Marshall 1986; Prince 1996; Chaves 2008). In addition, some commentators take Shaftesbury’s works to be laced with self-distancing irony (Klein 1994: 96–99; Jaffro 2008). This diversity of forms, styles, tones, and personae makes it difficult to attribute to Shaftesbury a single philosophical system of thought. Shaftesbury himself wrote: “The most ingenious way of becoming foolish, is by a System” (C 1.290).