 Shaftesbury’s belief in the fundamentally “self-improving” (C 2.427) purpose of philosophy leads him to criticize the turgid, analytic methods of the Scholastics and of modern thinkers such as Descartes and Locke (Schneewind 1998: 307 and Rivers 2000a: 87). As one of his characters puts it, philosophy must be rescued from its imprisonment in “Colleges and Cells” where it has been immured by “Empiricks, and pedantick Sophists” (C 2.184). To achieve its proper goals, philosophy needs to assume guises very different from the dry, unmoving texts of Shaftesbury’s predecessors.