right|upright|thumb|1739 portrait of Abraham Tucker by [[Enoch Seeman]]
Abraham Tucker (2 September 1705 – 20 November 1774) was an English country gentleman, who devoted himself to the study of philosophy. He wrote The Light of Nature Pursued (1768–1777) under the name of Edward Search.
Biography
Tucker was born in London of a Somerset family, the son of a wealthy city merchant. His parents died during his infancy, and he was brought up by his uncle, Sir Isaac Tillard. In 1721, he entered Merton College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, and studied philosophy, mathematics, French, Italian and music. He afterwards studied laws at the Inner Temple, but was never called to the bar.
In 1727 he bought Betchworth Castle, near Dorking, where he passed the remainder of his life. On his wife's death in 1754, Tucker occupied himself in collecting together all the letters that had passed between them, which, we are told, he transcribed twice over under the title of "The Picture of Artless Love."
He then concentrated on his major work, The Light of Nature Pursued, of which in 1763 he published a specimen under the title of Free Will, Foreknowledge, and Fate, by "Edward Search". The strictures of a critic in the Monthly Review of July 1763 drew from him a pamphlet called Man in Quest of Himself, by "Cuthbert Comment" (reprinted in Samuel Parr's Metaphysical Tracts, 1837), "a defence of the individuality of the human mind or self." In 1768 the first two volumes of his work were published. The remaining volume appeared posthumously. His eyesight failed him completely in 1771, but he contrived an apparatus which enabled him to write legibly enough that the result could be transcribed by his daughter. The final volume was ready for publication when he died. His work contains many psychological and more strictly metaphysical discussions, but it is chiefly in connexion with ethics that Tucker's speculations are best remembered. In important points he anticipated the utilitarianism of William Paley, who expressed obligations to his predecessor. "Every man's own satisfaction" Tucker held to be the ultimate end of action; and satisfaction or pleasure is one and the same in kind, however much it may vary in degree. This universal motive is further connected, as by Paley, through the will of God, with the "general good, the root where out all our rules of conduct and sentiments of honour are to branch."