Part 1 (1/2)

Benjamin Franklin.

by Frank Luther Mott and Chester E. Jorgenson.

PREFACE

Benjamin Franklin's reputation in America has been singularly distorted by the neglect of his works other than his _Autobiography_ and his most utilitarian aphorisms. If America has contented herself with appraising him as ”the earliest incarnation of 'David Harum,'” as ”the first high-priest of the religion of efficiency,” as ”the first Rotarian,” it may be that this aspect of Franklin is all that an America plagued by growing pains, by peopling and mechanizing three thousand miles of frontier, has been able to see. That facet of Franklin's mind and mien which allowed Carlyle to describe him as ”the Father of all Yankees” was appreciated by Sinclair Lewis's George F.

Babbitt: ”Once in a while I just naturally sit back and size up this Solid American Citizen, with a whale of a lot of satisfaction.” But this is not the Franklin of ”imperturbable common-sense” honored by Matthew Arnold as ”the very incarnation of sanity and clear-sense, a man the most considerable ... whom America has yet produced.” Nor is this the Franklin who emerges from his collected works (and the opinions of his notable contemporaries) as an economist, political theorist, educator, journalist, scientific deist, and disinterested scientist. If he wrote little that is narrowly belles-lettres, he need not be ashamed of his voluminous correspondence, in an age which saw the fruition of the epistolary art. The Franklin found in his collected and uncollected writings is, as the following Introduction may suggest, not the Franklin who too commonly is synchronized exclusively with the wisdom and wit of _Poor Richard_.

Since the present interpretation of the growth of Franklin's mind, with stress upon its essential unity in the light of scientific deism, tempered by his debt to Puritanism, cla.s.sicism, and neocla.s.sicism, may seem somewhat novel, the editors have felt it desirable to doc.u.ment their interpretation with considerable fullness. It is hoped that the reader will withhold judgment as to the validity of this interpretation until the doc.u.mentary evidence has been fully considered in its genetic significance, and that he will feel able to incline to other interpretations only in proportion as they can be equally supported by other evidence. The present interpretation is also supported by the Selections following--the fullest collection hitherto available in one volume--which offer, the editors believe, the essential materials for a reasonable acquaintance with the growth of Franklin's mind, from youth to old age, in its comprehensive interests--educational, literary, journalistic, economic, political, scientific, humanitarian, and religious.

With the exception of the selections from the _Autobiography_, the works are arranged in approximate chronological order, hence inviting a necessarily genetic study of Franklin's mind. The _Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_, never before printed in an edition of Franklin's works or in a book of selections, is here printed from the London edition of 1725, retaining his peculiarities of italics, capitalization, and punctuation. Attention is also drawn to the photographically reproduced complete text of _Poor Richard Improved_ (1753), graciously furnished by Mr. William Smith Mason. _The Way to Wealth_ is from an exact reprint made by Mr. Mason, and with his permission here reproduced. One of the editors is grateful for the privilege of consulting Mr. Mason's magnificent collection of Franklin correspondence (original MSS), especially the Franklin-Galloway and Franklin-Jonathan s.h.i.+pley (Bishop of St. Asaph) unpublished correspondence. With Mr. Mason's generous permission the editors reproduce fragments of this correspondence in the Introduction.

The bulk of the selections have been printed from the latest, standard edition, _The Writings of Benjamin Franklin_, collected and edited with a Life and Introduction by Albert Henry Smyth (10 vols., 1905-1907). For permission to use this material the editors are grateful to The Macmillan Company, publishers. The editors are indebted to Dr. Max Farrand, Director of the Henry E. Huntington Library, for permission to reprint part of Franklin's MS version of the _Autobiography_.

Chester E. Jorgenson is preparing an a.n.a.lysis and interpretation of Franklin's brand of scientific deism, its sources and relation to his economic, political, and literary theories and practice. Fragments of this projected study are included, especially in Section VII of the following Introduction. For the past two years Mr. Jorgenson has enjoyed the kindness and generosity of Mr. William Smith Mason, and has incurred an indebtedness which cannot be expressed adequately in print.

The work of the editors has been vastly eased by Beata Prochnow Jorgenson's a.s.sistance in typing, proofreading, et cetera. They are extremely grateful to Professor Harry Hayden Clark for incisive suggestions and valuable editorial a.s.sistance.

F. L. M.

C. E. J.

INTRODUCTION

I. FRANKLIN'S MILIEU: THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Benjamin Franklin's reputation, according to John Adams, ”was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them.”[i-1]

The historical critic recognizes increasingly that Adams was not thinking idly when he doubted whether Franklin's panegyrical and international reputation could ever be explained without doing ”a complete history of the philosophy and politics of the eighteenth century.” Adams conceived that an explication of Franklin's mind and activities integrated with the thought patterns of the epoch which fathered him ”would be one of the most important that ever was written; much more interesting to this and future ages than the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'” And such a historical and critical colossus is still among the works hoped for but yet unborn. Too often, even in the scholarly mind, Franklin has become a symbol, and it may be confessed, not a winged one, of the self-made man, of New-World practicality, of the successful tradesman, of the Sage of _Poor Richard_ with his penny-saving economy and frugality. In short, the Franklin legend fails to transcend an allegory of the success of the _doer_ in an America allegedly materialistic, uncreative, and unimaginative.

It is the purpose of this essay to show that Franklin, the American Voltaire,--always reasonable if not intuitive, encyclopedic if not sublimely profound, humane if not saintly,--is best explained with reference to the Age of Enlightenment, of which he was the completest colonial representative. Due attention will, however, be paid to other factors. And therefore it is necessary to begin with a brief survey of the pattern of ideas of the age to which he was responsive. Not without reason does one critic name him as ”the most complete representative of his century that any nation can point to.”[i-2]

When Voltaire, ”the patriarch of the _philosophes_,” in 1726 took refuge in England, he at once discovered minds and an att.i.tude toward human experience which were to prove the seminal factors of the Age of Enlightenment. He found that Englishmen had acclaimed Bacon ”the father of experimental philosophy,” and that Newton, ”the destroyer of the Cartesian system,” was ”as the Hercules of fabulous story, to whom the ignorant ascribed all the feats of ancient heroes.” Voltaire then paused to praise Locke, who ”destroyed innate ideas,” Locke, than whom ”no man ever had a more judicious or more methodical genius, or was a more acute logician.” Bacon, Newton, and Locke brooded over the currents of eighteenth-century thought and were formative factors of much that is most characteristic of the Enlightenment.

To Bacon was given the honor of having distinguished between the fantasies of old wives' tales and the certainty of empiricism. Moved by the ghost of Bacon, the Royal Society had for its purpose, according to Hooke, ”To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engynes and Inventions by Experiments.”[i-3] The zeal for experiment was equaled only by its miscellaneousness. Cheese making, the eclipses of comets, and the intestines of gnats were alike the objects of telescopic or microscopic scrutiny. The full implication of Baconian empiricism came to fruition in Newton, who in 1672 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Bacon was not the least of those giants upon whose shoulders Newton stood. To the experimental tradition of Kepler, Brahe, Harvey, Copernicus, Galileo, and Bacon, Newton joined the mathematical genius of Descartes; and as a result became ”as thoroughgoing an empiricist as he was a consummate mathematician,” for whom there was ”no _a priori_ certainty.”[i-4] At this time it is enough to note of Newtonianism, that for the incomparable physicist ”science was composed of laws stating the mathematical behaviour of nature solely--laws clearly deducible from phenomena and exactly verifiable in phenomena--everything further is to be swept out of science, which thus becomes a body of absolutely certain truth about the doings of the physical world.”[i-5] The pattern of ideas known as Newtonianism may be summarized as embracing a belief in (1) a universe governed by immutable natural laws, (2) which laws const.i.tute a sublimely harmonious system, (3) reflecting a benevolent and all-wise Geometrician; (4) thus man desires to effect a correspondingly harmonious inner heaven; (5) and feels a.s.sured of the plausibility of an immortal life. Newton was a believer in scriptural revelation. It is ironical that through his cosmological system, mathematically demonstrable, he lent reinforcement to deism, the most destructive intellectual solvent of the authority of the altar.

Deists, as defined by their contemporary, Ephraim Chambers (in his _Cyclopaedia ..._, London, 1728), are those ”whose distinguis.h.i.+ng character it is, not to profess any particular form, or system of religion; but only to acknowledge the existence of a G.o.d, without rendering him any external wors.h.i.+p, or service. The Deists hold, that, considering the multiplicity of religions, the numerous pretences to revelation, and the precarious arguments generally advanced in proof thereof; the best and surest way is, to return to the simplicity of nature, and the belief of one G.o.d, which is the only truth agreed to by all nations.” They ”reject all revelations as an imposition, and believe no more than what natural light discovers to them....”[i-6] The ”simplicity of nature” signifies ”the established order, and course of natural things; the series of second causes; or the laws which G.o.d has imposed on the motions impressed by him.”[i-7] And attraction, a kind of _conatus accedendi_, is the crown, according to the eighteenth century, of the series of secondary causes. Hence, Newtonian physics became the surest ally of the deist in his quest for a religion, immutable and universal. The Newtonian progeny were legion: among them were Boyle, Keill, Desaguliers, Shaftesbury, Locke, Samuel Clarke, 'sGravesande, Boerhaave, Diderot, Trenchard and Gordon, Voltaire, Gregory, Maclaurin, Pemberton, and others. The eighteenth century echoed Fontenelle's eulogy that Newtonianism was ”sublime geometry.” If, as Boyle wrote, mathematical and mechanical principles were ”the alphabet, in which G.o.d wrote the world,” Newtonian science and empiricism were the lexicons which the deists used to read the cosmic volume in which the universal laws were inscribed. And the deists and the liberal political theorists ”found the fulcrum for subverting existing inst.i.tutions and standards only in the laws of nature, discovered, as they supposed, by mathematicians and astronomers.”[i-8]

Complementary to Newtonian science was the sensationalism of John Locke.

Conceiving the mind as _tabula rasa_, discrediting innate ideas, Lockian psychology undermined such a theological dogma as total depravity--man's innate and inveterate malevolence--and hence was itself a kind of _tabula rasa_ on which later were written the optimistic opinions of those who credited man's capacity for altruism. If it remained for the French _philosophes_ to deify Reason, Locke honored it as the crowning experience of his sensational psychology.[i-9] Then, too, as Miss Lois Whitney has ably demonstrated, Lockian psychology ”cleared the ground for either primitivism or a theory of progress.”[i-10] In addition, his social compact theory, augmenting seventeenth-century liberalism, furnished the political theorists of the Enlightenment with ”the principle of Consent”[i-11] in their antipathy for monarchial obscurantism. Locke has been described as the ”originator of a psychology which provided democratic government with a scientific basis.”[i-12] The full impact of Locke will be felt when philosophers deduce that if sensations and reflections are the product of outward stimuli--those of nature, society, and inst.i.tutions--then to reform man one needs only to reform society and inst.i.tutions, or remove to some tropical isle. We remember that the French Encyclopedists, for example, were motivated by their faith in the ”indefinite malleability of human nature by education and inst.i.tutions.”[i-13]

”With the possible exception of John Locke,” C. A. Moore observes, ”Shaftesbury was more generally known in the mid-century than any other English philosopher.”[i-14] Shaftesbury's a priori ”virtuoso theory of benevolence” may be viewed as complementary to Locke's psychology to the extent that both have within them the implication that through education and reform man may become perfectible. Both tend to undermine social, political, and religious authoritarianism. Shaftesbury's insistence upon man's innate altruism and compa.s.sion, coupled with the deistic and rationalistic divorce between theology and morality, resulted in the dogma that the most acceptable service to G.o.d is expressed in kindness to G.o.d's other children and helped to motivate the rise of humanitarianism.

The idea of progress[i-15] was popularized (if not born) in the eighteenth century. It has been recently shown that not only the results of scientific investigations but also Anglican defenses of revealed religion served to accelerate a belief in progress. In answer to the atheists and deists who indicted revealed religion because revelation was given so late in the growth of the human family and hence was not eternal, universal, and immutable, the Anglican apologists were forced into the position of a.s.serting that man enjoyed a progressive ascent, that the religious education of mankind is like that of the individual. If, as the deists charged, Christ appeared rather belatedly, the apologists countered that he was sent only when the race was prepared to profit by his coming. G.o.d's revelations thus were adjusted to progressive needs and capacities.[i-16]

Carl Becker has suggestively dissected the Enlightenment in a series of ant.i.theses between its credulity and its skepticism. If the eighteenth-century philosopher renounced Eden, he discovered Arcadia in distant isles and America. Rejecting the authority of the Bible and church, he accepted the authority of ”nature,” natural law, and reason.

Although scorning metaphysics, he desired to be considered philosophical. If he denied miracles, he yet had a fond faith in the perfectibility of the species.[i-17]

Even as Voltaire had his liberal tendencies stoutly reinforced by contact with English rationalism and deism,[i-18] so were the other French _philosophes_, united in their common hatred of the Roman Catholic church, also united in their indebtedness to exponents of English liberalism, dominated by Locke and Newton. If, as Madame de Lambert wrote in 1715, Bayle more than others of his age shook ”the Yoke of authority and opinion,” English free thought powerfully reinforced the native French revolt against authoritarianism. After 1730 English was the model for French thought.[i-19] Nearly all of Locke's works had been translated in France before 1700. Voltaire's affinity for the English mind has already been touched on. D'Alembert comments, ”When we measure the interval between a Scotus and a Newton, or rather between the works of Scotus and those of Newton, we must cry out with Terence, _h.o.m.o homini quid praestat_.”[i-20]