Part 4 (1/2)

This is anything but the corollary of a defender of state rights.

Franklin was convinced that the permanence of the national view alone could prevent federal anarchy. Addressing himself to the problem of delegated authority Madison observed: ”This prerogative of the General Govt. is the great pervading principle that must controul the centrifugal tendency of the States; which, without it, will continually fly out of their proper orbits and destroy the order & harmony of the political system.”[i-354] One is tempted to see here Newton's principle of gravity translated into terms of political nationalism; one wonders whether it is probable that (like Madison's) Franklin's emphasis on the harmony of the whole could have been partly conditioned by the cohesiveness and harmony of universal physical laws incarnate in Newtonian physics, of which he was a master.

Franklin was ”apprehensive ...--perhaps too apprehensive,--that the Government of these States may in future times end in a Monarchy.”[i-355] He suggested that moderate rather than kingly salaries paid the chief executive would tend to allay this danger. Between Randolph, who belabored a single executive as the ”foetus of monarchy,”

and Wilson, who harbored it as the ”best safeguard against tyranny,”

stood Franklin, who saw it as subversive of democratic sovereignty but not necessarily fatal. He declared himself emphatically against the motion that the executive have a complete negative.[i-356] Extolling popular sovereignty, he warned that ”In free Governments the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors & sovereigns.”[i-357] He refused to consider a plan which sought to establish a franchise only for freeholders: ”It is of great consequence that we shd. not depress the virtue & public spirit of our common people; of which they displayed a great deal during the war, and which contributed princ.i.p.ally to the favorable issue of it.”[i-358] Pinckney had made a motion that rulers should have unenc.u.mbered estates:

Doctr Franklin expressed his dislike of every thing that tended to debase the spirit of the common people. If honesty was often the companion of wealth, and if poverty was exposed to peculiar temptation, it was not less true that the possession of property increased the desire of more property--[i-359].... This Const.i.tution will be much read and attended to in Europe, and if it should betray a great partiality to the rich--will not only hurt us in the esteem of the most liberal and enlightened men there, but discourage the common people from removing to this Country.[i-360]

Pinckney's motion was rejected. Franklin within the Convention did not seem to fear Gerry's threat--”the evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.”[i-361]

Franklin suggested the adoption of a unicameral legislature, but does not seem to have made any struggle for it. His article of 1789 in defense of the Pennsylvania (unicameral) legislature, however, shows that he clung to the principle as firmly as he had in 1776.[i-362] He questioned: ”The Wisdom of a few Members in one single Legislative Body, may it not frequently stifle bad Motions in their Infancy, and so prevent their being adopted?” In addition the bicameral house is c.u.mbersome and provocative of delay.

Little is known of Franklin's att.i.tude toward the violent controversy attendant upon efforts toward ratification. In his _Ancient Jews and Anti-Federalists_[i-363] he warned the traducers of the new Const.i.tution against voiding an instrument which in his opinion was as sound as the frailty of human reason would allow it to be. In fact, said he, it ”astonishes me, ... to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does.”[i-364] He may be said to have been anti-federalistic to the extent that he feared a strong executive, guarded jealously the legislative sphere, worried little about checks and balances, sought to accelerate popular sovereignty; he was federalistic to the extent that he opposed state localism with national sovereignty, was not blind to the depravity of human nature and hence felt the need for a vigorous coercive government. To M. Le Veillard he confessed an almost Hamiltonian distrust of the mult.i.tude: The Const.i.tution ”has ... met with great opposition in some States, for we are at present a nation of politicians. And, though there is a general dread of giving too much power to our _governors_, I think we are more in danger from too little obedience in the _governed_.”[i-365] He made the same complaint a year later: ”We have been guarding against an evil that old States are most liable to, _excess of power_ in the rulers, but our present danger seems to be _defect of obedience_ in the subjects.”[i-366] It is difficult to reconcile his inveterate distrust of men with his activity in behalf of an almost universal franchise, reluctance to sanction the principle of checks and balances, and belief in a unicameral legislature; it is difficult to reconcile the Plutarchan fervor with which he advocated the wisdom of following great leaders with his fear of a vigorous executive. It is not improbable that those ideas which are generally anti-federalistic in Franklin's political view are in part the result of his hatred of proprietary abuses which he witnessed as a provincial statesman during his middle age.

VII. FRANKLIN AS SCIENTIST AND DEIST

Jan Ingenhousz, the celebrated physician to Maria Theresa of Austria, wrote a letter to Franklin on May 3, 1780, which doubtless caused the patriarch of Pa.s.sy to reflect--not without sadness of heart--on the diversified fortune which time and circ.u.mstance had devised for him. The physician (no friend to the American revolution) implored Franklin not to abandon ”entirely the world Nature whose laws made by the supreme wisdom and is constant and unalterable as its legislature himself [_sic_].” Ingenhousz lamented that Franklin, ”a Philosopher so often and so successfully employed in researches of the most intricate and the most mysterious operations of Nature,”[i-367] should have given his time to politics.

Franklin is now most commonly viewed as a utilitarian moralist, a successful tradesman and printer, a shrewd propagandist and financier, the diplomat of the Revolution, and if at all as a scientist, then only as a virtuoso, fas.h.i.+oning devices, such as open stoves, bifocal spectacles, and lightning rods, for practical uses. Probably few general readers are aware that Franklin was a disinterested scientist in the sense that he interrogated nature with an eye to discovering its immutable laws. It is conversely supposed that Franklin himself was unaware of any inclination to pursue natural science to the exclusion of those political achievements which have identified him as one of the wiliest and sagest diplomats of the Enlightenment.

It may be learned, however (not without astonishment), that Franklin almost from the beginning of his partic.i.p.ation in politics resented the time given over to such activities, as so much time lost to his speculations and research in natural science. As early as 1752 he wistfully (though realistically) confessed that ”business sometimes obliges one to postpone philosophical amus.e.m.e.nts.”[i-368] A month after this, he wrote to Cadwallader Colden: ”I congratulate you on the prospect you have, of pa.s.sing the remainder of life in philosophical retirement.”[i-369] In the midst of investigating waterspouts, he observed to John Perkins: ”How much soever my Inclinations lead me to philosophical Inquiries, I am so engag'd in Business, public and private, that those more pleasing pursuits [of natural science] are frequently interrupted....”[i-370] He urged Dr. John Fothergill to give himself ”repose, delight in viewing the Operations of nature in the vegetable creation.”[i-371] In 1765, upon completing his negotiations in behalf of the Pennsylvania a.s.sembly, he promised Lord Kames that he would ”engage in no other” political affairs.[i-372] To the notable professor of physics of the University of Turin, Giambatista Beccaria, he wrote in 1768 from London (where he had sought to have the Stamp Act rescinded) that he had to ”take away entirely” his ”attention from philosophical matters, though I have constantly cherished the hope of returning home where I could find leisure to resume the studies that I have shamefully put off from time to time.”[i-373] Again, in 1779, he confessed to Beccaria: ”I find myself here [Pa.s.sy] immers'd in Affairs, which absorb my Attention, and prevent my pursuing those Studies in which I always found the highest Satisfaction; and I am now grown so old, as hardly to hope for a Return of that Leisure and Tranquillity so necessary for Philosophical Disquisitions.”[i-374] He longed (in 1782) to have Congress release him so that he might ”spend the Evening of Life more agreeably in philosophic [devoted to natural science]

Leisure.”[i-375] He who, John Winthrop claimed, ”was good at starting Game for Philosophers,”[i-376] acknowledged that he had thrown himself on the public, which, ”having as it were eaten my flesh, seemed now resolved to pick my bones.”[i-377] Reverend Mana.s.seh Cutler visited Franklin a few months before the patriarch's death. They ardently discussed botany, Franklin boyish in his eagerness to show the Reverend Mr. Cutler a ma.s.sive book, containing ”the whole of Linnaeus' Systema Vegetabilies.” ”The Doctor seemed extremely fond, through the course of the visit, of dwelling on Philosophical subjects, and particularly that of natural History, while the other Gentlemen were swallowed up with politics.”[i-378] In a fict.i.tious (?) conversation between Joseph II of Austria and Franklin, the Newton of electricity is reported as explaining that he was early in life attracted by natural philosophy: ”Necessity afterwards made me a politician.... I was Franklin, the _Philosopher_ to the world, long after I had in fact, become Franklin the Politician.”[i-379] After reviewing the evidence, it seems incredulous to doubt that, regardless of his achievements in other fields, Franklin sought his greatest intellectual pleasure in scientific research and speculation, and that his doctrines of scientific deism antedated and conditioned his political, economic, and humanitarian interests.

If Franklin's inventions have been justly praised, his affections for the empirical scientific method and his philosophic interest in Nature's laws have been unjustly ignored. He observed to Ebenezer Kinnersley ”that a philosopher cannot be too much on his guard in crediting their [”careless observers'”] relations of things extraordinary, and should never build an hypothesis on any thing but clear facts and experiments, or it will be in danger of soon falling ... like a house of cards”;[i-380] and to Abbe Soulavie, ”You see I have given a loose to imagination; but I approve much more your method of philosophizing, which proceeds upon actual observation, makes a collection of facts, and concludes no farther than those facts will warrant.”[i-381] In 1782 he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, that he longed to ”sit down in sweet Society with my English philosophic Friends, communicating to each other new Discoveries, and proposing Improvements of old ones; all tending to extend the Power of Man over Matter, avert or diminish the Evils he is subject to, or augment the Number of his Enjoyments.”[i-382] A careful study of his scientific papers discloses that he was not untrained in the method of hypotheses sustained or rejected by patient and laborious experimentation: not fortuitously did he arrive at conclusions in electricity, which were epochal in (1) ”His rejection of the two-fluid theory of electricity and subst.i.tution of the one-fluid theory; (2) his coinage of the appropriate terms _positive_ and _negative_, to denote an excess or a deficit of the common electric fluid; (3) his explanation of the Leyden jar, and, notably, his recognition of the paramount role played by the gla.s.s or dielectric; (4) his experimental demonstration of the ident.i.ty of lightning and electricity; and (5) his invention of the lightning conductor for the protection of life and property, together with his clear statement of its preventive and protective functions.”[i-383] Not only an inventor, Franklin inductively observed natural phenomena, and drew conclusions until he had created a virtual _Principia_ of electricity. His contemporaries were not loath to honor him as a second Newton. Franklin, however, was in all of his researches under a self-confessed yoke which doubtless tended to deny him access to the profoundest reaches of scientific inquiry: from Philadelphia he wrote in 1753 to Cadwallader Colden, eminent mathematician (as well as versatile scientist): ”Your skill & Expertness in Mathematical Computations, will afford you an Advantage in these Disquisitions [among them, researches in electricity], that I lament the want of, who am like a Man searching for some thing in a dark Room where I can only grope and guess; while you proceed with a Candle in your Hand.”[i-384]

In an effort to learn the _modus operandi_ of Franklin's philosophic thought, let us now review its genetic development, its probable sources, its relation to scientific deism, and the degree to which he achieved that serene repose for which he ever strove. A pioneer American rationalist, not without his claims to being ”another Voltaire,”

Franklin as a youth read those works which were forming or interpreting the thought patterns of the age. Born in an epoch presided over by a Locke and a Newton, an epoch of rationalism and ”supernatural”

rationalism, alike fed by physico-mathematical speculation. Franklin, barely beyond adolescence, felt the impacts of the age of reason.

Scholars before and since M. M. Curtis have explained that ”in religion he was a Deist of the type of Lord Herbert of Cherbury.”[i-385] M. Fa has sought, without convincing doc.u.mentary evidence, to interpret Franklin's philosophic mind in terms of Pythagoreanism.[i-386] We may find that these views are over simple and historically inadequate--even wrong.

Franklin was reared ”piously in the Dissenting way”[i-387] by a ”pious and prudent” Calvinistic father who died as he lived, with ”entire Dependence on his Redeemer.”[i-388] ”Religiously educated as a Presbyterian,”[i-389] young Benjamin was taught that _Major est Scripturae auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenu capacitas_. He was nurtured on the Bible and ”books in polemic divinity,” and he regularly attended services at the Old South Church. Doubtless without reflection he was led to identify goodness with the church and its wors.h.i.+p. He was a part of New England's bibliolatry. Not long before he was apprenticed to his brother James he read Cotton Mather's _Bonifacius--An Essay upon the Good that is to be Devised and Designed by those who desire to Answer the Great End of Life, and to do good while they live_, and Defoe's _Essays upon Several Projects: or Effectual Ways for Advancing the Interests of the Nation_. He confessed in 1784 that _Bonifacius_ ”gave me such a turn of thinking, as to have an influence on my conduct through life; for I have always set a greater value on the character of a _doer of good_ than on any other kind of reputation.”[i-390] Mather, as an exponent of Christian charity, urged that man help his neighbors ”with a rapturous a.s.siduity,”[i-391] that he may discover the ”ravis.h.i.+ng satisfaction which he might find in relieving the distresses of a poor miserable neighbor.”[i-392] It is ironic that Mather should have apparently aided a young man to divorce himself from the strenuous subtleties of theology. (Franklin was too young to gather that Mather circ.u.mspectly warned against a covenant of works, and hence was Pauline in his advocacy of _charity_ rather than of humanitarianism.) And from Defoe's _Essays_ Franklin received more than a penchant for projects.

Like Mather, Defoe observed that ”G.o.d Almighty has commanded us to relieve and help one another in distress.”[i-393] Defoe seemed to young Franklin to dwell on fellow-service--to promise that the good man need not have understood all of the dogma of Old South meetinghouse.

Apprenticed to James, Franklin admitted that he ”now had access to better books.”[i-394] Whatever the extent of James's library in 1718, by 1722 the _New England Courant_ collection included Burnet's _History of the Reformation_, _Theory of the Earth_, the _Spectator_ papers, _The Guardian_, _Art of Thinking_ [Du Port Royal], _The Tale of a Tub_, and the writings of Tillotson.[i-395] After reading most probably in these, and, as we are told, in Tryon's _Way to Health_, Xenophon's _Memorabilia_, digests of some of Boyle's lectures, Anthony Collins, Locke, and Shaftesbury, Franklin became in his Calvinist religion a ”real doubter.”[i-396] He became at the age of sixteen, as a result of reading Boyle's Lectures,[i-397] a ”thorough Deist.”[i-398] We cannot be certain of the Lectures read by Franklin, but we may observe Bentley's _Folly of Atheism_ (1692) and Derham's _Physico-Theology_ (1711-1712), which are representative of the series provided for by Boyle. Like Mather's _The Christian Philosopher_ (1721)[i-399] they both employ science and rationalism to reinforce (never as equivalent to or subst.i.tute for) scriptural theology. Fed by Newtonian physics, Bentley discovers in gravity ”the great basis of all mechanism,” the ”immediate _fiat_ and finger of G.o.d, and the executions of the divine law.”[i-400]

Gravity, ”the powerful cement which holds together this magnificent structure of the world,”[i-401] is the result of the Deity ”who _always acts geometrically_.” Borrowing from c.o.c.kburne, Ray, Bentley, and Fenelon, Derham offers likewise to prove the existence and operations of the Workman from his Work.[i-402]

It is unlikely that Boyle's Lectures (characterized by orthodox rationalism, augmented by Newtonianism) would alone have precipitated in Franklin a ”thorough deism.” Not improbably Locke, Shaftesbury, and Anthony Collins (whom Franklin mentions reading) were most militant in overthrowing his inherited bibliolatry. Although he does not say exactly which of Collins's works he read, Collins's rationale is repeated clearly enough in any one of his pieces. Warring against ”crack-brain'd Enthusiasts,” the ”prodigious Ignorance” and ”Impositions of Priests,”

against defective scriptural texts, Collins defends ”our natural Notions” against the authoritarianism of priests. Vilifying the authority of the surplice, he apotheosizes the authority of reason.[i-403] He intensifies the English tradition of every-man-his-own-priest, and exclaims ”How uncertain Tradition is!”[i-404] From this militant friend of John Locke, Franklin was doubtless impregnated with an _odium theologic.u.m_ and an exalted idea of the sanct.i.ty of Reason.

Having read _An Essay Concerning Human Understanding_,[i-405] Franklin may have remembered that Locke there observed, ”Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or a.s.sented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do.”[i-406] Like Collins, Locke urged a deistic rationale:

Since then the precepts of Natural Religion are plain, and very intelligible to all mankind, and seldom to come to be controverted; and other revealed truths, which are conveyed to us by books and languages, are liable to the common and natural obscurities and difficulties incident to words; methinks it would become us to be more careful and diligent in observing the former, and less magisterial, positive, and imperious, in imposing our own sense and interpretations of the latter.[i-407]

In addition Franklin may have been influenced by Locke's implied Newtonianism; he would suspect the subtleties of the Old South Church when he read: ”For the visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of the creation, that a rational creature, who will but seriously reflect on them, cannot miss the discovery of a Deity.”[i-408] Like Newton, Locke inferred an infinite and benevolent Geometrician from ”the magnificent harmony of the universe.”

Franklin also read Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, which Warburton quotes Pope as saying ”had done more harm to revealed religion in England than all the works of infidelity put together.”[i-409] Although he may have pondered over Shaftesbury's ”virtuoso theory of Benevolence,” he was not one to be readily convinced of the innate altruism of man. His Puritan heritage linked with an empirical realism prevented him from becoming prey to Shaftesbury's a priori optimism. He was aware of the potential danger of a complacent trust in natural impulses, which often lead to

The love of sweet security in sin.