Benjamin Franklin

REPRESENTATIVE SELECTIONS, WITH
INTRODUCTION, BIBLIOGRAPHY, AND NOTES

BY
Frank Luther Mott

Director, School of Journalism
University of Iowa

AND
Chester E. Jorgenson

Instructor in English
University of Iowa

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY

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Copyright, 1936, by
AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY

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Mott and Jorgenson's Franklin
W.P.I.

Made in U.S.A.

PREFACE

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, classicism, and neoclassicism, may seem somewhat novel, the editors have felt it desirable to document their interpretation with considerable fullness. It is hoped that the reader will withhold judgment as to the validity of this interpretation until the documentary 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correspondence (original MSS), especially the Franklin-Galloway and Franklin-Jonathan Shipley (Bishop of St. Asaph) unpublished correspondence.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 analysis 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 assistance in typing, proofreading, et cetera. They are extremely grateful to Professor Harry Hayden Clark for incisive suggestions and valuable editorial assistance.

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 attitude 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 constitute 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 assured 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 Cyclopædia ..., London, 1728), are those "whose distinguishing character it is, not to profess any particular form, or system of religion; but only to acknowledge the existence of a God, without rendering him any external worship, 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 God, 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 God 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 God 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 institutions 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 institutions—then to reform man one needs only to reform society and institutions, 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 institutions."[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 compassion, coupled with the deistic and rationalistic divorce between theology and morality, resulted in the dogma that the most acceptable service to God is expressed in kindness to God'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 asserting 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. God's revelations thus were adjusted to progressive needs and capacities.[i-16]

Carl Becker has suggestively dissected the Enlightenment in a series of antitheses 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, Homo homini quid præstat."[i-20]

Any doctrine was intensely welcome which would allow the Frenchman to regain his natural rights curtailed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by the inequalities of a state vitiated by privileges, by an economic structure tottering because of bankruptcy attending unsuccessful wars and the upkeep of a Versailles with its dazzling ornaments, and by a religious program dominated by a Jesuit rather than a Gallican church.[i-21] Economic, political, and religious abuses were inextricably united; the spirit of revolt did not feel obliged to discriminate between the authority of the crown and nobles and the authority of the altar. Graphic is Diderot's vulgar vituperation: he would draw out the entrails of a priest to strangle a king!

Let us now turn to the American backgrounds. The bibliolatry of colonial New England is expressed in William Bradford's resolve to study languages so that he could "see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in all their native beauty."[i-22] In addition to furnishing the new Canaan with ecclesiastical and political precedent, Scripture provided "not a partiall, but a perfect rule of Faith, and manners." Any dogma contravening the "ancient oracle" was a weed sown by Satan and fit only to be uprooted and thrown in the fire. The colonial seventeenth century was one which, like John Cotton, regularly sweetened its mouth "with a piece of Calvin." One need not be reminded that Calvinism was inveterately and completely antithetical to the dogma of the Enlightenment.[i-23] Calvinistic bibliolatry contended with "the sacred book of nature." Its wrathful though just Deity was unlike the compassionate, virtually depersonalized Deity heralded in the eighteenth century, in which the Trinity was dissolved. The redemptive Christ became the amiable philosopher. Adam's universally contagious guilt was transferred to social institutions, especially the tyrannical forms of kings and priests. Calvin's forlorn and depraved man became a creature naturally compassionate. If once man worshipped the Deity through seeking to parallel the divine laws scripturally revealed, in the eighteenth century he honored his benevolent God, who was above demanding worship, through kindnesses shown God's other children. The individual was lost in society, self-perfection gave way to humanitarianism, God to Man, theology to morality, and faith to reason. The colonial seventeenth century was politically oligarchical: when Thomas Hooker heckled Winthrop on the lack of suffrage, Winthrop with no compromise asserted that "the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser."[i-24] If the seventeenth-century college was a cloister for clerical education, the Enlightenment sought to train the layman for citizenship.

With the turn of the seventeenth century several forces came into prominence, undermining New England's Puritan heritage. Among those relevant for our study are: the ubiquitous frontier, and the rise of Quakerism, deism, Methodism, and science. The impact of the frontier was neglected until Professor Turner called attention to its existence; he writes that "the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe.... It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.... The frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution...."[i-25] In the period included in our survey the frontier receded from the coast to the fall line to the Alleghenies: at each stage it "did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier."[i-26] One recalls the spirited satire on frontier conditions, as the above aspects give birth to violence and disregard for law, in Hugh Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry. Under the satire one feels the justness of the attack, intensified by our knowledge that Brackenridge grew up "in a democratic Scotch-Irish back-country settlement." If the frontiersmen during the eighteenth century did not place their dirty boots on their governors' desks, they were partially responsible for an inveterate spirit of revolt, shown so brutally in the "massacres" provoked by the "Paxton boys" of Pennsylvania. One is not unprepared to discover resentment against the forms of authority in a territory in which a strong back is more immediately important than a knowledge of debates on predestination. Granting the importance of the frontier in opposing the theocratic Old Way, it must be considered in terms of other and more complex factors.

Reinforcing Edwards's Great Awakening, George Whitefield, especially in the Middle Colonies, challenged the growing complacence of colonial religious thought with his insistence that man "is by nature half-brute and half-devil." It has been suggested that Methodism in effect allied itself with the attitudes of Hobbes and Mandeville in attacking man's nature, and hence by reaction tended to provoke "a primitivism based on the doctrine of natural benevolence."[i-27]

The "New English Israel" was harried by the Quakers,[i-28] who preached the priesthood of all believers and the right of private judgment. They denied the total depravity of the natural man and the doctrine of election; they gloried in a loving Father, and scourged the ecclesiastical pomp and ceremony of other religions. They were possessed by a blunt enthusiasm which held the immediate private revelation anterior to scriptural revelation. Faithful to the inner light, the Quakers seemed to neglect Scripture. Although the less extreme Quakers, such as John Woolman, did not blind themselves to the need for personal introspection and self-conquest, Quakerism as a movement tended to place the greater emphasis on morality articulate in terms of fellow-service, and lent momentum to the rise of humanitarianism expressed in prison reform and anti-slavery agitation. Also one may wonder to what extent colonial Quakerism tended to lend sanction to the rising democratic spirit.

In the person of Cotton Mather, until recently considered a bigoted incarnation of the "Puritan spirit ... become ossified," are discovered forces which, when divorced from Puritan theology, were to become the sharpest wedges splintering the deep-rooted oak of the Old Way. These forces were the authority of reason and science. In The Christian Philosopher,[i-29] basing his attitude on the works of Ray, Derham, Cheyne, and Grew,[i-30] Mather attempted to shatter the Calvinists' antithesis between science and theology, asserting "that [Natural] Philosophy is no Enemy, but a mighty and wondrous Incentive to Religion."[i-31] He warned that since even Mahomet with the aid of reason found the Workman in his Work, Christian theologians should fear "lest a Mahometan be called in for thy Condemnation!"[i-32] Studying nature's sublime order, one must be blind if his thoughts are not carried heavenward to "admire that Wisdom itself!" Although Mather mistrusted Reason, he accepted it as "the voice of God"—an experience which enabled him to discover the workmanship of the Deity in nature. Magnetism, the vegetable kingdom, the stars infer a harmonious order, so wondrous that only a God could have created it. If Reason is no complete substitute for Scripture it offers enough evidence to hiss atheism out of the world: "A Being that must be superior to Matter, even the Creator and Governor of all Matter, is everywhere so conspicuous, that there can be nothing more monstrous than to deny the God that is above."[i-33] Sir Isaac Newton with his mathematical and experimental proof of the sublime universal order strung on invariable secondary causes, Mather confessed, is "our perpetual Dictator."[i-34] Conceiving of science as a rebuke to the atheist, and a natural ally to scriptural theology, Mather, like a Newton himself, juxtaposed rationalism and faith in one pyramidal confirmation of the existence, omnipotence, and benevolence of God. Here were variations from Calvinism's common path which, when augmented by English and French liberalism, by the influence of Quakerism and the frontier, were to give rise to democracy, rationalism, and scientific deism. The Church of England through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had "pursued a liberal latitudinarian policy which, as a mode of thought, tended to promote deism by emphasizing rational religion and minimizing revelation."[i-35] It was to be expected that in colonies created by Puritans (or even Quakers), deism would have a less spectacular and extensive success than it appears to have had in the mother country. If militant deism remained an aristocratic cult until the Revolution,[i-36] scientific rationalism (Newtonianism) long before this, from the time of Mather, became a common ally of orthodoxy. If a "religion of nature" may be defined with Tillotson as "obedience to Natural Law, and the performance of such duties as Natural Light, without any express and supernatural revelation, doth dictate to man," then it was in the colonies, prior to the Revolution, more commonly a buttress to revealed religion than an equivalent to it.

Lockian sensism and Newtonian science were the chief sources of that brand of colonial rationalism which at first complemented orthodoxy, and finally buried it among lost causes. The Marquis de Chastellux was astounded when he found on a center table in a Massachusetts inn an "Abridgment of Newton's Philosophy"; whereupon he "put some questions" to his host "on physics and geometry," with which he "found him well acquainted."[i-37] Now, even a superficial reading of the eighteenth century discloses countless allusions to Newton, his popularizers, and the implications of his physics and cosmology. As Mr. Brasch suggests, "From the standpoint of the history of science," the extent of the vogue of Newtonianism "is yet very largely unknown history."[i-38]