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." 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."

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." 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." 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." 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...." 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." 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."

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. Then, too, as Miss Lois Whitney has ably demonstrated, Lockian psychology "cleared the ground for either primitivism or a theory of progress." In addition, his social compact theory, augmenting seventeenth-century liberalism, furnished the political theorists of the Enlightenment with "the principle of Consent" in their antipathy for monarchial obscurantism. Locke has been described as the "originator of a psychology which provided democratic government with a scientific basis." 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."

"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." 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 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.

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.

Even as Voltaire had his liberal tendencies stoutly reinforced by contact with English rationalism and deism, 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. 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."

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. 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." 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. 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." 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...." 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." 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."

The "New English Israel" was harried by the Quakers, 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, basing his attitude on the works of Ray, Derham, Cheyne, and Grew, 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." 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!" 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." 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." 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." 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, 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." 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."

In Samuel Johnson's retrospective view, the Yale of 1710 at Saybrook was anything but progressive with its "scholastic cobwebs of a few little English and Dutch systems." The year of Johnson's graduation (1714), however, Mr. Dummer, Yale's agent in London, collected seven hundred volumes, including works of Norris, Barrow, Tillotson, Boyle, Halley, and the second edition (1713) of the Principia and a copy of the Optics, presented by Newton himself. After the schism of 1715/6 the collection was moved to New Haven, at the time of Johnson's election to a tutorship. It was then, writes Johnson, that the trustees "introduced the study of Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton as fast as they could and in order to this the study of mathematics. The Ptolemaic system was hitherto as much believed as the Scriptures, but they soon cleared up and established the Copernican by the help of Whiston's Lectures, Derham, etc." Johnson studied Euclid, algebra, and conic sections "so as to read Sir Isaac with understanding." He gloomily reviews the "infidelity and apostasy" resulting from the study of the ideas of Locke, Tindal, Bolingbroke, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, and Collins. That Newtonianism and even deism made progress at Yale is the tenor of Johnson's backward glance. About 1716 Samuel Clarke's edition of Rohault was introduced at Yale: Clarke's Rohault was an attack upon this standard summary of Cartesianism. Ezra Stiles was not certain that Clarke was honest in heaping up notes "not so much to illustrate Rohault as to make him the Vehicle of conveying the peculiarities of the sublimer Newtonian Philosophy." This work was used until 1743 when 'sGravesande's Natural Philosophy was wisely substituted. Rector Thomas Clap used Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated as a favorite text. That there was no dearth of advanced natural science and philosophy, even suggestive of deism, is fairly evident.

Measured by the growth of interest in science in the English universities, Harvard's awareness of new discoveries was not especially backward in the seventeenth century. Since Copernicanism at the close of the sixteenth century had few adherents, it is almost startling to learn that probably by 1659 the Copernican system was openly avowed at Harvard. In 1786 Nathaniel Mather wrote from Dublin: "I perceive the Cartesian philosophy begins to obteyn in New England, and if I conjecture aright the Copernican system too." John Barnard, who was graduated from Harvard in 1710, has written that no algebra was then taught, and wistfully suggests that he had been born too soon, since "now" students "have the great Sir Isaac Newton and Dr. Halley and some other mathematicians for their guides." Although Thomas Robie and Nathan Prince are thought to have known Newton's physics through secondary sources, and, as Harvard tutors, indoctrinated their charges with Newtonianism, it was left to Isaac Greenwood to transplant from London the popular expositions of Newtonian philosophy. A Harvard graduate in 1721, Greenwood continued his theological studies in London where he attended Desaguliers's lectures on experimental philosophy, based essentially on Newtonianism. From Desaguliers Greenwood learned how

By Newton's help, 'tis evidently seen
Attraction governs all the World's machine.

He learned that Scripture is "to teach us Morality, and our Articles of Faith" but not to serve as an instructor in natural philosophy. In fine, Greenwood became devoted to science, and science as it might serve to augment avenues to the religious experience. In London he had come to know Hollis, who in 1727 suggested to Harvard authorities that Greenwood be elected Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural and Experimental Philosophy. Greenwood accepted, and until 1737 was at Harvard a propagandist of the new science. In 1727 he advertised in the Boston News-Letter that he would give scientific lectures, revolving primarily around "the Discoveries of the incomparable Sir Isaac Newton." From 1727 through 1734 he was a prominent popularizer of Newtonianism in Boston.

It remained for Greenwood's pupil John Winthrop to be the first to teach Newton at Harvard with adequate mechanical and textual materials. Elected in 1738 to the Hollis professorship formerly held by Greenwood, Winthrop adopted 'sGravesande's Natural Philosophy, at which time, Cajori observes, "the teachings of Newton had at last secured a firm footing there." The year after his election he secured a copy of the Principia (the third edition, 1726, edited by Dr. Henry Pemberton, friend of Franklin in 1725-1726). According to the astute Ezra Stiles, Winthrop became a "perfect master of Newton's Principia—which cannot be said of many Professors of Philosophy in Europe." That he did not allow Newtonianism to draw him to deism may be seen in Stiles's gratification that Winthrop "was a Firm friend to Revelation in opposition to Deism." Stiles "wish[es] the evangelical Doctors of Grace had made a greater figure in his Ideal System of divinity," thus inferring that Winthrop was a rationalist in theology, however orthodox.

A cursory view of the eighteenth-century pulpit discloses that if the clergy did not become deistic they were not blind to a natural religion, and often employed its arguments to augment scriptural authority. Aware of the writings of Samuel Clarke, Wollaston, Whiston, Cudworth, Butler, Hutcheson, Voltaire, and Locke, Mayhew revolts against total depravity and the doctrines of election and the Trinity, arraigns himself against authoritarianism and obscurantism, and though he draws upon reason for revelation of God's will, he does not seem to have been latitudinarian in respect to the holy oracles. Although he often wrote ambiguously concerning the nature of Christ, he asserted: "That I ever denied, or treated in a bold or ludicrous manner, the divinity of the Son of God, as revealed in scripture, I absolutely deny." He is antagonistic toward the mystical in Calvinism, convinced that "The love of God is a calm and rational thing, the result of thought and consideration." His biographer thinks that Mayhew was "the first clergyman in New England who expressly and openly opposed the scholastic doctrine of the trinity." Coupling "natural and revealed religion," he does not threaten but he urges that one "ought not to leave the clear light of revelation.... It becomes us to adhere to the holy Scriptures as our only rule of faith and practice, discipline and worship." In Mayhew one finds an impotent compromise between Calvinism and the demands of reason, fostered by the Enlightenment. Like Mayhew's, in the main, are the views of Dr. Charles Chauncy, who reconciled the demands of reason and revelation, concluding that "the voice of reason is the voice of God." Jason Haven and Jonas Clarke are typical of the orthodox rationalists who were alive to the implications of science, and to such rationalists as Tillotson and Locke. Haven affirms that "by the light of reason and nature, we are led to believe in, and adore God, not only as the maker, but also as the governor of all things." "Revelation comes in to the assistance of reason, and shews them to us in a clearer light than we could see them without its aid." Clarke observes that "the light of nature teaches, which revelation confirms." Rev. Henry Cumings, illustrating his indebtedness to scientific rationalism, honors "the gracious Parent of the universe, whose tender mercies are over all his works ...," a Deity "whose providence governs the world; whose voice all nature obeys; to whose controul all second causes and subordinate agents are subject; and whose sole prerogative it is to dispense blessings or calamities, as to his wisdom seems best." Simeon Howard discovers the "perfections of the Deity, as displayed in the Creation" as well as in the "government and redemption of the world." Both Phillips Payson and Andrew Eliot affirm the identity of "the voice of reason, and the voice of God."

No clergyman of the eighteenth century was more terribly conscious of the polarity of colonial thought than was Ezra Stiles. Abiel Holmes has told the graphic story of Stiles's struggles with deism after reading Pope, Whiston, Boyle, Trenchard and Gordon, Butler, Tindal, Collins, Bolingbroke, and Shaftesbury. If he finally, as a result of his trembling and fearful doubt, reaffirmed zealously his faith in the bibliolatry and relentless dogma of Calvinism, Newtonian rationalism was a means to his recovery, and throughout his life a complement to his Calvinism. Turning from his well-worn Bible, the chief source of his faith, he also kindled his "devotion at the stars." It should be remembered, however, that this tendency among Puritan clergy to call science to the support of theology had been inaugurated by Cotton Mather as early as 1693, and that it was the Puritan Mather whom Franklin acknowledged as having started him on his career and influenced him, by his Essays to do Good, throughout life.

Only against this complex and as yet inadequately integrated background of physical conditions and ideas (the dogmas of Puritanism, Quakerism, Methodism, rationalism, scientific deism, economic and political liberalism—against a cosmic, social, and individual attitude, the result of Old-World thought impinging on colonial thought and environment) can one attempt to appraise adequately the mind and achievements of Franklin, whose life was coterminous with the decay of Puritan theocracy and the rise of rationalism, democracy, and science.

II. Franklin's Theories of Education

Franklin's penchant for projects manifests itself nowhere more fully than in his schemes of education, both self and formal. One may deduce a pattern of educational principles not undeservedly called Franklin's theories of education, theories which he successfully institutionalized, from an examination of his Junto ("the best school of philosophy, morality, and politics that then existed in the province"), his Philadelphia Library Company (his "first project of a public nature"), his Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America, calling for a scientific society of ingenious men or virtuosi, his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania and Idea of the English School, which eventually fathered the University of Pennsylvania, and from his fragmentary notes in his correspondence.

Variously apotheosized, patronized, or damned for his practicality, expediency, and opportunism, dramatized for his allegiance to materiality, Franklin has commonly been viewed (and not only through the popular imagination) as one fostering in the American mind an unimaginative, utilitarian prudence, motivated by the pedestrian virtues of industry, frugality, and thrift. Whatever the educational effect of Franklin's life and writings on American readers, we shall find that his works contain schemes and theories which transcend the more mundane habits and utilitarian biases ascribed to him.

Franklin progressively felt "the loss of the learned education" his father had planned for him, as he realized in his hunger for knowledge that he must repair the loss through assiduous reading, accomplished during hours stolen from recreation and sleep. Proudly he confessed that reading was his "only amusement." In 1727 he formed the Junto, or Leather Apron Club, his first educational project. Franklin was never more eclectic than when founding the Junto. To prevent Boston homes from becoming "the porches of hell," Cotton Mather had created mutual improvement societies through which neighbors would help one another "with a rapturous assiduity." Mather in his Essays to do Good proposed:

That a proper number of persons in a neighborhood, whose hearts God hath touched with a zeal to do good, should form themselves into a society, to meet when and where they shall agree, and to consider—"what are the disorders that we may observe rising among us; and what may be done, either by ourselves immediately, or by others through our advice, to suppress those disorders?"

Since Franklin's father was a member of one of Mather's "Associated Families" and since Franklin as a boy read Mather's Essays with rapt attention, and since his Rules for a Club Established for Mutual Improvement are amazingly congruent with Mather's rules proposed for his neighborly societies, it is not improbable that Franklin in part copied the plans of this older club. One also wonders whether Franklin remembered Defoe's suggestions in Essays upon Several Projects (1697) for the formation of "Friendly Societies" in which members covenanted to aid one another. In addition, M. Faÿ has observed that the "ideal which this society [the Junto] adopted was the same that Franklin had discovered in the Masonic lodges of England." Then, too, in London during the period of Desaguliers, Sir Hans Sloane, and Sir Isaac Newton, he would have heard much of the ideals and utility of the Royal Society. Many of the questions discussed by the Junto are suggestive of the calendar of the Royal Society:

Is sound an entity or body?

How may the phenomena of vapors be explained?

What is the reason that the tides rise higher in the Bay of Fundy, than the Bay of Delaware?

How may smoky chimneys be best cured?

Why does the flame of a candle tend upwards in a spire?

The Junto members, like Renaissance gentlemen, were determined to convince themselves that nothing valuable to the several powers of life should be alien to them. They were urged to communicate to one another anything significant "in history, morality, poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge." Surely a humanistic catholicity of interest! Schemes for getting on materially, suggestions for improving the laws and protecting the "just liberties of the people," efforts to aid the strangers in Philadelphia (an embryonic association of commerce), curiosity in the latest remedies used for the sick and wounded: all were to engage the minds of this assiduously curious club. Above all, the members must be "serviceable to mankind, to their country, to their friends, or to themselves." The intensity of the Junto's utilitarian purpose was matched only by its humanitarian bias. Members must swear that they "love mankind in general, of what profession or religion soever," and that they believe no man should be persecuted "for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship." Also they must profess to "love truth for truth's sake," to search diligently for it and to communicate it to others. Tolerance, the empirical method, scientific disinterestedness, and humanitarianism had hardly gained a foothold in the colonies in 1728. On the other hand, the Junto members were urged, when throwing a kiss to the world, not to neglect their individual ethical development. Franklin's humanitarian neighborliness is associated with a rigorous ethicism. The members were invited to report "unhappy effects of intemperance," of "imprudence, of passion, or of any other vice or folly," and also "happy effects of temperance, of prudence, of moderation." Franklin reflects sturdily here, and boundlessly elsewhere, the Greek and English emphasis on the Middle Way. If this is prudential, it is an elevated prudence.

The Philadelphia Library Company was born of the Junto and became "the mother of all the North American subscription libraries, now so numerous." The colonists, "having no publick amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observ'd by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries." It is curious that although many articles have been written describing the Library Company no one seems to include a study of the climate of ideas represented in its volumes. One must be careful not to credit Franklin with solely presiding over the ordering of books. At a meeting in 1732 of the company, Thomas Godfrey, probable inventor of the quadrant and he who learned Latin to read the Principia, notified the body that "Mr. Logan had let him know he would willingly give his advice of the choice of the books ... the Committee esteeming Mr. Logan to be a Gentleman of universal learning, and the best judge of books in these parts, ordered that Mr. Godfrey should wait on him and request him to favour them with a catalogue of suitable books." The first order included: Puffendorf's Introduction and Laws of Nature, Hayes upon Fluxions, Keill's Astronomical Lectures, Sidney on Government, Gordon and Trenchard's Cato's Letters, the Spectator, Guardian, Tatler, L'Hospital's Conic Sections, Addison's works, Xenophon's Memorabilia, Palladio, Evelyn, Abridgement of Philosophical Transactions, 'sGravesande's Natural Philosophy, Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, Bayle's Critical Dictionary, and Dryden's Virgil. As a gift Peter Collinson included Newton's Principia in the order. The ancient phalanxes were thoroughly routed! Then there is the MS "List of Books of the Original Philadelphia Library in Franklin's Handwriting" which lends recruits to the modern battalions. Included in this list are: Fontenelle on Oracles, Woodward's Natural History of Fossils and Natural History of the Earth, Keill's Examination of Burnet's Theory of the Earth, Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Surgery at Paris, William Petty's Essays, Voltaire's Elements of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy, Halley's Astronomical Tables, Hill's Review of the Works of the Royal Society, Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, Burlamaqui's Principles of Natural Law and Principles of Politic Law, Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History, and Conyer Middleton's Miscellaneous Works. From the volumes owned by the Library Company in 1757 it would have been possible for an alert mind to discover all of the implications, philosophic and religious, of the rationale of science. No less could be found here the political speculations which were later to aid the colonists in unyoking themselves from England. The Library was an arsenal capable of supplying weapons to rationalistic minds intent on besieging the fortress of Calvinism. Defenders of natural rights could find ammunition to wound monarchism; here authors could discover the neoclassic ideals of curiosa felicitas, perspicuity, order, and lucidity reinforced by the emphasis on clarity and correctness sponsored by the Royal Society and inherent in Newtonianism as well as Cartesianism. In short, the volumes contained the ripest fruition of scientific and rationalistic modernity. One can only conjecture the extent to which this library would perplex, astonish, and finally convert men to rationalism and scientific deism, and release them from bondage to throne and altar.

In 1743 Franklin wrote and distributed among his correspondents A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America. From a letter (Feb. 17, 1735/6) of William Douglass, one-time friend of Franklin's brother James, to Cadwallader Colden, we learn that some years before 1736, Colden "proposed the forming a sort of Virtuoso Society or rather Correspondence." I. W. Riley suggests that Franklin owes Colden thanks for having stimulated him to form the American Philosophical Society. There remains no convincing evidence, however, to disprove A. H. Smyth's observation that Franklin's Proposal "appears to contain the first suggestions, in any public form [editors' italics] for an American Philosophical Society." P. S. Du Ponceau has noted with compelling evidence that the philosophical society formed in 1744 was the direct descendant of Franklin's Junto. That in part the Philadelphia Library Company was one of the factors in the formation of the scientific society may be inferred from Franklin's request that it be founded in Philadelphia, which, "having the advantages of a good growing library," can "be the centre of the Society." The most important factor, however, was obviously the desire to imitate the forms and ideals of the Royal Society of London. Both societies had as their purpose the improvement of "the common stock of knowledge"; neither was to be provincial or national in interests, but was to have in mind the "benefit of mankind in general." A study of Franklin's Proposal will suggest the purpose of the Royal Society as interpreted by Thomas Sprat:

Their purpose is, in short, to make faithful Records, of all the Works of Nature, or Art, which can come within their reach: that so the present Age, and posterity, may be able to put a mark on the Errors, which have been strengthened by long prescription: to restore the Truths, that have lain neglected: to push on those, which are already known, to more various uses: and to make the way more passable, to what remains unreveal'd.

The Royal Society, no less than Franklin's Proposal, stressed the usefulness of its experimentation. Even as it sought "to overcome the mysteries of all the Works of Nature" through experimentation and induction, the Baconian empirical method, so Franklin urged the cultivation of "all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life." Though Franklin may have stopped short of theoretical science, he was not only interested in making devices but also in discovering immutable natural laws on which he could base his mechanics for making the world more habitable, less unknown and terrifying. Interpreting natural phenomena in terms of gravity and the laws of electrical attraction and repulsion is to detract from the terror in a universe presided over by a providential Deity, exerting his wrath through portentous comets, "fire-balls flung by an angry God."

Franklin's program is no more miscellaneous, or seemingly pedestrian, than the practices of the Royal Society. As a discoverer of nature's laws and their application to man's use, Franklin, the Newton of electricity, appealed to fact and experiment rather than authority and suggested that education in science may serve, in addition to making the world more comfortable, to make it more habitable and less terrifying. The ideals of scientific research and disinterestedness were dramatized picturesquely by the Tradesman Franklin, who aided the colonist in becoming unafraid.

Although his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749) furnished the initial suggestion which created the Philadelphia Academy, later the college, and ultimately the University of Pennsylvania, it is easy to overestimate the real significance of Franklin's influence in these schemes unless we remember that political quarrels separated him from those who were nurturing the school in the 1750's. In 1759 Franklin wrote from London to his friend, Professor Kinnersley, concerning the cabal in the Academy against him: "The Trustees have reap'd the full Advantage of my Head, Hands, Heart and Purse, in getting through the first Difficulties of the Design, and when they thought they could do without me, they laid me aside." After Franklin failed to secure Samuel Johnson, Rev. William Smith was made Provost and Professor of Natural Philosophy of the Academy in 1754. He quoted Franklin as saying that the Academy had become "a narrow, bigoted institution, put into the hands of the Proprietary party as an engine of government."

With Milton, Locke, Fordyce, Walker, Rollin, Turnbull, and "some others" as his sources, Franklin adapted the works of these pioneers in education to provincial uses. (One finds it difficult to discover any original ideas in the Proposals.) Like Locke and Milton, he urged that education "supply the succeeding Age with Men qualified to serve the Publick with Honour to themselves, and to their Country." Here he was unlike President Clap, who in 1754 explained that "the Original End and design of Colleges was to instruct and train up persons for the Work of the ministry.... The great design of founding this school [Yale] was to educate ministers in our own way." As early as 1722, in Dogood Paper No. IV, Franklin caricatured sardonically the narrow theological curriculum of Harvard College. Existing for the citizenry rather than the clergy, offering instruction in English as well as Latin and Greek, in mechanics, physical culture, natural history, gardening, mathematics, and arithmetic rather than in sectarian theology, Franklin's Academy was to be more secular and utilitarian than any other school in the provinces. Indeed, Rev. George Whitefield lamented the want of "aliquid Christi" in the curriculum, "to make it as useful as I would desire it might be."

Franklin stressed the need for the acquisition of a clear and concise literary style. He observed: "Reading should also be taught, and pronouncing, properly, distinctly, emphatically; not with an even Tone, which under-does, nor a theatrical, which over-does Nature." Hence he reflected the virtues of neoclassic perspicuity and correctness. (These plans he more fully expressed in his Idea of the English School, published in 1751.) As he grew older he apparently became less tolerant of the teaching of the ancient languages in colonial schools: in Observations Relative to the Intentions of the Original Founders of the Academy of Philadelphia (1789), he charged that the Latin school had swallowed the English and that he was hence "surrounded by the Ghosts of my dear departed Friends, beckoning and urging me to use the only Tongue now left us, in demanding that Justice to our Grandchildren, that our Children has [sic] been denied." The Latin and Greek languages he considered "in no other light than as the Chapeau bras of modern Literature." Like Emerson's, his opposition was to linguistic study rather than to the classical ideas.

Although he emphasized the study of science and mechanics, it is important to observe that he kept his balance. He warned Miss Mary Stevenson in 1760: "There is ... a prudent Moderation to be used in Studies of this kind. The Knowledge of Nature may be ornamental, and it may be useful; but if, to attain an Eminence in that, we neglect the Knowledge and Practice of essential Duties, we deserve Reprehension." Not without reserve did he champion the Moderns; remembering several provocative scientific observations in Pliny, he wrote to William Brownrigg (Nov. 7, 1773): "It has been of late too much the mode to slight the learning of the ancients." He would not agree with the enthusiastic and trenchant disciple of the moderns, M. Fontenelle, that "We are under an obligation to the ancients for having exhausted almost all the false theories that could be found." Although he would agree that the empirical method of acquiring knowledge is more reasonable than authoritarianism reared on syllogistic foundations, and with Cowley that

Bacon has broke that scar-crow Deity ["Authority"],

he was not blithely confident that science and the knowledge gained from experimentation would create a more rigorously moral race. He wrote to Priestley in 1782: "I should rejoice much, if I could once more recover the Leisure to search with you into the Works of Nature; I mean the inanimate, not the animate or moral part of them, the more I discover'd of the former, the more I admir'd them; the more I know of the latter, the more I am disgusted with them." He often suggested, "As Men grow more enlightened," but seldom did this clause carry more than an intellectual connotation. Progress in knowledge did not on the whole suggest to Franklin progress in morals or the general progress of mankind.

Essentially classical in morality, extolling a temperance like that of Xenophon, Epictetus, Cicero, Socrates, and Aristotle, Franklin could not cheerily champion the moderns without serious reservations. Considering only progress in knowledge, man may be considered as pedetentim progredientes, but, Franklin thought, man seemed to have found it easier to conquer lightning than himself. If science and other contemporaneous knowledge detracted from cosmic terror, it did not solve the problem of the mystery of evil and sin: like Shakespeare, Franklin was perplexed by the inexplicability and ruthlessness of Man's potential and actual malevolence. Thus in stressing utility and vocational adaptiveness, Franklin did not forget to stress the need for development of character, man's internal self, and here he did not find the ancients dispensable. If unlike Socrates in his studies of physical nature, he was like the Athenian gadfly in his quest for moral perfection in the teeth of "perpetual temptation," in his strenuous and sober effort to know himself. Too little attention has been paid Franklin's Hellenic sobriety—even as it has had too meagre an influence. Let Molière challenge, "The ancients are the ancients, we are the people of today"; Franklin, although confident that he could learn more of physical nature from Newton than from Aristotle, was not convinced that the wisdom of Epictetus or the Golden Verses of Pythagoras were less salutary than the wit of his own age. A modern in his confidence in the progress of knowledge, Franklin, approaching the problem of morality, wisely saw the ancients and moderns as complementary. Aware of the continuity of the mind and race, he was not willing to dismiss the ancients as fit to be imitated. Yet he failed to discover in the welter of egoistic men any continuous moral progress, although, unlike the determinists, he thought that the individual could improve himself through self-knowledge and self-control. Unlike contemporary exponents of the "original genius" cult who scorned industrious rational study and conformity, Franklin as an educational theorist was the exponent of reason and of conscious intellectual industry and thrift; he would mediate between the study of nature and of man, and, like Aristotle, he would rely not so much upon individualistic self-expression as upon a purposeful imitation of those men in the past who had led useful and happy lives.

III. Franklin's Literary Theory and Practice

Uniting the "wit of Voltaire with the simplicity of Rousseau," Franklin achieved a style "only surpassed by the unimprovable Hobbes of Malmesbury, the paragon of perspicuity." Characterized by simplicity, order, and a trenchant pointedness, his prose style was "a principal means" of his "advancement."

He was "extreamly ambitious ... to be a tolerable English writer." In the Autobiography he recalls that he read books in "polemic divinity," Plutarch's Lives (probably Dryden's translation), Pilgrims Progress, Defoe's Essays upon Several Projects, Mather's Essays to do Good, Xenophon's Memorabilia, the Spectator papers, and the writings of Shaftesbury and Collins.

Born in Boston, he knew the Bible, characterized by the apostle of Augustan correctness, Jonathan Swift, as possessing "that simplicity, which is one of the greatest perfections in any language." If Franklin did not achieve its "sublime eloquence," he approximated at intervals its directness and simplicity. In reading Defoe's Essays he learned that Queen Anne's England urged that writers be "as concise as possible" and avoid all "superfluous crowding in of insignificant words, more than are needful to express the thing intended." (It is possible that Defoe's efforts "to polish and refine the English tongue," to avoid "all irregular additions that ignorance and affectation have introduced," influenced Franklin in favor of "correctness" and against provincialisms.) Defoe's "explicit, easy, free, and very plain" rhetoric is Franklin's.

After Franklin's father warned him that his arguments were not well-ordered and trenchantly expressed, he desperately sought to acquire a convincing prose style. In 1717 James, Franklin's elder brother, returned from serving a printer's apprenticeship in London. James had known and been attracted to Augustan England, the England of the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian. Familiar is Franklin's narrative of how he patterned his fledgling style on the pages of the Spectator papers, and learned to satisfy his father—and himself. Like the neoclassicists, Franklin learned to write by imitation, by respectfully subordinating himself to those he recognized as masters, and not, like the romanticists, by expressing his own ego in revolt against convention and conformity to traditional standards. The group who supplied copy for James's New England Courant, we are told, were trying to write like the Spectator. "The very look of an ordinary first page of the Courant is like that of the Spectator page." In the Dogood Papers (1722) and the Busy-Body series (1728) Franklin's writings show a literal indebtedness to the style and even substance of the Spectator. If, after the Busy-Body essays, Franklin's writings bear little resemblance to the elegance and glow of the Spectator, he did learn from it a long-remembered lesson in orderliness. From the Spectator he may have learned to temper wit with morality and morality with wit; he may have learned the neoclassic objection to the "unhappy Force of an Imagination, unguided by the Check of Reason and Judgment"; he may have acquired his distrust of foreign phrases when English ones were as good, or better, insisting on the use of native English undefiled. It is interesting but perhaps futile to conjecture to what degree Franklin at this time, on reading Spectator No. 160, "On Geniuses" (warning against a servile imitation of ancient authors, a warning which anticipates the cult of original geniuses of later decades), would have been predisposed against ancient literature and languages. If the Spectator was partially responsible for his pleasantries at the expense of Greek in Dogood Paper No. IV, his attitude toward the ancients is more ostensibly the result of his later preoccupation with the sciences, and of contact with representatives of the deistic time-spirit whose faith in progress led them to underrate the past.

When Franklin went to live in London in 1724-1726, and became familiar with such men of science as Dr. Henry Pemberton and others, he must have become aware of ideals of prose style not a little unlike those practised by the preachers of his Boston. In Boston he had heard (and in the polemical works in his father's library, read) sermons couched in a style satirized in Hudibras as a "Babylonish dialect ... of patched and piebald languages" (ll. 93 ff.). Sensing the disparity between the seventeenth-century prose styles and the empirical, logical, and orderly method of science, the Royal Society not long after its inception inaugurated a campaign for a clarity akin to the pattern urged by Hobbes: "The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, Reason is the Pace, Encrease of Science the way; and the benefit of man-kind the end. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering among innumerable absurdities." Summarizing the intent of the stylistic reformations instituted by the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat urged writers "to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words ... a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars." It is asserted that the program of the Royal Society "called for stylistic reform as loudly as for reformation in philosophy. Moreover, this attitude was in the public mind indissolubly associated with the Society." It is only reasonable to infer that Franklin (as a member of the Royal Society and as founder of the American Philosophical Society) was alive to the movement toward "undefiled plainness" which had for half a century been gathering momentum.

Even as Cartesianism in France is said to have fostered logic and lucidity of detail, and that which is universally valid and recognized by all men, and that art which is aloof to the non-human world, so in England may Newtonianism (which overthrew Cartesianism) have conditioned writers to develop a uniform style, purged of tenuous rhetorical devices. An age characterized by a worship of reason, which was supposed to be identical in all men, an age deferring to the general mind of man, would be hostile to the rhetorical caprices of those expressing their private, idiosyncratic enthusiasms. If the neoclassic apotheosis of simplicity and freedom from intricacy was the result of a "rationalistic anti-intellectualism," expressed in terms of hostility to belabored proof of ideas known to the general will, then it would seem that one of the factors sturdily conditioning this hostility was Newtonian science. Admitting that reason leads to uniformitarianism, one may recall that the processes of science are discoverable by reason, and that such a cosmologist as Newton illustrated mathematically and empirically a system, grand in its lucidity, and capable of being apprehended by all through reason. If the deistic fear of "enthusiasm" in religion—the individual will prevailing against the consensus gentium—parallels, according to Professor Lovejoy, the neoclassic fear of feeling and the unrestrained play of imagination in art, then Newtonian science, as it reinforced deism, was no negligible factor in discrediting enthusiasm, and hence indirectly militating against originality, emotion, and the unchecked imagination. Is it not conceivable that the Newtonian cosmology, popularized by a vast discipleship, challenged the scientists and men of letters alike to achieve a corresponding order, clarity, and simplicity in poetry and prose?

After Franklin's return from London, he reinforced his Addison-like style with the rhetorical implications of science and Newtonianism: in his Preface (1729) to the Pennsylvania Gazette he observed that an editor ought to possess a "great Easiness and Command of Writing and Relating Things clearly and intelligibly, and in few Words." Good writing, in Franklin's opinion, "should proceed regularly from things known to things unknown [surely the method of all inductive reasoning and science] distinctly and clearly without confusion. The words used should be the most expressive that the language affords, provided that they are the most generally understood. Nothing should be expressed in two words that can be as well expressed in one; that is, no synonyms should be used, or very rarely, but the whole should be as short as possible, consistent with clearness; the words should be so placed as to be agreeable to the ear in reading; summarily it should be smooth, clear, and short, for the contrary qualities are displeasing." Like the members of the Royal Society, Franklin would bring the words of written discourse "as near as possible to the spoken." In 1753 he observed: "If my Hypothesis [concerning waterspouts] is not the Truth itself it is [at] least as naked: For I have not with some of our learned Moderns, disguis'd my Nonsense in Greek, cloth'd it in Algebra or adorn'd it with Fluxions. You have it in puris naturalibus." He briefly summarized his rhetorical ideal, in a letter to Hume: "In writings intended for persuasion and for general information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression in the least obscure is a fault."

Unlike Jefferson, "no friend to what is called purism, but a zealous one" to neology, Franklin had an inveterate antipathy toward the use of colloquialisms, provincialisms, and extravagant innovations. In another letter to Hume, he hoped that "we shall always in America make the best English of this Island [Britain] our standard." If he did not hold the typical eighteenth-century view that "English must be subjected to a process of classical regularizing," neither did he, with his friend Joseph Priestley, espouse the idea of correctness, dependent only on usage. In general, he seems to have had a tendency toward purism; it is not unlikely that as a youth he was influenced by Swift's Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue. Striving for correctness, and the avoidance of "affected Words or high-flown Phrases" he approximated the curiosa felicitas of the neoclassicists.

A solid neoclassicist in style. Franklin accepted the canon of imitation as it was imperfectly understood in the eighteenth century. To the extent, however, that the models were conceived of as approximating the consensus gentium, fragments illustrating universal reason, there may be little disparity between neoclassic imitation and Aristotle's use of the term in the sense of imitating a higher ethical reality. His own life, Franklin thought, (with the exception of a few "errata") was "fit to be imitated." A. H. Smyth notes, perhaps extravagantly, "Nothing but the 'Autobiography' of Benvenuto Cellini, or the 'Confessions' of Rousseau, can enter into competition with it." This may suggest a clue to the durable nature of Franklin's life-tale. Cellini, it is true, was tremendously alive to Benvenuto, even as Michel de Montaigne was interested in his own whims, but neither Cellini, nor Montaigne, nor Franklin, could have penned the Confessions, the thesis of which is that if Rousseau is not better than other men at least he is different. Cellini, Montaigne, and Franklin, on the other hand, while allowing us to see their fancies and singular biases, tended to emphasize those qualities which they held in common with their age, nation, and even the continuity of mankind. Montaigne, it will be remembered, sought to express la connaissance de l'homme en général. With no aspirations to become an original genius, Franklin, both in his prose style and his yearning for perfection, sought the guidance of models, which he conceived as embodying universal reason. Had he been a writer of epics he would with Pope have acquired "from ancient rules a just esteem"—when the rules were, in his mind, "according to nature."

Likewise Franklin is representative of the Enlightenment in his description of the province of the imagination. It is an axiom that "the belief that the imagination ought to be kept in check by reason, pervades the critical literature of the first half of the eighteenth century." Franklin observes that poetasters above all need instruction on how to govern "Fancy [Imagination] with Judgement." He implies that imagination is a power lending an air of unreality to a creation, often like "the Effect of some melancholy Humour." He feared that the unchecked fancy would vitiate his ideals of simplicity and correctness, and a sober and practical argument.

Posing as no original genius independent of the wisdom of the ages, confessing that "from a child" he "was fond of reading" and that as a youth "reading was the only amusement" he allowed himself, Franklin was not backward in cataloguing many of the authors who helped to motivate his thought. He seems to have been acquainted with portions of Plato, Aesop, Pliny, Xenophon, Herodotus, Epictetus, Vergil, Horace, Tacitus, Seneca, Sallust, Cicero, Tully, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bacon, Dryden, Tillotson, Rabelais, Bunyan, Fénelon, Chevalier de Ramsay, Pythagoras, Waller, Defoe, Addison and Steele, William Temple, Pope, Swift, Voltaire, Boyle, Algernon Sidney, Trenchard and Gordon, Young, Mandeville, Locke, Shaftesbury, Collins, Bolingbroke, Richardson, Whiston, Watts, Thomson, Burke, Cowper, Darwin, Rowe, Rapin, Herschel, Paley, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, Hume, Robertson, Lavoisier, Buffon, Dupont de Nemours, Whitefield, Pemberton, Blackmore, John Ray, Petty, Turgot, Priestley, Paine, Mirabeau, Quesnay, Raynal, Morellet, and Condorcet, to suggest only the more prominent. Such a catalogue tends to discredit the all too common idea that the untutored tradesman was torpid to the information and wisdom found in books.

If his prose style shows none of the delicate rhythms and haunting imagery of the prose born of the romantic movement, it is nevertheless far from pedestrian. If it seems devoid of imaginative splendor, it is not lacking in force and persuasion. After one has noted Franklin's canon of simplicity and order, his insistence on correctness, his assumed role as Censor Morum, his acceptance of the doctrine of imitation and the use of imagination guided by reason, one returns to the question of the degree to which the ideals of rhetoric fostered by the men of science may have helped to motivate Franklin's prose style, and to what degree his acceptance of deism augmented by Newtonianism may have furnished him with a rationale which lent sanction to his demand for a simple style.

Sir Humphrey Davy found in Franklin's scientific papers a language lucid and decorous, "almost as worthy of admiration as the doctrine" they contain. S. G. Fisher buoyantly maintained that Franklin's "is the most effective literary style ever used by an American." After reading Franklin's paper on stoves he was "inclined to lay down the principle that the test of literary genius is the ability to be fascinating about stoves." Whether he writes soberly (albeit tempered by Gallic fancy) of the mutability of life, as in The Ephemera, or of sophisticated social amenities, as in the letters to Madame Brillon and Madame Helvétius, or in his memoirs, in which solid fact follows solid fact, sifted by the years of good fortune, Franklin's style never loses its compelling charm and vigor. If he never wrote (or uttered) less than was demanded by the nature of his subject, neither would he have disgusted the Clerk of Oxenford who

Nought o word spak he more than was nede.

He was no formal literary critic such as Boileau, Lessing, or Coleridge, and no acknowledged arbiter of taste, such as Dr. Johnson. Yet Franklin, in voluminous practice, enjoying tremendous international vogue, proved that his theories bore the acid test of effectiveness. Indirectly he challenged his readers to honor principles of rhetoric which could so trenchantly serve the demands of his catholic pen, and make him one of the most widely read of all Americans.

IV. Franklin as Printer and Journalist

Franklin was a printer chiefly because of two proclivities which were basic in his personality from childhood to old age—a bent toward practical mechanics ("handiness") and a fondness for reading (bookishness). Further, he was a journalist and publisher chiefly because he was a printer.

A thorough printer is both an artisan and an artist; he has both the manual dexterity of a good workman and the aesthetic appreciation of the amateur of beauty. Franklin always took pride in his ability to handle the printer's tools, from the time when, at the age of twelve, he became "a useful hand" in the print shop of his brother James, until the very end of his life. One of the pleasantest anecdotes of the old printer is that which tells of his visit to the famous Didot printing establishment in Paris, when he stepped up to a press, and motioning the printer aside, himself took possession of the machine and printed off several sheets. Then the American ambassador smiled at the gaping printers and said, "Do not be astonished, Sirs, it is my former business."

Even in his boyhood, it was a pleasure to Franklin "to see good workmen handle their tools," and he tells in his autobiography how much this feeling for tools meant to him throughout his life. His flair for invention, though founded on this same "handiness," was not always directed toward the production of tools; but in the two fields of "philosophical" experimentation and the printing trade, his dexterity and cleverness in making needful instruments and devices were invaluable.

Partly because of the fact that printers' supplies must be imported from England, and partly because of his natural tool-mindedness, Franklin manufactured more of his own supplies than any other American commercial printer before or since. He cast type, made paper molds, mixed inks, made contributions to press building, did engraving, forwarded experiments in stereotyping, and worked at logotypy. Long after he had retired from the printing business. Franklin continued to influence developments in that field. It is a common saying among printers that one never forgets the smell of printer's ink. Franklin kept touch with his former business through various partnerships, through correspondence with printer friends, through the establishment of a private press in his home at Passy during his ambassadorship to France, and through his personal supervision of the education of his grandson in "the art preservative of arts." "I am too old to follow printing again myself," he wrote to a friend, "but, loving the business, I have brought up my grandson Benjamin to it, and have built and furnished a printing-house for him, which he now manages under my eye."

As to just how adept Franklin was on the distinctively aesthetic side of printing, critics must differ. It has been customary to assume that the output of his shop was far superior to that of the several other printing houses in the colonies. Such broad generalizations are misleading, however; and it is certainly possible to find Parks and even Bradford imprints which compare favorably enough with some of Franklin's. In typography, the phase of printing which affords the widest aesthetic scope, Franklin was by no means a genius. William Parks, of Annapolis and later of Williamsburg, was at least Franklin's peer during the seventeen-thirties and 'forties in the artistic arrangement of type; and William Goddard, who practiced the art a little later in several of the colonies, was his superior. Yet Franklin was an outstanding printer in a region blessed with few good presses. The difference between him and most of the other colonial printers may be stated thus: Franklin maintained a high average of workmanlike (though not inspired) performance, while his contemporaries were inclined to be slovenly, inaccurate, and generally careless.

In the later years of his life Franklin gave no little attention to fine printing, though as a dilettante rather than as a commercial printer. In France he was friendly with François Ambroise Didot, the greatest French printer of his times, and put his grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache to school in Didot's establishment. With Pierre Simon Fournier, who ranked next to Didot among French printers, Franklin corresponded from time to time. In England the American printer maintained touch with prominent practitioners of his craft from the time of his first visit abroad until his death. Samuel Palmer, Franklin's first London employer, was but a mediocre printer; but John Watts, to whose house the young American went after a year at Palmer's, stood much higher in his vocation. Both Watts and Palmer were patrons of William Caslon, from whom Franklin later bought type. But John Baskerville, Caslon's rival, was the founder whom Franklin did most to encourage and to bring to the attention of discriminating printers. The English printer with whom Franklin was upon the terms of greatest intimacy—and that for many years—was William Strahan, member of Parliament, King's Printer, and a successful publisher. Strahan was a man of parts, a great letter writer, and a friend of David Hume and Samuel Johnson. The latter referred to the Strahan shop as "the greatest printing house in London." Another correspondent was John Walter, logotyper, press builder, and founder of the London Times. In all his letters to his printer friends, Franklin shows not only a lively interest in improvements and inventions for the trade, but also an increasing interest in the artistic side of printing and type-founding.

The "bookish inclination" which Franklin credits in the Autobiography with being the quality that decided his father to make a printer of him, appertained to the trade because printers were commonly publishers and sellers of books and pamphlets, and often editors and publishers of newspapers. How the young Franklin satisfied his literary urge in the print shop of his brother James is a familiar story, and his theories of writing are traced in another section of this Introduction. The contribution to literature which he made as a publisher of original books is negligible, but he did his part both as publisher and bookseller to spread that bookishness to which he felt that he owed much of his own success. Like all publishers before and since, he was forced by his customers to issue books of a lower sort than he could fully approve in order to float editions of more desirable works: he tells plaintively of his public's preference for "Robin Hood's Songs" over the Psalms of his beloved Watts. In still another way, Franklin promoted the bookishness of his community: he founded the first of American circulating libraries, and he built up for himself one of the largest private libraries in the country.

Journalism was a common by-product of the printing trade. When Franklin and Meredith took over Keimer's The Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences: and Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, there were six other newspapers being published in the colonies—three in Boston and one each in New York, Philadelphia, and Annapolis. The Williamsburg press had a newspaper a few years later, but the other two printing towns in the colonies had to wait some thirty years for journalistic ventures—a newspaper in New London and a magazine in Woodbridge.

The fundamental question to be asked in analyzing a newspaper may be stated thus: What is the editorial conception of the primary function of the press? Franklin had received his early newspaper training on his brother's New England Courant, which frankly acknowledged entertainment as its primary function and relegated news to a minor place. Of his contemporaries in 1729, the oldest, the Boston News-Letter, held the publication of news to be its sole function; while the Boston Gazette, the New York Gazette, and the Maryland Gazette took much the same attitude. In the main, they were rather dreary reprints of stale European news. Bradford's American Weekly Mercury, in Philadelphia, gave somewhat more attention to local news; but with the exception of the Franklin-Breintnal Busy-Body papers, contributed in 1728-1729 in order to bring Keimer to his knees, the Mercury gave very little attention to the entertainment function. Only the New England Weekly Journal, carrying on something of the tradition of the old Courant, dealt largely in entertainment as well as in news. This bi-functional policy was the one adopted by Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette, which was always readable and amusing at the same time that it was newsy.

Of the editorial or opinion-forming function of newspapers there was little evidence in Franklin's paper, at least in the field of politics. The obvious reason was the active governmental censorship. It remained for John Peter Zenger to introduce that function into colonial journalism in the New York Weekly Journal in 1733: his struggle for the freedom of the press is well known. But the Pennsylvania Gazette never became in any degree a political organ while Franklin edited it; and his first political pronouncement was published not in his paper but in a pamphlet, Plain Truth, issued just before his retirement from editorial duties.

Two common misconceptions in regard to Franklin's newspaper call for correction: (1) The Pennsylvania Gazette was not connected as forerunner or ancestor with the Saturday Evening Post. The Gazette, a newspaper to the end, closed its file in 1815; the Post, a story paper, issued its Volume I, Number 1, in 1821. Throughout much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Post carried the legend "Founded in 1821" on its front page; and not until after the Curtis Publishing Company bought it in 1897 did it begin to print the words "Founded A.D. 1728 by Benjamin Franklin" on its cover. The sole connection of the Post with Franklin lies in the fact that it was first issued from an office at 53 Market Street which Franklin had once occupied. (2) Franklin did not publish a "chain" of newspapers. A "chain" implies some kind of co-operative connection between the various members, but the several papers which Franklin helped to finance had no such relationship. In some he was a six-years partner, keeping his interest until the resident publisher, usually a former employee, was established; to some he made loans or, in the case of relatives, gifts.

One of his journalistic ventures which is not mentioned in the Autobiography is the General Magazine, of 1741. It missed by three days being the first of American magazines: Andrew Bradford had learned of Franklin's project and, with his American Magazine, beat him in the race for priority. But the American Magazine was a failure in three monthly numbers, while Franklin's periodical, though more readable, died after its sixth issue. As an initial episode in the history of American magazines, the General Magazine has a certain eminence; but Franklin's neglect of it when writing his Autobiography, after the events of nearly fifty busy years had apparently crowded it out of his memory, is sufficient commentary on its unimportance.

To the end of his life Franklin was proud of his trade of printing, with its handmaiden journalism. His last will and testament begins: "I, Benjamin Franklin, Printer...." Though clearly not the chief interest of his life, it was one to which he was fundamentally and consistently attached.

V. Franklin's Economic Views

An eighteenth-century colonial who wrote on paper money, interest, value, and insurance, who discussed a theory of population and the economic aspects of the abolition of slavery, who championed free trade, and who probably lent Adam Smith some information used in his Wealth of Nations, who was an empirical agriculturist, who was "half physiocratic before the rise of the physiocratic school"—such a colonial has, indeed, claims to being America's pioneer economist.

Franklin's hatred of negro slavery was conditioned by more than his humanitarian bias. It may be seen that his indictments of black cargoes were the resultant of an interplay of his convictions that economically slavery was enervating and dear and of his abstract sense of religious and ethical justice. One should not minimize, however, his distrust of slavery on other than economic bases. He was acutely influenced by the Quakers of his colony who, like gadflies, were stinging slaveholders to an awareness of their blood traffic, and by the rise of English humanitarianism. In his youth he had published (first edition, 1729; second, 1730), with no little danger to himself and his business, Ralph Sandiford's A Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times, an Amos-like vituperative attack on the "unrighteous Gain" of slaveholding. He also published works of Benjamin Lay and John Woolman. Friend of Anthony Benezet, Benjamin Rush, Fothergill, and Granville Sharp, and after 1760 a member of Dr. Bray's Associates, he lent his voice and pen to denouncing slavery on religious and ethical grounds; and in England, after the James Sommersett trial (1772), he "began to agitate for parliamentary action" toward the abolishing of slavery in all parts of the British Empire. Following the Sommersett verdict, Franklin contributed a brief article to the London Chronicle (June 18-20, 1772) in which he denounced the "constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men." Losing his temperamental urbanity when observing "the diabolical Commerce," "the abominable African Trade," he recollects approvingly that a certain French moralist could "not look on a piece of sugar without conceiving it stained with spots of human blood!" Conditioned by Quakerism, by his deism, which suggested that "the most acceptable Service we render him [God] is doing good to his other Children," and by the eighteenth century's growing repugnance toward suffering and pain, Franklin (although he took little part in legislating against slavery in Pennsylvania) became through his writing a model to be imitated, especially in France, by a people more intent on becoming humane than saintly.

His letter to Anthony Benezet (London, July 14, 1773), however, clearly indicates that for economic, as well as humanitarian reasons, he had sought freedom for slaves:

I am glad to hear that such humane Sentiments prevail so much more generally than heretofore, that there is Reason to hope our Colonies may in time get clear of a Practice that disgraces them, and, without producing any equivalent Benefit, is dangerous to their very Existence.

Franklin's view of the economic disabilities of slavery is best expressed in Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc. (1751). Arguing against British restraint of colonial manufactures, he observed that "'tis an ill-grounded Opinion that by the Labour of slaves, America may possibly vie in Cheapness of Manufactures with Britain. The Labour of Slaves can never be so cheap here as the Labour of working Men is in Britain." With arithmetic based on empirical scrutiny of existing conditions, resembling the mode of economists following Adam Smith, he charged that slaves are economically unprofitable due to the rate of interest in the colonies, their initial price, their insurance and maintenance, their negligence and malevolence. In addition, "Slaves ... pejorate the Families that use them; the white Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry." Slaves are hardly economical investments in terms of colonial character. Looking to the "English Sugar Islands" where Negroes "have greatly diminish'd the Whites," and deprived the poor of employment, "while a few Families acquire vast Estates," he realized that "population was limited by means of subsistence," which foreshadowed the more pessimistic progressions of Malthus. Having just maintained that "our People must at least be doubled every 20 Years," and intuitively suspecting that the means for subsistence progress more slowly, he exclaimed, "Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?" He saw mere economic extravagance as the short-time effect of slavery; he feared that the long-time effect would be to create an aristocracy subsisting at the head of a vast brood of slaves and poor whites.

It was inevitable in a state having no staple crop, such as rice, sugar, tobacco, or cotton, which offered at least economic justification for negro slavery, that abolition of slaves should be urged partially on purely economic grounds, and that Pennsylvania should have been the first colony to legislate in favor of abolition, in 1780. Although one may feel that economic determinism is overly simple and audacious in its doctrinaire interpretations, one can not refuse to see the extent to which economics tended to buttress humane and religious factors in Franklin's mind to make him a persuasive champion of abolition.

A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency has been appraised as "by far the ablest and most original treatise that had been written on the subject up to 1728 and was probably the most widely read work on paper currency that appeared in colonial America." That Franklin's interest in paper money was not unique, one may gather from the fact that between 1714 and 1721 "nearly thirty pamphlets appeared" on this subject in Massachusetts alone. One of the 1728 theses at Harvard, answered in the affirmative, was: "Does the issue of paper money contribute to the public good?" "Since there was a scarcity of circulating medium, caused by the constant drain of specie for export," explains Mr. D. R. Dewey, "it is not strange that projects for converting credit into wealth should have sprung up in the colonies." Franklin argued in his Modest Enquiry that (1) "A plentiful Currency will occasion Interest to be low," (2) it "will occasion the Trading Produce to bear a good Price," (3) it "will encourage great Numbers of labouring and Handicrafts Men to come and settle in the Country," and (4) it "will occasion a less consumption of European Goods, in proportion to the Number of the People." Thus he saw paper money as a "Morrison's Pill," promising to cure all economic ills. It has been suggested that as a printer Franklin naturally would favor issues of paper money. In view of his later apostasy one should note that in this essay Franklin apparently accepted the current mercantilist notions, best expressed here in his conviction that paper money will secure a favorable balance of trade. Demands for emissions of paper money were inevitable in a colony in the grip of such a restrictive commercial policy as British mercantilism. It must be observed, however, that Franklin differed from the proper mercantilists to the extent that simple valuable metals were not to be measures of value. Deriving his idea from Sir William Petty, Franklin took labor as the true measure of value,—a position later held by Karl Marx. In his preoccupation with the growth of manufactures and favorable balances of trade, Franklin gave no suggestions that at least by 1767 he was to become an exponent of agrarianism and free trade. One wonders to what extent his warnings against the purchase of "unnecessary Householdstuff, or any superfluous thing," his inveterate emphasis on industry and frugality, were conditioned by his view that such indulgence would essentially cause a preponderance of imports, hence casting against them an unfavorable trade balance.

In 1751 Parliament passed an act regulating in the New England colonies the issue of paper money and preventing them "from adding a legal tender clause thereto"; in 1764 Parliament forbade issue of legal tender money in any of the colonies. As a member of the Pennsylvania assembly, Franklin had successfully sponsored issues of paper money; in London, following the 1764 act, he urged that one of the causes breeding disrespect for Parliament was "the prohibition of making paper money among [us]." Economics blends into politics when we remember that the 1764 restraining legislation was "one of the factors in the subsequent separation, for it caused some of the suffering that inevitably follows in the wake of an unsound monetary policy whose onward course is suddenly checked." In 1766 Franklin was yet an ardent imperialist, who sought politically and economically to keep whole "that fine and noble China Vase, the British Empire." His Remarks and Facts Concerning American Paper Money (1767), in answer to Lord Hillsborough's Board of Trade report circulated among British merchants, is an ardent plea for legal tender paper money. He argued that British merchants (since yearly trade balances had regularly been in their favor) had not been deprived of gold and silver, that paper money had worked in the Colonies, and that British merchants had lost no more in their colonial dealings than was inevitable in war times. Franklin concluded that since there were no mines in the colonies, paper money was a necessity (arguing here very shrewdly that even English silver "is obliged to the legal Tender for Part of its Value"). Hence, at least for colonies deserving it, the mother country should take off the restraint on legal tender. What Franklin seems not to have known and what the merchants had actually felt (they had their accounts staring at them) was that in the past, especially after 1750, much of the legal tender was in effect nothing but inconvertible fiat money. Mr. Carey quotes from an uncollected item, Franklin's "The Legal Tender of Paper Money in America," in which he threatened that "if the colonies were not allowed to issue legal-tender notes there was no way in which they could retain hard money except by boycotting English goods." Franklin suggested (to S. Cooper, April 22, 1779) that depreciation may not be unmixed evil, since it may be viewed as a tax: "It should always be remembered, that the original Intention was to sink the Bills by Taxes, which would as effectually extinguish the Debt as an actual Redemption." Not a little Machiavellian for one who was not blind to the sanctity of contracts!

With the Revolution and the attendant depreciation in currency, Franklin tended to warn against over-issues. Like Governor Hutchinson, who said that "the morals of the people depreciate with the currency," Franklin confessed in 1783 "the many Mischiefs, the injustices, the Corruption of Manners, &c., &c., that attended a depreciating Currency." There is no evidence to show that Franklin dissented from the conservative prohibition in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 against issues of legal tender paper.

Deborah Logan (in a letter in 1829) stated that Franklin "once told Dr. Logan that the celebrated Adam Smith, when writing his 'Wealth of Nations,' was in the habit of bringing chapter after chapter as he composed it, to himself, Dr. Price and others of the literati; then patiently hear [sic] their observations, and profit by their discussion and criticism—even sometimes submitting to write whole chapters anew, and even to reverse some of his propositions." James Parton observed that the allusions to the colonies which "constitute the experimental evidence of the essential truth of the book" were supplied by Franklin. But Rae reasonably counters: "It ought of course to be borne in mind that Smith had been in the constant habit of hearing much about the American Colonies and their affairs during his thirteen years in Glasgow from the intelligent merchants and returned planters of that city."

In general, we may conclude that Franklin and Smith were exponents of free trade in proportion as they were reactionaries against British mercantilism. Each in his reaction tended to elevate the function of agriculture beyond reasonable limits. Unlike the physiocrats and Franklin, however, Adam Smith did not hold that, in terms of wealth-producing, manufacturers were sterile. Even if Franklin saw only agriculture as productive, he was not blind to the utility of manufactures, especially after the break with the mother country, when he realized that home industry must be developed to supply the colonial needs formerly satisfied by British exports.

Finally, each was, in varying degrees, an exponent of laissez faire. Since we shall discover that politically Franklin was less a democrat than is often supposed, we may feel that his belief in free trade led him to embrace reservedly the principle of laissez faire, rather than that free trade, an economic concept, was but a fragment of a larger dogma, namely, that government should be characterized by its passivity, frugality, and maximum negligence. V. L. Parrington quotes from George Whately's Principles of Trade, which contained views congenial to Franklin:

When Colbert assembled some wise old merchants of France, and desired their advice and opinion, how he could best serve and promote commerce, their answer, after consultation, was, in three words only, Laissez-nous faire: "Let us alone." It is said by a very solid writer of the same nation, that he is well advanced in the science of politics, who knows the full force of that maxim. Pas trop gouverner: "Not to govern too much!" which, perhaps, would be of more use when applied to trade, than in any other public concern. (Present editors' italics.)

Laissez faire in Franklin's as in Whately's view tended to be synonymous with free trade. Laissez faire was suggested by his insistence on free trade, as he progressively expressed his antipathy for mercantilism, rather than that free trade was simply a natural deduction from a more inclusive economic-political dogma.

Writing to the pro-colonial Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph, whose "sweet Retirement" at Twyford he had long enjoyed, Franklin, seeing no hopes of a reconciliation between the colonies and Great Britain, uttered what marked him as the first American disciple of Quesnay's school of economic thought: "Agriculture is the great Source of Wealth and Plenty. By cutting off our Trade you have thrown us to the Earth, whence like Antaeus we shall rise yearly with fresh Strength and Vigour." Upon learning of the colonists' "Resolutions of Non-Importation" he wrote to "Cousin" Folger that they must promote their own industries, especially those of the "Earth and their Sea, the true Sources of Wealth and Plenty." Learning that the colonists had threatened to boycott English manufacturers by creating their own basic industries, Franklin demurred in a letter to Cadwallader Evans: "Agriculture is truly productive of new wealth; manufacturers only change forms, and whatever value they give to the materials they work upon, they in the mean time consume an equal value in provisions, &c. So that riches are not increased by manufacturing; the only advantage is, that provisions in the shape of manufactures are more easily carried for sale to foreign markets." Positions to be Examined, Concerning National Wealth affords a succinct statement of Franklin's agrarianism. "There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbours. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favour, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry." Dupont de Nemours, as early as 1769, had written: "Who does not know that the English have today their Benjamin Franklin, who has adopted the principles and the doctrines of our French economists?" Before attempting to appraise the real indebtedness of Franklin to the physiocrats, it is well to seek to learn how he came in contact with their ideas, and especially why by the year 1767 he was acutely susceptible to their doctrine. In the summer of 1767, in the company of Sir John Pringle, Franklin went to Paris, not an unknown figure to the French savants, who were acquainted with his scientific papers already translated into French by D'Alibard. That he was feted by the Newtons of the physiocrats, François Quesnay and the elder Mirabeau, as "le Savant, le Geomètre, le Physicien, l'homme à qui la nature permet de dévoiler ses secrets," we are assured, when to De Nemours (July 28, 1768) he writes regretfully: "Be so good as to present my sincere respect to that venerable apostle, Dr. Quesnay, and to the illustrious Ami des Hommes (of whose civilities to me at Paris I retain a grateful remembrance)...." Having missed Franklin in Paris (1767), De Nemours had sent Franklin "un recueil des principaux traités économiques du Docteur Quesnay" and his own Physiocratie (1768), which cast him in the role "of a propagandist of Physiocratie doctrines." Franklin admitted, "I am perfectly charmed with them, and wish I could have stayed in France for some time, to have studied in your school, that I might by conversing with its founders have made myself quite a master of that philosophy." That Franklin was not before 1767 unacquainted with the Économistes we learn when he tells Dupont de Nemours that Dr. Templeman had shown him the De Nemours-Templeman correspondence when the latter was Secretary of the London Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. A second trip to Paris (in 1769) to confer with Barbeu Dubourg, an avowed physiocrat, concerning his forthcoming translation of Franklin's works, served to acquaint him still further with the doctrines of the new school.

Franklin's agrarianism is congruent with physiocracy in as far as he observed that agriculture alone, of the many industries, produced a surplus of wealth after all of the expenses of production had been paid. Each laborer produced more than enough to satisfy his own needs. This surplus the Économistes termed the produit net. A worker in manufactures, it was assumed, consumed foodstuffs and other materials in proportion to the value he created in his manufacturing process. Hence there obviously could be no produit net accruing from manufactures. Like the physiocrats, Franklin felt that manufactures were sterile, to the extent that no new wealth was created. The physiocrats believed, however, that laborers in manufacturing industries could create a produit net if they stinted themselves in consuming foodstuffs, et cetera, but it was argued that this prudential asceticism was not a characteristic habit. To this extent at least the physiocrats were empirical.

Free trade no less than agrarianism characterized physiocracy. Although Franklin indicated his antagonism toward governmental restraint of trade, internal and among nations, in his antipathy toward British mercantilism, it was not until after he became impregnated with French doctrine that he began to express very fully his advocacy of free trade. After Connecticut imposed a 5% duty on goods imported from neighboring colonies, Franklin wrote to Jared Eliot in 1747 that it was likely that the duty would devolve on the consumer and be "only another mode of Taxing" the purchaser. In addition he recognized that smuggling, virtually a colonial art, would cause the "fair Trader" to "be undersold and ruined." He urged that the import duty might suggest selfishness, and might also tend to deter Connecticut commerce. Here, it must be admitted, Franklin did not sanction free trade with a priori appeals to the "natural order," the key in the arch of physiocracy. He rather appealed to the instincts and observations of the prudential tradesman. His Plan for Regulating Indian Affairs (1766), unlike his 1747 letters, suggested (if it did not express concretely) inviolable laws of commerce in the words: "It seems contrary to the Nature of Commerce, for Government to interfere in the Prices of Commodities.... It therefore seems to me, that Trade will best find and make its own Rates; and that Government cannot well interfere, unless it would take the whole Trade into its own hands ... and manage it by its own Servants at its own Risque." To Dupont de Nemours he admitted that British mercantilism had not achieved "that wisdom which sees the welfare of the parts in the prosperity of the whole." To Sir Edward Newenham, representing the County of Dublin, he expressed admiration for Irish efforts to secure freedom of commerce, "which is the right of all mankind." "To enjoy all the advantages of the climate, soil, and situation in which God and nature have placed us, is as clear a right as that of breathing; and can never be justly taken from men but as a punishment for some atrocious crime." Three years before he met Quesnay (though after he had read Dupont de Nemours's letters to Templeman), Franklin sanctioned free trade through appeal to other than utilitarian prudence: first he admitted that British restraint of colonial commerce, for example with the West Indies, will tend to prevent colonists from making remittances for British manufactured goods, since "The Cat can yield but her skin." Then with a suggestion of philosophic generalization he hoped that "In time perhaps Mankind may be wise enough to let Trade take its own Course, find its own Channels, and regulate its own Proportions, etc." Restraint of manufactures "deprive[s] us of the Advantage God & Nature seem to have intended us.... So selfish is the human Mind! But 'tis well there is One above that rules these Matters with a more equal Hand. He that is pleas'd to feed the Ravens, will undoubtedly take care to prevent a Monopoly of the Carrion." Glorifying the husbandman and suggesting that trade restrictions disturb a natural order, Franklin wrote to David Hartley in 1783 that Great Britain has tended to impede "the mutual communications among men of the gifts of God, and rendering miserable multitudes of merchants and their families, artisans, and cultivators of the earth, the most peaceable and innocent part of the human species."

That Franklin was not without his influence in eighteenth-century economic thought we may gather from Dugald Stewart's opinion that "the expressions laissez-faire and, pas trop gouverner are indebted chiefly for their extensive circulation to the short and luminous comments of Franklin, which had so extraordinary an influence on public opinion in the old and new world." Mr. Carey maintains that Franklin, unlike the physiocrats, inveighed against trade regulations because they led to smuggling rather than because to any important degree they violated the "natural order." The physiocrats are tenuous, amorphous, and ambiguous when they seek to define L'Ordre naturel. At times Dupont de Nemours seems to identify it with a primitivistic past. Quesnay, on the other hand, says: "Natural right is indeterminate in a state of nature. The right only appears when justice and labour have been established." Again, he asserts: "By entering society and making conventions for their mutual advantage men increase the scope of natural right without incurring any restriction of their liberties, for this is just the state of things that enlightened reason would have chosen." Natural order is a "providential order": "Its laws are irrevocable, pertaining as they do to the essence of matter and the soul of humanity. They are just the expression of the will of God." According to the physiocrats, the laws of the natural order are "unique, eternal, invariable, and universal." Now it is true that nowhere did Franklin assert that his advocacy of laissez faire and agrarianism was neatly dependent on these a priori bases. Even though this is true, there are references (quoted above) which seem to suggest that trade restrictions are violations of the very nature of things. It is not wholly fanciful (bearing in mind Franklin's adoration of a Deity who is the creator and sustainer of immutable, universal physical laws which together present the mind with the concept of a vast, wonderfully harmonized physical machine) to conjecture to what extent this matchless physical harmony tended to challenge him with the possibility of discovering a parallel economic machine operating according to immutable laws capable of proof and human adaptability.

O. H. Taylor has shown that "The evolution of the idea of 'laws' in economics has closely paralleled its evolution in the natural sciences." In searching for these economic constants, "the economic mechanism was regarded as a wise device of the Creator for causing individuals, while pursuing only their own interests, to promote the prosperity of society; and for causing the right adjustment to one another of supplies, demand, prices, and incomes, to take place automatically, in consequence of the free action of all individuals." After giving due weight to the fact that Franklin saw in the doctrine of the physiocrats trenchant arguments to buttress his attacks on British mercantilism, one has cogent evidence for at least raising the question, To what extent may his apprehension of a demonstrable physical harmony have suggested to his speculative mind an economic analogy?

VI. Franklin's Political Theories

Plague of the Pennsylvania proprietaries, propagandist of the American Revolution, moderator of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin was all through his life a politician and statesman in an age characterized above all by political speculations and changes in the destiny of states. Colonial patriot, "arch rebel of King George III," "idol of the court of Versailles," Franklin was a cyclopedia of political strategy and principles. Only through a genetic survey of Franklin the political theorist can one hope to understand his mind as he changed from imperialist, to revolutionist, to the patriarch of the Constitutional Convention who, like a balance wheel, moderated the extreme party factions.

In the early 1720's, Franklin had breathed a Boston air saturated with discontent between the royal governor and the governed. By 1730 he was printer to the Pennsylvania Assembly and in 1736 was appointed clerk to that body. Yet one learns little of his political biases until 1747, when he published Plain Truth. In 1729 he genially asserted that he was "no Party-man," and in 1746 temperately stated,

Free from the bitter Rage of Party Zeal,
All those we love who seek the publick Weal.

His Plain Truth (November, 1747), directed against the proprietary governor as well as against the Quaker assembly, showed Franklin a party man only if one dedicated to "the publick weal" was a party man. With all respect for the Quaker conscience which checks military activity, Franklin could not, however, condone its virtually prohibiting others from defending the province's border. And the proprietaries had shown an inveterate unwillingness to arm Pennsylvania—a reluctance which did not, however, prevent them from collecting taxes and quitrents. On other questions the governor and his chiefs had to contend with the opposition of the assembly. Without opposition, the proprietary government could serenely kennel itself in its medieval privilege of remaining dumb to an urgent need: one remembers that eighteenth-century proprietary colonies were "essentially feudal principalities, upon the grantees of which were bestowed all the inferior regalities and subordinate powers of legislation which formerly belonged to the counts palatine, while provision was also made for the maintenance of sovereignty in the king [the king paid little attention to Pennsylvania], and for the realization of the objects of the grant." While the government remained inert, Pennsylvania would be a pawn in the steeled hands of the French and their rum-subsidized Indian mercenaries. Appealing to Scripture and common sense, Franklin pleaded for "Order, Discipline, and a few Cannon." Not untruthfully he warned that "we are like the separate Filaments of Flax before the Thread is form'd, without Strength, because without Connection, but Union would make us strong, and even formidable." Since war existed, there was no need to consider him a militarist because he challenged, "The Way to secure Peace is to be prepared for War." In the midst of Plain Truth Franklin uttered what only before the time of Locke could be interpreted in terms of feudal comitatus: he entreated his readers to consider, "if not as Friends, at least as Legislators, that Protection is as truly due from the Government to the People, as Obedience from the People to the Government." Suggestive of the contract theory, this is revolutionary only in a very elementary way. With the French writhing under the Treaty of Paris, with appeals to natural rights and the right of revolution, this once harmless principle took on Gargantuan significance. But Thomas Penn anticipated wisely enough the ultimate implication of Franklin's paper; Penn intuitively saw the march of time: "Mr. Franklin's doctrine that obedience to governors is no more due them than protection to the people, is not fit to be in the heads of the unthinking multitude. He is a dangerous man and I should be glad if he inhabited any other country, as I believe him of a very uneasy spirit. However, as he is a sort of tribune of the people, he must be treated with regard." It is difficult to see how Franklin's passion for order and provincial union, obviously necessary, could have been considered so illiberally subversive of the government. By 1747 Franklin had read in Telemachus that kings exist for the people, not the people for the kings; he must have read Locke's justification of the "Glorious Revolution" and have become aware of the impetus it gave to the British authority of consent in its subsequent constitutional history.

After his first political pamphlet, he widened his horizon from provincial to colonial affairs. Two years before the London Board of Trade demanded that colonial governors hold a conference with the Iroquois, Franklin seems to have devised plans for uniting the several colonies. He was aware of the narrow particularism shown by the provinces; he knew also that since "Governors are often on ill Terms with their Assemblies," no concerted military efforts could be achieved without a military federation. One remembers that as soon as he could think politically he was an imperialist, a lesser William Pitt, and in his Increase of Mankind (1751) could gloat over an envisioned thickly populated America—"What an Accession of Power to the British Empire by Sea as well as Land!" When the Board of Trade, after British efforts to bring the colonies together had failed, demanded that something be done, Franklin was appointed one of the commissioners to meet at Albany in 1754. Like Franklin, Governor Glen had admitted that the colonies were "a Rope of Sand ... loose and inconnected." Franklin's plan, adopted by the commissioners, called for a Governor-General "appointed by the king" and a Grand Council made up of members chosen by the Assembly of each of the colonies, the Governor "to have a negation on all acts of the Grand Council, and carry into execution whatever is agreed on by him and that Council." Surely not a very auspicious beginning for one who later was to favor the legislative over the executive functions of state. The plan included the powers of making Indian treaties of peace and war, of regulating Indian trade and Indian purchases, of stimulating the settling of new lands, of making laws to govern new areas, of raising soldiers, of laying general duties, et cetera. But Franklin did not minimize the lack of cohesion of the colonies. We recollect that "in 1755, at a time when their very existence was threatened by the French, Massachusetts and New York engaged in a bitter boundary controversy leading to riot and bloodshed." The colonies refused to ratify the plan—"their weak Noddles are perfectly distracted," wrote Franklin. He was probably right when he observed in 1789 that had the plan been adopted "the subsequent Separation of the Colonies from the Mother Country might not so soon have happened." The sending of British regulars to America and the resulting efforts at taxation were not least among the sparks which set off the Revolution.

Franklin's Three Letters to Governor Shirley (1754), while expressing no credulous views of the wisdom of the people, maintained in one breath that the colonists were loyal to the Constitution and Crown as ever colonists were and in another that "it is supposed an undoubted right of Englishmen, not to be taxed but by their own consent given through their representatives." (Shirley had apparently written that the Council in the Albany Plan should be appointed by England, and not by the colonial assemblies.) Franklin held for the colonists' right to English civil liberty and the right to enjoy the Constitution. Here again we find a factor later magnified into one of the major causes of the Revolution.

In addition to being lethargic in the defense of the Pennsylvania borders, the proprietor refused "to be taxed except for a trifling Part of his Estate, the Quitrents, located unimprov'd Lands, Money at Interest, etc., etc., being exempted by Instructions to the Governor." Thereupon Franklin turned from colonial affairs (which had indeed proved obstinate) to pressing local matters, when in 1757 he was appointed agent to go to London to demand that the proprietor submit his estates to be taxed. In the Report of the Committee of Aggrievances of the Assembly of Pennsylvania (Feb. 22, 1757) it was charged that the proprietor had violated the royal charter and the colonists' civil rights as Englishmen, and had abrogated their natural rights, rights "inherent in every man, antecedent to all laws." Later it was but a short step from provincial matters to colonial rights of revolution. In this Report we see Franklin associated for the first time expressly with the throne-and-altar-defying concept of natural rights.

Although we have yet to review the evidence which shows that Franklin at one stage in his political career was an arch-imperialist, we need to digress to observe an intellectual factor which, if only fragmentarily expressed in his political thought during his activities in behalf of Pennsylvania liberties, was to become a momentous sanction when during the war he became a diplomat of revolution. From the Stoics, from Cicero, Grotius, Puffendorf, Burlamaqui, and as Rev. Jonathan Mayhew observes, from Plato and Demosthenes, from Sidney, Milton, Hoadley, and Locke; in addition, from Gordon and Trenchard (see Cato's Letters and The Independent Whig), Blackstone, Coke—from these and many others, the colonists derived a pattern of thought known as natural rights, dependent on natural law. There is no better summary of natural rights than the Declaration of Independence; and of it John Adams remarked: "There is not an idea in it but what has been hackneyed in Congress for two years before." Carl Becker pointedly observes: "Where Jefferson got his ideas is hardly so much a question as where he could have got away from them." A characteristic summary of natural law may be found in Blackstone's Commentaries:

This law of nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.

Discoverable only by reason, natural laws are immutable and universal, apprehensible by all men. As Hamilton wrote,

The origin of all civil government, justly established, must be a voluntary compact between the rulers and the ruled, and must be liable to such limitations as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter; for what original title can any man, or set of men, have to govern others, except their own consent? To usurp dominion over a people in their own despite, or to grasp at a more extensive power than they are willing to intrust, is to violate that law of nature which gives every man a right to his personal liberty, and can therefore confer no obligation to obedience.

In a pre-social state, real or hypothetical, men possess certain natural rights, the crown of them, according to Locke, being "the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, which I call by the general name, property." In entering the social state men through free consent are willing to sacrifice fragments of their natural rights in order to gain civil rights. This process would seem tyrannical were one to forget that the surrender is sanctioned by the principle of consent. Men in sacrificing their rights expect from society (i.e., the governors) civil rights and, in addition, protection of their unsurrendered natural rights. A voluntary compact is achieved between the governor and the governed. If laws are fabricated which contravene these, the governed have retained for themselves the right of forcible resistance. A natural inference from these premises is that sovereignty rests with the people. In the colonies this secular social compact was buttressed by the principle of covenants and natural rights within the churches. Sermons became "textbooks of politics." Miss Baldwin has ably illustrated how before 1763 the clergy in Franklin's native New England had popularized the "doctrines of natural right, the social contract, and the right of resistance" as well as "the fundamental principle of American constitutional law, that government, like its citizens, is bounded by law and when it transcends its authority it acts illegally."

In an oration commemorating the Boston massacre Dr. Benjamin Church stated the principle of the compact: "A sense of their wants and weakness in a state of nature, doubtless inclined them to such reciprocal aids and support, as eventually established society." Defining liberty as "the happiness of living under laws of our own making by our personal consent or that of our representatives," he warned that any breach of trust in the governor "effectually absolves subjects from every bond of covenant and peace."

Then, too, Newtonian science buttressed the principle of natural rights. Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated mathematically that the universe was governed by a fagot of immutable, universal, and harmonious physical laws. These were capable of being apprehended through reason. Now even as reason discovered the matchless physical harmony, so could reason, men argued, ferret out unvarying, universal principles of social-political rights. These principles constituted natural rights, natural to the extent that all men had the power, if not the capacity, to discover and learn them through use of their native reason. Newton demonstrated the validity of physical law: Locke sanctioned the supremacy of reason. Since Franklin was himself motivated by Newtonian rationalism and was a student of Locke, there is reason to believe that he was vibrantly aware of the extent to which the scientific-rationalistic ideology lent sanction to man's timeless quest for the certitude of "natural rights," antecedent to all laws.

Franklin's mission to London in 1757 as Pennsylvania agent may be understood through an examination of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (London, 1759). If not written by him, at least "the ideas are his." Convinced that the proprietors "seem to have no regard to the Publick Welfare, so the private Point may be gained—'Tis like Firing a House to have Opportunity of stealing a Trencher," Franklin knew that a brilliant attack had to be made were he to intimidate the proprietary government into assuming its charter responsibilities and granting the colonists what they considered to be inviolable rights. By 1758 his "Patience with the Proprietors is almost tho' not quite spent." A few months later, impatient with unresponsive officials, he wrote to Joseph Galloway: "God knows when we shall see it finish'd, and our Constitution settled firmly on the Foundation of Equity and English Liberty: But I am not discouraged; and only wish my Constituents may have the Patience that I have, and that I find will be absolutely necessary." In 1759 Franklin still found the proprietors "obscure, uncertain and evasive," and was acutely virulent in despising Rev. William Smith, who was in London attacking him and the Quaker Assembly's demands. In the same letter to Galloway he uttered a thought which he sought to develop during his second trip to London as Assembly agent in 1764: "For my part, I must own, I am tired of Proprietary Government, and heartily wish for that of the Crown."

Turning to An Historical Review to learn the political principles sanctioning the Assembly's grievances against its feudal lords, one finds that the colonists conceived it "our duty to defend the rights and privileges we enjoy under the royal charter." Secondly, they reminded the lords that the laws agreed upon in England (prior to the settling of Pennsylvania) were "of the nature of an original compact between the proprietary and the freemen, and as such were reciprocally received and executed." Thirdly, they demanded the right to exercise the "birthright of every British subject," "to have a property of [their] own, in [their] estate, person, and reputation; subject only to laws enacted by [their] own concurrence, either in person or by [their] representatives." Fourthly, they resisted the proprietors on basis of their possession of natural rights, "antecedent to all laws." The editor of the protest charged that "It is the cause of every man who deserves to be free, everywhere." It is ironic that this grievance should have enjoyed the sanction of one who, like Lord Chatham, was an empire builder, one who proudly wrote, "I am a Briton," and even during the time he sought to retrieve the Pennsylvania colonists' lost natural rights, entertained the ideas of a British imperialist. Franklin little saw that the internal Pennsylvania struggle was to be contagious, that the provincial revolt was motivated partially at least by political theories which were to be given expression par excellence when a discontented minority created the Declaration of Independence. In 1760 Franklin had the satisfaction of witnessing the victory of the Assembly over the Proprietors, although he was not unaware that the right to tax feudal lands was less than that right he had already envisioned—the right to become a royal colony.

But Franklin's pleas for charter, constitutional, and natural rights may be misleading if one considers his position as suggestive of doctrinaire republicanism, of Paine's "Government is the badge of our lost innocence," or of Shelley's

Kings, priests, and statesmen blast the human flower.

His political activities assert the rights of the governed against the governor; his writings often indirectly suggest the intemperance of the governed, and the need for something more lasting than mere outer freedom. Like Coleridge, who wrote:

[Man] may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within,

white-locked Father Abraham harangued:

The Taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the Government were the only Ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness, three times as much by our Pride, and four times as much by our Folly; and from these Taxes the Commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an Abatement.

With solid good sense Franklin acknowledged that "happiness in this life rather depends on internals than externals."

His purpose for being in London accomplished, Franklin wrote The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies, and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe (1760). Since "there is evidence that the pamphlet created much contemporary interest," Franklin undoubtedly had some influence in causing the retention of Canada, a retention which "made the American Revolution inevitable." If the release from French terrorism caused the colonists to become myopic toward advantages lent them as a British colony, it is appropriate in view of Franklin's later advocacy of independence and ironic in view of his then imperialistic principles, that he should have written The Interest of Great Britain. Here Franklin, later to be a propagandist of revolution, cast himself in the role of architect of a vast empire. For economic reasons, and for colonial safety, he urged the retention, ridiculing the charge that the colonies were lying in wait to declare their independence from England, if the French were cast out from Canada.

Back in Pennsylvania in 1764 he declared the provincial government "running fast into anarchy and confusion." In his Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation of Our Public Affairs (1764) he set up a sturdy antagonism between "Proprietary Interest and Power, and Popular Liberty." Unlike the "lunatic fringe" of liberals who see "Popular Liberty compatible only with a tendency toward anarchy" Franklin urged that the Pennsylvania government lacked "Authority enough to keep the common Peace." The constitutional nature of proprietary government had lost dignity and hence "suffers in the Opinion of the People, and with it the Respect necessary to keep up the Authority of Government." Almost Burkean in his apology for change, he suggested that the popular party demand "rather and only a Change of Governor, that is, instead of self-interested Proprietaries, a gracious King!" His Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County is a bloody tribute to the lack of authority and police power of the current regime. The Petition to the King for a royal governor maintained that, torn by "armed Mobs," the government was "weak, unable to support its own Authority, and maintain the common internal Peace of the Province."

While petitioning for a crown colony, he found himself in 1765 faced with a larger than provincial interest—Lord Grenville's Stamp Act forced him into the role of one seeking definition of colonial status. Such was his position in his examination (1766) before the House of Commons relative to the repeal of the Stamp Act. Almost brusquely he told his catechizers that even a moderated stamp act could not be enforced "unless compelled by force of arms." With a preface asserting that colonials before 1763 were proud to be called Old-England men, he summarized: "The authority of parliament was allowed to be valid in all laws, except such as should lay internal taxes. It was never disputed in laying duties to regulate commerce." Parliament, in the colonial view, had no right to lay internal taxes because "we are not represented there." Mr. Merriam observes that in advancing this legal and constitutional issue, the colonists "had in short an antiquated theory as to the position and power of Parliament, and a premature theory of Parliamentary representation."

Franklin referred to the Pennsylvania colonial charter to prove that all that was asked for was the "privileges and liberties of Englishmen." When the examiners asked whether the colonists appealing to the Magna Charta and constitutional rights of Englishmen could not with equal force "object to the parliament's right of external taxation," Franklin with cautious ambiguity declared: "They never have hitherto." Franklin's skill in upholding tenuous, almost "metaphysical," constitutional grievances (grievances, however, which were not upheld by constitutional legalists in England) captivated Edmund Burke's imagination: Franklin appeared to him like a schoolmaster catechizing a pack of unruly schoolboys. Conservative in his omission of any appeal to "natural rights," he was radical in his legalistic distinctions between parliamentary rights to levy certain kinds of taxes. His position in 1766 and for several years following was one of seeking legal definitions of the colonial status. Considering the popular excesses in the colonies, Franklin's view was anything but illiberally radical. Trying to counteract "the general Rage against America, artfully work'd up by the Grenville Faction," fearful that the unthinking rabble in the colonies might demonstrate too lustily against duties and the redcoats, Franklin saw, as a result of the constitutional dilemma, the true extent of the fracture:

But after all, I doubt People in Government here will never be satisfied without some Revenue from America, nor America ever satisfy'd with their imposing it; so that Disputes will from this Circumstance besides others, be perpetually arising, till there is a consolidating union of the whole.

His chief demand was for a less ambiguous relation between the mother and her offspring, for a unified, pacific commonwealth empire. Until he left for the colonies in 1775, he tirelessly sought through conversation, conference, and articles sent to the British press (in addition he "reprinted everything from America" that he "thought might help our Common Cause") to reiterate patiently the colonies' "Charter liberties," their abhorrence of Parliament-imposed internal taxes, and the quartering of red-coated battalions. Constantly hoping for a favorable Ministry (of a Lord Rockingham or a Shelburne), and bemoaning the physical infirmities of Pitt which rendered him politically impotent, Franklin felt almost romantically confident at first of a change that must come. All the while, like Merlin's gleam, visions of a world-encircling British empire haunted the Pennsylvania tradesman. A letter to Barbeu Dubourg discloses at once his belief in an imperial federation and in the sovereignty of the colonial assemblies: "In fact, the British empire is not a single state; it comprehends many; and, though the Parliament of Great Britain has arrogated to itself the power of taxing the colonies, it has no more right to do so, than it has to tax Hanover. We have the same King, but not the same legislatures." Marginalia by Franklin's hand in an anti-colonial pamphlet written by Dean Tucker indicate how completely he (and here he represented colonial, not private, opinion) had failed to see the growth of parliamentary power: "These Writers against the Colonies all bewilder themselves by supposing the Colonies within the Realm, which is not the case, nor ever was."

By 1774 Franklin had discovered the futility of his imperialistic illusions: ministries, fearing the siren colonies, had blocked their ears with wax. The Pennsylvanian knew that "Divine Providence first infatuates the power it designs to ruin." He who had wished for an empire as harmoniously companied as the orbited harmony of celestial bodies lamented while on his way to America in 1775 that "so glorious a Fabric as the present British Empire [was] to be demolished by these Blunderers." Broken was "that fine and noble China Vase, the British Empire." In 1774 he would have gained little cheer from William Livingston's opinion (uttered in 1768): "I take it that clamour is at present our best policy."

His sense of defeat was aggravated by that ugly scene in the Cockpit in 1774 when Wedderburn bespattered the taciturn colonial agent with foul invective. It had been charged that Franklin, the postmaster, had purloined letters of Governor Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Oliver of Massachusetts and had sent them back to the colonies as proof of the colonists' contention that the royal governors were hostile to their colonial subjects. He whom (as Lord Chatham said) "all Europe held in high Estimation for his Knowledge and Wisdom, and rank'd with our Boyles and Newtons," was decked by Wedderburn "with the choicest flowers of Billingsgate." In the presence of Lord Shelburne, Lord North, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and Priestley, Franklin, "motionless and silent," bore the harangue of the solicitor general for a full three hours. Franklin's eloquent mock humility inspired Horace Walpole to write:

Sarcastic Sawney, swol'n with spite and prate,
On silent Franklin poured his venal hate.
The calm philosopher, without reply,
Withdrew, and gave his country liberty.

As propagandist for legislative freedom, Franklin, appealing for sanction to legalistic and constitutional liberty more than to natural rights, was no more radical than Edmund Burke. If ever an extreme democrat, Franklin had yet by 1775 to become one. Temperamentally hostile to "drunken electors," the "madness of mobs," he held a patrician attitude toward authority. Earlier, in 1768, he had written from London: "All respect to law and government seems to be lost among the common people, who are moreover continually inflamed by seditious scribblers, to trample on authority and every thing that used to keep them in order." To Georgiana Shipley he sent (Epitaph on Squirrel Mungo's death) this Miltonic and unrepublican sentiment:

Learn hence,
Ye who blindly seek more liberty,
Whether subjects, sons, squirrels or daughters,
That apparent restraint may be real protection
Yielding peace and plenty
With security.

In 1771 he indicted Parliament in a letter to Joseph Galloway: "Its Censures are no more regarded than Popes' Bulls. It is despis'd for its Venality, and abominated for its Injustice." But he hastened to show that he had no illusions that men are natively pure, that only governments are wicked. With almost a Hamiltonian distrust of the public ranks he wrote: "And yet it is not clear that the People deserve a better Parliament, since they are themselves full as corrupt and venal: witness the Sums they accept for their Votes at almost every Election."

Back in the colonies, Franklin remained just long enough to help form a constitution for Pennsylvania, and to aid Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence. After the royal governors had dissolved the assemblies and the Continental Congress urged the colonies to form their own constitutions, Franklin assumed leadership in his state and helped to compose a constitution less conservative than those of most of the other colonies. Created between July 15 and Sept. 28, 1776, essentially by one who had just worked on and signed the Declaration of Independence, it is not strange that the dominant ideology of this constitution—that of natural rights, the compact theory, and consent of the governed—should be like that of the Declaration. The new constitution has been called the "most democratic constitution yet seen in America." The unicameral legislature, the assembly of representatives, the plan of judicial review of laws every seven years, and other features have been looked upon as demonstrating the dangerous ultra-democratic tendencies of Franklin. The revolutionary Benjamin Rush, who had helped Paine with Common Sense, was dismayed because, in his view, Pennsylvania "has substituted mob government for one of the happiest governments in the world.... A single legislature is big with tyranny. I had rather live under the government of one man than of seventy-two." One wonders to what extent Franklin was responsible for the unicameral legislature when we know that it "was the natural outcome of Penn's ideas of government as embodied in his various charters." The plural executive, the right of freemen to form their militia and elect their own officers, the extension of male suffrage, and other innovations in this constitution were of a radical nature in as far as the populace were given greater liberties and responsibilities than ever before in the colonies. It seems almost incredible that the patrician-minded Franklin, with his Puritan heritage, should have thus almost hurriedly cast himself at the feet of the people. Certain extenuating factors may be mentioned in an attempt not to gloss over but to understand the violent antithesis between Franklin the imperialist and Franklin the revolutionist. To what extent did his antipathy for proprietary governors, as well as the general colonial experience with governors, suggest a joint executive of a council and governor? Since his experience as a Whig propagandist had been to exalt colonial legislatures, to what extent did he see in the unicameral form a plan which would give freest movement to the legislative activity? Prior to 1776 there is little that would suggest that Franklin had any confidence in men, unchecked. Yet it is difficult to show that, in the first flush of indignation against England and revolutionary enthusiasm, Franklin did not favor for a time distinctly radical tendencies.

In 1776 he left, as he wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, "to procure those aids from European powers, for enabling us to defend our freedom and independence." He who had "been a Servant to many publicks, thro' a long life" went to Passy, where from the Hôtel de Valentinois of M. Roy de Chaumont he was to direct financial efforts calculated, with Washington's generalship, and the assiduous loyalty of a minority group, to win the Revolution. Welcomed as the apotheosis of "les Insurgens," he was virtually deified; as Turgot expressed it, Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis. The universality of his vogue in France was primarily due to his deistic naturalism, his wily pleading and activities in behalf of colonial independence, the receptivity of the Gallic mind for any marten-capped child of the New World, and to his scientific thought and experimentation which had fortified Reason in purging the unknown of its terror, helping thus to make the philosophe at home in his reasonable world. Three weeks after Franklin arrived in France, one Frenchman said that "it is the mode today for everybody to have an engraving of M. Franklin over the mantelpiece." France overnight became Franklinist when the savant came to dwell at Passy. Even before the victory of Yorktown he became la mode. It was to be his success to convert France's unrecognized alliance with the colonies to an open and undisguised alliance, perhaps even to war with England. But even for one who enjoyed, as John Adams wrote, a reputation "more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire," it was to be a difficult task to manipulate a Beaumarchais, a Vergennes, and others, in spite of the well-known and inveterate economic and political grievances which the French held for the English. The virtues he stressed in the Morals of Chess he was able to translate into a diplomatic mien, uniting "perfect silence" with a "generous civility." As a result, his record as minister to France is marked by complete success; but for this "it is by no means certain that American independence would have been achieved until many years later."

Plagued by Frenchmen desiring places in the colonial army, feted by the philosophes, sorely vexed by the need for settling countless maritime affairs, embracing and embraced by the venerable Voltaire, corresponding with Hartley concerning exchange of prisoners, shaping alliances and treaties, conducting scientific experiments, investigating Mesmer, intrigued by balloon ascensions, made the darling of several salons, associating in the Lodge of the Nine Sisters with Bailly, Bonneville, Warville, Condorcet, Danton, Desmoulins, D'Auberteuil, Pétion, Saint-Étienne, Sieyès, and others, all men who helped to give shape (or shapelessness) to the French Revolution, Franklin found little time to search for that philosophic repose which he had long coveted. It may be extravagant to say that Franklin was the "Creator of Constitutionalism in Europe," but we know that in 1783 he printed the colonial constitutions for continental distribution. It has been suggested that Franklin was an important formative factor in Condorcet's faith in universal suffrage, a unicameral legislature, and the liberties guaranteed by constitutional law. Then, too, Franklin had signed the Declaration of Independence—a document which the French hailed as the "restoration of humanity's title deeds." The Duc de la Rochefoucauld eulogized the unicameral legislature of Pennsylvania, identifying "this grand idea" and its "maximum of simplicity" as Franklin's creation. Fauchet eulogized him as "one of the foremost builders of our sacred constitution." Along with Helvétius, Mably, Rousseau, and Voltaire, Franklin was considered as one who laid the foundations for the French revolution. Franklin's taciturnity, his "art of listening," his diplomatic reserve, do not suggest a volatile iconoclast doing anything consciously to bring about a republican France. This did not prevent him from becoming a symbol of liberty by his mere presence in the land, stimulating patriots to examine the foundations of the tyrannical authority which they saw or imagined enslaving them. Holding no brief for natural equality, Franklin suggested that "quiet and regular Subordination" is "so necessary to Success." Realist that he was, he became almost obsessed with the innate depravity of men until he was doubtful whether "the Species were really worth producing or preserving." One would not be considered excessively republican who inveighed against the "collected passions, prejudices, and private interests" of collective legislative bodies. He wrote to Caleb Whitefoord: "It is unlucky ... that the Wise and Good should be as mortal as Common People and that they often die before others are found fit to supply their Places." The great proportion of mankind, weak and selfish, need "the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice." No less extreme than J. Q. Adams's retort to Paine's Rights of Man, that it is anarchic to trust government "to the custody of a lawless and desperate rabble," was Franklin's distrust of the unthinking majority.

Having helped to free the colonies, Franklin fittingly became, if not one of the fathers of the Constitution, then, due to the serenity with which he helped to moderate the plans of extremists on both sides, at least its godfather. If, as Mr. James M. Beck asserts, the success of the Constitution has been the result of its approximation of the golden mean, between monarchy and anarchy, the section and the nation, the small and the large state, then its success may be attributed not a little to Franklin's genius. After small and large states had waged a fruitless struggle over congressional representation, Franklin spoke:

The diversity of opinion turns on two points. If a proportional representation takes place, the small States contend that their liberties will be in danger. If an equality of votes is to be put in its place, the large States say their money will be in danger. When a broad table is to be made, and the edges <of planks do not fit> the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint.

The former imperialist could not logically become a state rights advocate. Engrossed essentially in "promoting and securing the common Good," he derided the advantage the greater state would have, asserting that he "was originally of Opinion it would be better if every Member of Congress, or our national Council, were to consider himself rather as a Representative of the whole, than as an Agent for the Interests of a particular State." When Mr. Randolph considered,

To negative all laws, passed by the several States, contravening, in the opinion of the national legislature, the articles of union: (the following words were added to this clause on motion of Mr. Franklin, "or any Treaties subsisting under the authority of the union.")

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." 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." 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. Extolling popular sovereignty, he warned that "In free Governments the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors & sovereigns." 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 principally to the favorable issue of it." Pinckney had made a motion that rulers should have unencumbered 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—.... This Constitution 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.

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."

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. 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 cumbersome and provocative of delay.

Little is known of Franklin's attitude toward the violent controversy attendant upon efforts toward ratification. In his Ancient Jews and Anti-Federalists he warned the traducers of the new Constitution 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." 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 multitude: The Constitution "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." 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." 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 Passy to reflect—not without sadness of heart—on the diversified fortune which time and circumstance 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," 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, fashioning 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 participation 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 amusements." A month after this, he wrote to Cadwallader Colden: "I congratulate you on the prospect you have, of passing the remainder of life in philosophical retirement." 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...." He urged Dr. John Fothergill to give himself "repose, delight in viewing the Operations of nature in the vegetable creation." In 1765, upon completing his negotiations in behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly, he promised Lord Kames that he would "engage in no other" political affairs. 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." Again, in 1779, he confessed to Beccaria: "I find myself here [Passy] 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." 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." He who, John Winthrop claimed, "was good at starting Game for Philosophers," acknowledged that he had thrown himself on the public, which, "having as it were eaten my flesh, seemed now resolved to pick my bones." Reverend Manasseh 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 massive 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." In a fictitious (?) 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." 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"; and to Abbé 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." 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." 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 substitution 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 rôle played by the glass or dielectric; (4) his experimental demonstration of the identity 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." 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."

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." M. Faÿ has sought, without convincing documentary evidence, to interpret Franklin's philosophic mind in terms of Pythagoreanism. We may find that these views are over simple and historically inadequate—even wrong.

Franklin was reared "piously in the Dissenting way" by a "pious and prudent" Calvinistic father who died as he lived, with "entire Dependence on his Redeemer." "Religiously educated as a Presbyterian," young Benjamin was taught that Major est Scripturae auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenü 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 worship. 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." Mather, as an exponent of Christian charity, urged that man help his neighbors "with a rapturous assiduity," that he may discover the "ravishing satisfaction which he might find in relieving the distresses of a poor miserable neighbor." 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 circumspectly 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 "God Almighty has commanded us to relieve and help one another in distress." 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." 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. 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." He became at the age of sixteen, as a result of reading Boyle's Lectures, a "thorough Deist." 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) they both employ science and rationalism to reinforce (never as equivalent to or substitute for) scriptural theology. Fed by Newtonian physics, Bentley discovers in gravity "the great basis of all mechanism," the "immediate fiat and finger of God, and the executions of the divine law." Gravity, "the powerful cement which holds together this magnificent structure of the world," is the result of the Deity "who always acts geometrically." Borrowing from Cockburne, Ray, Bentley, and Fénelon, Derham offers likewise to prove the existence and operations of the Workman from his Work.

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. He intensifies the English tradition of every-man-his-own-priest, and exclaims "How uncertain Tradition is!" From this militant friend of John Locke, Franklin was doubtless impregnated with an odium theologicum and an exalted idea of the sanctity of Reason.

Having read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 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 assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do." 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.

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." 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." 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.

To what extent did Franklin's nascent humanitarianism—mildly provoked by the neighborliness of Mather and Defoe—receive additional sanction from Shaftesbury's doctrine that "compassion is the supreme form of moral beauty, the neglect of it the greatest of all offenses against nature's ordained harmony"? Identifying self-love and social, Shaftesbury saw the divine temper achieved through affection for the public, the "universal good." Born among men who were convinced of the supremacy of scripture, Franklin would at first be astonished (then perhaps liberated) upon reading in the Characteristics that "Religion excludes only perfect atheism." From such a piece as Shaftesbury's An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit Franklin learned that not all men preserved a union between theology and ethics, scripture and religion. Although Shaftesbury occasionally indicated a reverence for sacred scriptures, the totality of his thought was cast in behalf of natural religion. He was convinced that the "Deity is sufficiently revealed through natural Phenomena." Extolling the apprehension of the Deity through man's uniform reason, Shaftesbury urbanely lampooned enthusiasm, that private revelation which threatened to prevail against the consensus gentium.

By 1725 Franklin had divorced theology from morality and morality from conscience, having punctuated his youth with faunish "errata." Although he was as a youth too much at ease in Zion, he did not lose substantial (if then a theoretic) faith in the struggle between the law of the spirit and the law of the members. Nurtured by the Bible, Bunyan, Addison and Steele, Tryon, Socrates, and Xenophon—a blend of Christian and classical traditions—he felt the reasonableness, if not the saintliness, of curbing the resolute sway of his natural self.

After five years with James, a year in Philadelphia where part of the time he worked with Samuel Keimer, a fanatic and bearded Camisard, Franklin, through the duplicity of Governor Keith, found himself in November, 1724, aboard the London-Hope, England-bound. It would be unfair to Franklin were we to think him a primitive colonist to whom England was an unreal, incalculable land. We remember that James knew the London of Anne, Addison, Steele, Locke, and Newton. And we have seen that the New England Courant library was one of which no London gentleman and scholar need have been ashamed. As a worker on this newspaper Franklin had set up the names and some indications of the thoughts of such men as Fénelon, Tillotson, Defoe, Swift, Butler, Bayle, Isaac Watts, Blount, Burnet, Whiston, Temple, Trenchard and Gordon, Denham, Garth, Dryden, Milton, Locke, Flamstead, and Newton.

During his two years in London, working successively in the printing houses of Samuel Palmer and James Watts, he mingled with many of the leaders of the day. Probably because he had, while yet in America, read (in the transactions of the Royal Society) of the virtuosi's interest in asbestos, he wrote to Sir Hans Sloane, offering to show him purses made of that novel stuff. And we know that Sir Hans Sloane received Franklin in his home at Bloomsbury Square. Before he met other notables he published (what he called later an "erratum") A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725). Franklin himself said this work was the result of his setting up Wollaston's The Religion of Nature Delineated at Palmer's and his not agreeing with the author's "reasonings." Coming to Wollaston's work (with Franklin's Dissertation and Articles of Belief in mind) we can, however, see much that Franklin agreed with, general principles which do little more than reflect the current patterns of thought. Like Franklin, Wollaston saw Reason as "the great law of our nature." With Locke he denied innate ideas. That part of The Religion of Nature Delineated in which he searched with laborious syllogistic reasoning for the Ultimate Cause (which could not produce itself) may have been boring to the less agile mind of the young printer. Wollaston, however, apologized for his syllogistic gymnastics offered in proof of Deity since "much more may those greater motions we see in the world, and the phenomena attending them" afford arguments for such a proof:

I mean the motions of the planets and the heavenly bodies. For these must be put into motion, either by one Common mighty Mover, acting upon them immediately, or by causes and laws of His Appointment; or by their respective movers, who, for reasons to which you can by this time be no stranger, must depend upon some Superior, that furnished them with the power of doing this.

With Newtonian rapture he marveled at "the grandness of this fabric of the world," at "the chorus of planets moving periodically, by uniform laws." Rapt in wonder, he gazed "up to the fixt stars, that radiant numberless host of heaven." Like a Blackmore, Ray, Fontenelle, or Newton, he felt that they were "probably all possest by proper inhabitants." He wondered at the "just and geometrical arrangement of things." These are all sentiments that Franklin expressed in his philosophical juvenilia. But then, Franklin (after reading this sublimated geometry which reduced the parts of creation to an equally sublime simplicity) noted in Wollaston that man must be a free agent, that good and evil are as black and white, distinguishable, that empirically the will is free, the author urging with Johnsonian good sense, "The short way of knowing this certainly is to try." Franklin's Dissertation was dedicated to his friend James Ralph and prefaced by a misquotation from Dryden and Lee's Oedipus. It purports, as Franklin wrote in 1779, "to prove the doctrine of fate, from the supposed attributes of God ... that in erecting and governing the world, as he was infinitely wise, he knew what would be best; infinitely good, he must be disposed, and infinitely powerful, he must be able to execute it: consequently all is right." With confidence lent him by his a priori method, he proposed: "I. There is said to be a First Mover, who is called God, Maker of the Universe. II. He is said to be all-wise, all-good, all-powerful." With the nonchalance of an abstractionist, he concluded, "Evil doth not exist." Transcending the sensational necessitarianism of Anthony Collins and John Locke, Franklin observed (with an eye on Newton's law of gravitation) that man has liberty, the "Liberty of the same Nature with the Fall of a heavy Body to the Ground; it has Liberty to fall, that is, it meets with nothing to hinder its Fall, but at the same Time it is necessitated to fall, and has no Power or Liberty to remain suspended." As a disciple of Locke's psychology, Franklin reflected his concept of the tabula rasa in describing an infant's mind which "is as if it were not." "All our Ideas are first admitted by the Senses and imprinted on the Brain, increasing in Number by Observation and Experience; there they become the Subjects of the Soul's Action."

In the Dissertation one can discover the extent to which Franklin had absorbed (if not from Newton's own works, then from his popularizers and intellectual sons such as Pemberton, Franklin's friend) several of the essential tenets of Newtonianism. Here we see his belief in a universe motivated by immutable natural laws comprising a sublimely harmonious system reflecting a Wise Geometrician; a world in which man desires to affect a corresponding inner heaven. Enraptured by the order of the natural laws of Newtonianism, and like a Shaftesbury searching for a demonstrable inner harmony, Franklin (carrying his a priorism to logical absurdity) was unable to reconcile free will with Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Goodness. (In how far was this partly the result of his having been steeped in Calvinism's doctrine of Election?)

The Dissertation is as appreciative of Newton's contribution to physics and thought as Thomson's To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton. Not unlike Franklin's framework is Shaftesbury's thought in An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit. Since Franklin acknowledged his reading of Shaftesbury and since as late as 1730 he borrowed heavily from the Characteristics, it seems probable that Shaftesbury lent Franklin in this case some sanction for his only metaphysical venture.

As one result of his printing A Dissertation he made the acquaintance of Lyons, author of The Infallibility of Human Judgement who introduced him to Mandeville and Dr. Henry Pemberton, who in turn "Promis'd to give me an opportunity, some time or other, of seeing Sir Isaac Newton, of which I was extreamly desirous; but this never happened [the italics are the editors']." Dr. Pemberton, physician and mathematician, met Newton in 1722, and during the time Franklin enjoyed his friendship was helping Newton to prepare the third edition of the Principia. As a result of his aiding Newton "to discover and understand his writings," Pemberton in 1728 published A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy. It is obvious that Franklin could have discovered few men with a more concentrated and enthusiastic knowledge of Newtonianism than that possessed by Dr. Pemberton. As we have already noted, Franklin undoubtedly derived his appreciation of Newtonian speculation not from grubbing in the Principia but from secondary sources. There is no reason to apologize for Franklin on this score when we remember that Voltaire, who popularized Newtonianism in France, exclaimed: "Very few people read Newton because it is necessary to be learned to understand him. But everybody talks about him." Desaguliers, coming to London from Oxford in 1713, observed that "he found all Newtonian philosophy generally receiv'd among persons of all ranks and professions, and even among the ladies by the help of experiments." Pemberton wrote that the desire after knowledge of Newtonianism "is by nothing more fully illustrated, than by the inclination of men to gain an acquaintance with the operations of nature; which disposition to enquire after the causes of things is so general, that all men of letters, I believe, find themselves influenced by it." Through the sublimated mathematics of the Principia, Pemberton observed, "the similitude found in all parts of the universe makes it undoubted, that the whole is governed by one supreme being, to whom the original is owing of the frame of nature, which evidently is the effect of choice and design." To what extent Franklin later gave evidence of his knowledge of Newtonian speculation we shall further discover in his Articles of Belief.

He returned in the summer of 1726 on the Berkshire to Philadelphia with Mr. Denham, a sweetly reasonable Quaker. During this journey he wrote his Journal of a Voyage from London to Philadelphia, indicating a virtuoso's interest in all novel phenomena of nature. In Philadelphia he worked for Denham, then Keimer, and finally established his own printing house in 1728, a year after founding the Junto, and the year of his Articles of Belief. By this time, Franklin, like Hume, wearied of metaphysics. Commonly this creed has been described as illustrating the deism of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. It is true that Franklin admits a God who ought to be worshipped, the chief parts of worship being the cultivation of virtue and piety; but there is no suggestion of Lord Herbert's fourth and fifth dogmas, that sin must be atoned for by repentance, and that punishment and rewards follow this life. His reaction against Calvinism may be shown in his failure to include reference to scripture, the experience of faith, and the triune godhead presided over by the redeemer Christ. As a deist he accepted "one supreme, most perfect Being." This Deity is the "Author and Father of the Gods themselves." "Infinite and incomprehensible," He has created many gods, each having "made for himself one glorious Sun, attended with a beautiful and admirable System of Planets." Franklin offered his adoration to that "Wise and Good God, who is the author and owner of our System." It is conventional to suggest that his interest in the plurality of worlds and gods should be traced to Plato's Timaeus. In the absence of any conclusive evidence concerning Franklin's study of Plato, and in view of his profound awareness of contemporary scientific and philosophical thought, it seems more reasonable to see the source of this idea in the thought of his own age. Let us remember that with the growth of the heliocentric cosmology there resulted a vast expanse of the unknown, bound to intrigue the speculations of the philosophers of the age. We know that Ray, Fénelon, Blackmore, Huygens, Fontenelle, Shaftesbury, Locke, and Newton all wondered about the plurality of worlds and gods.

In company with the supernatural rationalists and deists, Franklin exalted Reason as the experience through which God is discovered and known. Through Reason he is "capable of observing his Wisdom in the Creation." With Newtonian zeal, upon observing "the glorious Sun, with his attending Worlds," he saw the Deity responsible first for imparting "their prodigious motion," and second for maintaining "the wondrous Laws by which they move." As we have seen above, this argument from the design of creation to a Creator was one of the most influential and popular of the impacts of Newtonian physics. Like Fénelon, Blackmore, and Ray, whom he read and recommended that others read, Franklin exclaimed:

Thy Wisdom, thy Power, and thy Goodness are everywhere clearly seen; in the air and in the water, in the Heaven and on the Earth; Thou providest for the various winged Fowl, and the innumerable Inhabitants of the Water; thou givest Cold and Heat, Rain and Sunshine, in their Season, [et cetera].

In addition to the works mentioned above which aided Franklin in arriving at a natural religion, it is certain that his views and even idiom received stout reinforcement from such a passage as follows from Ray's classic work:

There is no greater, at least no more palpable and convincing argument of the existence of a Deity, than the admirable act and wisdom that discovers itself in the make and constitution, the order and disposition, the ends and uses of all the parts and members of this stately fabric of heaven and earth; for if in the works of art ... a curious edifice or machine, counsel, design, and direction to an end appearing in the whole frame, and in all the several pieces of it, do necessarily infer the being and operation of some intelligent architect or engineer, why shall not also in the works of nature, that grandeur and magnificence, that excellent contrivance for beauty, order, use &c. which is observable in them, wherein they do as much transcend the effects of human art as infinite power and wisdom exceeds finite, infer the existence and efficacy of an omnipotent and all-wise Creator?

Then he directly referred to the Archbishop of Cambray's Traité de l'existence et des attributs de Dieu. Oliver Elton observes that this work "with its appeal to popular science, is the chief counterpart in France to the 'physico-theology' current at the time in England." From the skeleton of the smallest animal, "the bones, the tendons, the veins, the arteries, the nerves, the muscles, which compose the body of a single man" to "this vaulted sky" which turns "around so regularly," all show "the infinite skill of its Author." Although Fénelon is applying Cartesian physics, here Descartes reinforced Newtonianism; like Newton, Fénelon argued that cosmic motion is ordered by "immutable laws," so "constant and so salutary." Blackmore's Creation, a Philosophical Poem (1712), aiming to demonstrate "the existence of a God from the marks of wisdom, design, contrivance, and the choice of ends and means, which appear in the universe" also furnished additional sanction for Franklin's emphasis on the wondrous laws of the creation and the discovery of the Deity in his Work. Like James Thomson, Blackmore seeks to show how

The long coherent chain of things we find
Leads to a Cause Supreme, a wise Creating Mind.

In revolt against the contractile elements in Calvinism, Franklin believed that God "is not offended, when he sees his Children solace themselves in any manner of pleasant exercises and Innocent Delights." In his Articles of Belief Franklin retains from his Dissertation his a priori concept of the Deity as a creator and sustainer of "Wondrous Laws," immutable and beneficent. To the depersonalized First Mover, however, he has added "some of those Passions he has planted in us," and he suggests furthermore that the Deity is mildly providential. A maker of systematic, if inhuman, metaphysics in the Dissertation, the author of the Articles, in spite of the superficial and embryonic metaphysics, succeeds better in making himself at home in his world. To this embryonic religion (linked with Franklin's obsession with the plurality of worlds and gods—of no real significance save to indicate picturesquely the extent to which he had, with the scientists of his age, extended the limits of the physical universe) Franklin welded a pattern of ethics, prudential but stern.

Mr. Hefelbower's description of the growth of free thought might appropriately be applied to Franklin's Articles: "As the supernatural waned in radical Deism, the ethical grew in importance, until religion was but a moral system on a theistic background." Although the metaphysical portions of this work are far too neighborly and casual to be inspiring and provocative of saintliness, the ethical conclusions (would that they were uttered less consciously and complacently!) are worthy of the introspective force of New England's stern mind, of the classic tradition of Socrates and Aristotle, and of England's unbending emphasis on the middle way. One could learn from the Articles how to be just, if he did not discover what is meant by the beauty of holiness. In 1728 Franklin, though bewildered by the tenuousness of metaphysics, based his religion on the "everlasting tables of right reason," plumbing the "mighty volumes of visible nature." He was thus our pioneer scientific deist, who discovered his chief sanction in popularized Newtonian physics.

Following Franklin's formal profession of deism buttressed by Newtonian science in 1728, one must depend on scattered references to plot the persistence of his philosophic ideology. His Dialogues between Philocles and Horatio (1730), borrowed from Shaftesbury's The Moralists, suggest that his moral speculations were dual and not reconciled; he seems torn between humanitarian compassion and the self-development of the individual, unable to decide which is the nobler good. One may observe that this moral bifurcation was inveterate in Franklin's mind, never resolving itself into a fondness for the idea that human nature is inexorably the product of institutions and outward social forms. A Witch Trial at Mount Holly suggests that he felt free to handle scriptures with Aristophanic levity. His intellectual conviction of a matchless physical harmony, as yet unmatched in the world by a corresponding moral harmony, is joyously seen in Preface to Poor Richard, 1735:

Whatever may be the Musick of the Spheres, how great soever the Harmony of the Stars, 'tis certain there is no Harmony among the Stargazers; but they are perpetually growling and snarling at one another like strange Curs....

Even Polly Baker is made to appeal to "nature and nature's God," discovering in her bastard children the Deity's "divine skill and admirable workmanship in the formation of their bodies." In Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749) Franklin remarked in a note on Natural Philosophy that "Proper Books may be, Ray's Wisdom of God in the Creation, Derham's Physico-Theology, [Pluche's?] Spectacle de la Nature, &c." Poor Richard, in addition to prognostications of weather, survey of roads, Rabelaisian wit, and aphoristic wisdom, was a popular vehicle for the diffusion of a Newtonianism bordering on a mild form of deism.

Since Franklin's interest in science is too commonly discussed as if his research were synonymous with a tinkering and utilitarian inventiveness, it is pertinent to inquire in how far it was at least partially (or even integrally) the result of his philosophic acceptance of Newtonianism. Since his philosophic rationale preceded his activities in science, it will not do to suggest that his interest in science was responsible for his scientific deism. He wrote (August 15, 1745) to Cadwallader Colden, who was receptive to Newtonianism, that he [Franklin] "ought to study the sciences" in which hitherto he had merely dabbled. Then follow his electrical experiments. In one of his famous letters on the properties and effects of electricity (sent to Peter Collinson, July 29, 1750) he allowed that the principle of repulsion "affords another occasion of adoring that wisdom which has made all things by weight and measure!" Investigating—like a Newton—nature's laws, Franklin at first hand added to his philosophic assurance of the existence of a Deity, observable in the physical order.

In 1739 Franklin met Reverend George Whitefield, whose sermons and journals he printed while the evangelist remained in the colonies. He first angled public opinion through the Pennsylvania Gazette, promising to print Whitefield's pieces "if I find sufficient Encouragement." The Pennsylvania Gazette piously hoped that Whitefield's heavenly discourses would be ever remembered: "May the Impression on all our Souls remain, to the Honour of God, both in Ministers and People!" As editor (perhaps even writer of some of those notices) Franklin must have squirmed in praising the activities of one who daily cast all deists in hell! But it should be observed that if Franklin could not accept Methodistic zeal, he loved Whitefield, the man. Even so did Whitefield regard Franklin, the man and printer—though not the scientific deist. Waiting to embark for England in 1740, Whitefield wrote to Franklin from Reedy Island: "Dear Sir, adieu! I do not despair of your seeing the reasonableness of Christianity. Apply to God, be willing to do the Divine Will, and you shall know it." Twelve years later Whitefield wrote to his printer-deist friend: "I find that you grow more and more famous in the learned world. As you have made a pretty considerable progress in the mysteries of electricity, I would now humbly recommend to your diligent unprejudiced pursuit and study the mysteries of the new birth." When troops had been sent to Boston, Franklin wrote a letter to Whitefield (after January 21, 1768) which offers a significant clue for estimating Franklin's philosophy: "I see with you that our affairs are not well managed by our rulers here below; I wish I could believe with you, that they are well attended to by those above; I rather suspect, from certain circumstances, that though the general government of the universe is well administered, our particular little affairs are perhaps below notice, and left to take the chance of human prudence or imprudence, as either may happen to be uppermost. It is, however, an uncomfortable thought, and I leave it." Whitefield "endorsed his friend's letter with the words, 'Uncomfortable indeed! and blessed be God, unscriptural!'" If in 1786 Franklin wrote to an unknown correspondent (perhaps Tom Paine?) that any arguments "against the Doctrines of a particular Providence" strike "at the Foundation of all Religion," he also had written not long before that "the Dispensations of Providence in this World puzzle my weak Reason." Beneath the taciturn and allegedly complacent, imperturbable Franklin there is apparent a haunting inquietude. Never dead to his Calvinist heritage, he sought to establish a providential relationship between the Deity and man's fortunes, not a little chilled in the presence of the virtually depersonalized Deity of the Enlightenment. If Calvin's God was wrathful, he was providential; his own Deity, if benevolent and omnipotent, seemed strangely remote from the ken of man's moral experience. Science had shown him a Deity existing at the head of a fagot of immutable laws. If this Creator was picturesquely unlike the fickle gods of Olympus, he was strangely like them to the extent that he seemed to exist apart from man's moral nature. When he wrote to his friend, the Bishop of St. Asaph, "It seems my Fate constantly to wish for Repose, and never to obtain it," was he in part longing for the retirement when he would be able to resolve his doubts as to the workings of Providence?

M. Marbois, discussing Franklin's religion with John Adams, quietly noted that "Mr. Franklin adores only great Nature." Joseph Priestley "lamented that a man of Dr. Franklin's general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done so much as he did to make others unbelievers." This evidence appears untrustworthy in light of his diffident attitude toward church attendance, even toward scriptures, as it may be discovered in his collected works. Even if he did not feel the desire to attend formal services, he seemed, like Voltaire, to feel that they were salutary, if only to furnish the canaille with the will to obey authority. In 1751 Franklin's mother, Abiah Franklin, wrote to her son: "I hope you will lookup to God, and thank Him for all His good providences towards you." If he were unable to understand God's providences, it was certain that he did not seek to disturb others by calling the concept of a providential deity into question.

In England and France Franklin was revered as the answer to the Enlightenment's prayer for the ideal philosopher-scientist. Sir John Pringle, one of his warmest friends, in a Royal Society lecture in honor of Maskelyne, might well have been describing Franklin's place in eighteenth-century science when he said: "As much then remains to be explored in the celestial regions, you [Maskelyne] are encouraged, Sir, by what has been already attained, to persevere in these hallowed labours, from which have been derived the greatest improvements in the most useful arts, and the loudest declarations of the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of the Supreme Architect in the Spacious and beautiful fabric of the world." To his age Franklin was "that judicious philosopher," judicious and "enlightened" to the extent that his experiments showed how men "may perceive not only the direction of Divine Wisdom, but the goodness of Providence towards mankind, in having so admirably settled all things in the sublime arrangement of the world, that it should be in the power of men to secure themselves and their habitations against the dire effects of lightning." Turgot's famous epigram on Franklin, the republican-deist, that he snatched sceptres from kings and lightning from the heavens, in part expressed the extent to which the French public conceived of Franklin, the scientist, as detracting from the terror in the cosmos, hence making their reasonable world more habitable. In the popular mind death-dealing lightning had been the visible symbol and proof of Calvin's wrathful and capricious Jehovah. Franklin's dramatic and widely popularized proof that even lightning's secrets were not past finding out, that it acted according to immutable laws and could be made man's captive and menial slave, no doubt had a powerful influence in encouraging the great untheological public to become ultimately more receptive to deism. If Franklin was apotheosized as the apostle of liberty, he was no less sanctified as a "Modern Prometheus." In his own words, he saw science as freeing man "from vain Terrors." To Condorcet, his friend and disciple, Franklin was one who "was enabled to wield a power sufficient to disarm the wrath of Heaven."

He expressed his creed just before his death in the often-quoted letter to Ezra Stiles. Bearing in mind his inveterate scientific deism, we are not surprised that his religion is one created apart from Christian scripture, that Jesus is the conventional, amiable philosopher, respected but not worshipped by the Enlightenment. If he seems convinced in this letter that God "governs" the universe "by his Providence," we have seen above that his attitude toward the Deity's relation to man and his world was anything but sure and free from disturbing reflection. Convinced that the Deity "ought to be worshipped," he next observed "that the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children." His a priori concept of a benevolent Deity whose goodness is expressed in the harmony of the creation, in effect challenged him to attempt to approximate this kindness in his relations with his fellow men. Apart from provoking humanitarianism, primarily an ethical experience guided not by sentimentality but by reason and practicality. Franklin's natural religion—like deism in general—failed, as scriptural religion does not, to establish a union between theology, the religious life, and ethical behavior. It must be seen that Franklin had no confidence in achieving the good life through mere fellow-service: he continually urged man to conquer passion through reason, seeming to covet pagan sobriety more than he did the satisfaction of having aided man to achieve greater physical ease. If he felt that "to relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures is concurring with the Deity; it is godlike," he warned against helping those who had failed to help themselves, implying that the inner growth of the individual is more significant than his outward charity to others. Whatever be the ultimate resolution of these antithetic principles, we see that his humanitarianism was the offspring of his a priori conceived Deity, augmented by his experiments in science which led to discovery of nature's laws. His emphasis on the inward and vertical growth of the individual toward perfection, on the other hand, may be viewed as the expression of the introspective force of his Puritan heritage and his knowledge, direct and indirect, of classical literature. As in the polarity of his thoughts concerning Providence, so here we see that the modus operandi of his mind is explicable in terms of the interplay of the old and the new, Greek paganism (Socratic self-knowledge) and Christianity and the rationale of the Enlightenment.

Before he became an economist, a statesman, a man of letters, a scientist, he had embraced scientific deism, primarily impelled by Newtonianism. We have observed that it is not improbable that his agrarianism, emphasis on free trade, and tendency toward laissez faire were partially at least the result of his efforts to parallel in economics the harmony of the physical order. Likewise, his views on education were conditioned by his faith in intellectual progress, in the might of Reason, which in turn was in part the result of his scientific deism. Then too, it may well be suggested that his theories of rhetoric were to some degree the result of his rationalistic and scientific habits of mind. We have also seen that his scientific deism was among the motivating factors of his belief in natural rights, which, coupled with his empirical awareness of concrete economic and political abuses issuing from monarchy and imperialistic parliamentarians, made him alive to the sovereignty of the people in their demands for civil and political liberty. This introduction, it is hoped, has made apparent the fact that the growth of Franklin's mind was a complex matter and that it was moulded by a vast multitude of often diverse influences, no one of which alone completely "explains" him. Puritanism, classicism, and neoclassicism were all important influences. Yet perhaps the modus operandi of this myriad-minded colonial, this provincial Leonardo, is best explained in reference to the thought pattern of scientific deism. To see the reflection of Newton and his progeny in Franklin's activities, be they economic, political, literary, or philosophical, lends a compelling organic unity to the several sides of his genius, heretofore seen as unrelated. Franklin's mind represents an intellectual coherence—an imperfect counterpart to the physical harmony of the Newtonian order, of which all through his life he was a disciple.