Benjamin Franklin

Even Polly Baker is made to appeal to "nature and nature's G.o.d,"[i-462]

discovering in her b.a.s.t.a.r.d children the Deity's "divine skill and admirable workmans.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d in the Creation_, Derham's _Physico-Theology_, [Pluche's?] _Spectacle de la Nature, &c._"[i-463] _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.[i-464]

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.[i-465] 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!"[i-466] Investigating--like a Newton--nature's _laws_, Franklin at first hand added to his philosophic a.s.surance 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.[i-467] He first angled public opinion through the _Pennsylvania Gazette_, promising to print Whitefield's pieces "if I find sufficient Encouragement."[i-468] 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 G.o.d, both in Ministers and People!"[i-469] 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 h.e.l.l! But it should be observed that if Franklin could not accept Methodistic zeal, he loved Whitefield, the man.[i-470] 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 G.o.d, be willing to do the Divine Will, and you shall know it."[i-471] 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."[i-472]

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 circ.u.mstances, 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."[i-473] Whitefield "endorsed his friend's letter with the words, '_Uncomfortable_ indeed! and blessed be G.o.d, _unscriptural_!'"[i-474] If in 1786 Franklin wrote to an unknown correspondent (perhaps Tom Paine?)[i-475] that any arguments "against the Doctrines of a particular Providence" strike "at the Foundation of all Religion,"[i-476] he also had written not long before that "the Dispensations of Providence in this World puzzle my weak Reason."[i-477]

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 relations.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d 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 f.a.got of immutable laws. If this Creator was picturesquely unlike the fickle G.o.ds 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,"[i-478] 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."[i-479] 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."[i-480]

This evidence appears untrustworthy in light of his diffident att.i.tude toward church attendance, even toward scriptures, as it may be discovered in his collected works.[i-481] 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 G.o.d, and thank Him for all His good providences towards you."[i-482] If he were unable to understand G.o.d'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,[i-483] 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 s.p.a.cious and beautiful fabric of the world."[i-484] 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

Turgot's famous epigram on Franklin, the republican-deist, that he s.n.a.t.c.hed 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.[i-486] 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."[i-487] To Condorcet, his friend and disciple, Franklin was one who "was enabled to wield a power sufficient to disarm the wrath of Heaven."[i-488]

He expressed his creed just before his death in the often-quoted letter to Ezra Stiles.[i-489] 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 wors.h.i.+pped by the Enlightenment. If he seems convinced in this letter that G.o.d "governs" the universe "by his Providence," we have seen above that his att.i.tude 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 wors.h.i.+pped," 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.dlike,"[i-490] 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 ant.i.thetic 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 cla.s.sical 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 mult.i.tude of often diverse influences, no one of which alone completely "explains" him. Puritanism, cla.s.sicism, and neocla.s.sicism 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote i-1: _The Works of John Adams_, ed. by C. F. Adams (Boston, 1856), f, 660.]

[Footnote i-2: W. P. Trent, "Benjamin Franklin," _McClure's Magazine_, VIII, 273 (Jan., 1897).]

[Footnote i-3: Cited in C. R. Weld's _History of the Royal Society_ (London, 1848), I, 146. For Baconian influence see I, 57 f. See also Edwin Greenlaw, "The New Science and English Literature in the Seventeenth Century," _Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine_, XIII, 331-59 (1925). Of dominant tendencies he stresses (a) a "new realism, or sense of fact and reliance on observation and experiment"; (b) the disregard for authority in favor of free inquiry; and (c) the development of faith in progress, inspiring men to improve their worldly condition.]

[Footnote i-4: E. A. Burtt, _The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science_, 208. Newtonianism as a method and a philosophy has been ably examined by recent scholars. See, for examples, C. Becker, _The Declaration of Independence_, especially chap. II, and _The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers_; and in Bibliography, pp. cli ff., below, W. M. Horton (chap. II); C. S. Duncan; H. Drennon; L. Bloch; E. Halevy. See also Isabel St. John Bliss, "Young's _Night Thoughts_ in Relation to Contemporary Christian Apologetics," _Publications of the Modern Language a.s.sociation_, XLIX, 37-70 (March, 1934); J. H. Randall, _The Making of the Modern Mind_ (Boston, 1926), chap. X ff.; H. H. Clark, "An Historical Interpretation of Thomas Paine's Religion," _University of California Chronicle_, x.x.xV, 56-87 (Jan., 1933), and "Toward a Reinterpretation of Thomas Paine,"

_American Literature_, V, 133-45 (May, 1933).]

[Footnote i-5: Burtt, _op. cit._ 223.]

[Footnote i-6: Article, "Deism."]

[Footnote i-7: Article, "Nature."]

[Footnote i-8: P. Smith, _A History of Modern Culture_ (New York, 1934), II, 17-8.]

[Footnote i-9: See S. Hefelbower, _The Relation of John Locke to English Deism_.]

[Footnote i-10: _Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century_, 168-9: "One inference that might be drawn from the theory was that while the infant whose mind is a blank page at birth is not so well off from the primitivistic point of view as the one who comes into the world already equipped with a complete set of the laws of nature and a predisposition to obey them, he is infinitely better off than the infant whose poor little mind had been loaded with original sin by his remote ancestors. For the orthodox baby, born in sin, there is almost no hope, except in supernatural aid; but if we suppose that man's ideas are all derived, as Locke postulated, from sense-impressions, then we may conclude that all men, rich and poor, primitive and civilized, are on an equal footing intellectually at birth. Although the primitive child does not have the help of civilization in the development of his mind, neither does he have its superst.i.tions, prejudices, and corrupting influences; and he might actually be better off than the product of civilization--at least so many a primitivist argued. But one might draw another inference from the _tabula rasa_ theory. Men, however corrupt they are now, may still have a chance of regeneration if their mind is really like blank paper at birth." For eighteenth-century primitivism see also H. N. Fairchild, _The n.o.ble Savage_ (New York, 1928).]

[Footnote i-11: H. J. Laski, _Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham_ (New York, 1920), 9. See also W. A. Dunning, _A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu_; G. S. Veitch, _Genesis of Parliamentary Reform_; and G. P. Gooch, _English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_ (2d ed., Cambridge, England, 1927).]

[Footnote i-12: K. Martin, _French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, 13.]

[Footnote i-13: See J. B. Bury, _The Idea of Progress_, chap. VIII; and J. Morley, _Diderot and the Encyclopaedists_, I, 6: "The great central moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad inst.i.tutions."]

[Footnote i-14: "Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700-1760," _Publications of the Modern Language a.s.sociation_, x.x.xI (N.

S. XXIV), 277 (June, 1916).]

[Footnote i-15: See Bury, _op. cit._; Whitney, _op. cit._; and J.

Delvaille, _Essai sur l'histoire de l'idee de progres_ (Paris, 1910).]

[Footnote i-16: R. Crane, "Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress, 1699-1745," _Modern Philology_, x.x.xI, 273-306 (Feb., 1934), and 349-82 (May, 1934).]

[Footnote i-17: _The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers_, 30-1.]

[Footnote i-18: N. L. Torrey, _Voltaire and the English Deists_.]

[Footnote i-19: D. Mornet, _French Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, 50-1. Also see his _Les sciences de la nature en France au XVIII^e siecle_ (Paris, 1911), and R. L. Cru, _Diderot as a Disciple of English Thought_ (New York, 1913). See Morley, _op. cit._, I, 31 ff., and Martin, _op. cit._]

[Footnote i-20: _An Account of the Destruction of the Jesuits in France_ (Glasgow, 1766), 61.]

[Footnote i-21: Consult M. Roustan, _The Pioneers of the French Revolution_, and L. Ducros, _French Society in the Eighteenth Century_.]

[Footnote i-22: Quoted in J. Fiske's _The Beginnings of New England_, 73. For the seventeenth-century New England way, see especially F. H.

Foster, _A Genetic History of the New England Theology_ (Chicago, 1907); P. Miller, _Orthodoxy in Ma.s.sachusetts, 1630-1650: A Genetic Study_ (Cambridge, Ma.s.s., 1933); B. Wendell, _Cotton Mather, The Puritan Priest_; I. W. Riley, _American Philosophy: The Early Schools_, 3-58 and _pa.s.sim_; H. W. Schneider, _The Puritan Mind_; J. Haroutunian, _Piety versus Moralism_; R. and L. Boas, _Cotton Mather: Keeper of the Puritan Conscience_ (New York, 1928). See Bk. V of Mather's _Magnalia_, "prose epic of New England Puritanism" (B. Wendell, _Literary History of America_, 50).]

[Footnote i-23: Prior to the Treaty of Paris (1763) the American colonies were indebted primarily to English liberalism for ideas subversive of colonial orthodoxy. If works of Fenelon, Fontenelle, Bayle, Voltaire, and Rousseau are occasionally found in the colonies prior to 1763, these are dwarfed beside the impact of such English minds as those of Trenchard and Gordon, Collins, Wollaston, Tillotson, Boyle, Shaftesbury, Locke, and Newton. It was only in the twilight of the century that French liberalism, itself nursed on English speculation, began to impinge on the thought-life of the colonies. See H. M. Jones, _America and French Culture_. Also see L. Rosenthal, "Rousseau at Philadelphia," _Magazine of American History_, VII, 46-55. See works of Riley, Koch, Gohdes, Morais, in Bibliography, pp. cli ff., below.]

[Footnote i-24: Fiske, _op. cit._, 124.]

[Footnote i-25: F. J. Turner, _The Frontier in American History_ (New York, 1920), 30.]

[Footnote i-26: _Ibid._, 38.]

[Footnote i-27: Whitney, _op. cit._, 83-4.]

[Footnote i-28: See R. M. Jones, _The Quakers in the American Colonies_ (London, 1921).]

[Footnote i-29: T. Hornberger's "The Date, the Source, and the Significance of Cotton Mather's Interest in Science," _American Literature_, VI, 413-20 (Jan., 1935), offers evidence to show that Mather's thought in this work is latent in earlier works.]

[Footnote i-30: K. Murdock (ed.), _Selections from Cotton Mather_ (New York, 1926), xlix-l; see G. L. Kittredge items (Murdock, lxii), and Hornberger, _op. cit._]

[Footnote i-31: Murdock, _op. cit._, 286.]

[Footnote i-32: _Ibid._, 292.]

[Footnote i-33: _Ibid._, 349.]

[Footnote i-34: Riley, _op. cit._, 196.]

[Footnote i-35: Quoted in H. M. Morais, _Deism in Eighteenth Century America_, 25.]

[Footnote i-36: _Ibid._, 17. See also G. A. Koch, _Republican Religion_.]