Benjamin Franklin.
by Frank Luther Mott and Chester E. Jorgenson.
PREFACE
Benjamin Franklin"s reputation in America has been singularly distorted by the neglect of his works other than his _Autobiography_ and his most utilitarian aphorisms. If America has contented herself with appraising him as "the earliest incarnation of "David Harum,"" as "the first high-priest of the religion of efficiency," as "the first Rotarian," it may be that this aspect of Franklin is all that an America plagued by growing pains, by peopling and mechanizing three thousand miles of frontier, has been able to see. That facet of Franklin"s mind and mien which allowed Carlyle to describe him as "the Father of all Yankees" was appreciated by Sinclair Lewis"s George F.
Babbitt: "Once in a while I just naturally sit back and size up this Solid American Citizen, with a whale of a lot of satisfaction." But this is not the Franklin of "imperturbable common-sense" honored by Matthew Arnold as "the very incarnation of sanity and clear-sense, a man the most considerable ... whom America has yet produced." Nor is this the Franklin who emerges from his collected works (and the opinions of his notable contemporaries) as an economist, political theorist, educator, journalist, scientific deist, and disinterested scientist. If he wrote little that is narrowly belles-lettres, he need not be ashamed of his voluminous correspondence, in an age which saw the fruition of the epistolary art. The Franklin found in his collected and uncollected writings is, as the following Introduction may suggest, not the Franklin who too commonly is synchronized exclusively with the wisdom and wit of _Poor Richard_.
Since the present interpretation of the growth of Franklin"s mind, with stress upon its essential unity in the light of scientific deism, tempered by his debt to Puritanism, cla.s.sicism, and neocla.s.sicism, may seem somewhat novel, the editors have felt it desirable to doc.u.ment their interpretation with considerable fullness. It is hoped that the reader will withhold judgment as to the validity of this interpretation until the doc.u.mentary evidence has been fully considered in its genetic significance, and that he will feel able to incline to other interpretations only in proportion as they can be equally supported by other evidence. The present interpretation is also supported by the Selections following--the fullest collection hitherto available in one volume--which offer, the editors believe, the essential materials for a reasonable acquaintance with the growth of Franklin"s mind, from youth to old age, in its comprehensive interests--educational, literary, journalistic, economic, political, scientific, humanitarian, and religious.
With the exception of the selections from the _Autobiography_, the works are arranged in approximate chronological order, hence inviting a necessarily genetic study of Franklin"s mind. The _Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_, never before printed in an edition of Franklin"s works or in a book of selections, is here printed from the London edition of 1725, retaining his peculiarities of italics, capitalization, and punctuation. Attention is also drawn to the photographically reproduced complete text of _Poor Richard Improved_ (1753), graciously furnished by Mr. William Smith Mason. _The Way to Wealth_ is from an exact reprint made by Mr. Mason, and with his permission here reproduced. One of the editors is grateful for the privilege of consulting Mr. Mason"s magnificent collection of Franklin correspondence (original MSS), especially the Franklin-Galloway and Franklin-Jonathan Shipley (Bishop of St. Asaph) unpublished correspondence. With Mr. Mason"s generous permission the editors reproduce fragments of this correspondence in the Introduction.
The bulk of the selections have been printed from the latest, standard edition, _The Writings of Benjamin Franklin_, collected and edited with a Life and Introduction by Albert Henry Smyth (10 vols., 1905-1907). For permission to use this material the editors are grateful to The Macmillan Company, publishers. The editors are indebted to Dr. Max Farrand, Director of the Henry E. Huntington Library, for permission to reprint part of Franklin"s MS version of the _Autobiography_.
Chester E. Jorgenson is preparing an a.n.a.lysis and interpretation of Franklin"s brand of scientific deism, its sources and relation to his economic, political, and literary theories and practice. Fragments of this projected study are included, especially in Section VII of the following Introduction. For the past two years Mr. Jorgenson has enjoyed the kindness and generosity of Mr. William Smith Mason, and has incurred an indebtedness which cannot be expressed adequately in print.
The work of the editors has been vastly eased by Beata Prochnow Jorgenson"s a.s.sistance in typing, proofreading, et cetera. They are extremely grateful to Professor Harry Hayden Clark for incisive suggestions and valuable editorial a.s.sistance.
F. L. M.
C. E. J.
INTRODUCTION
I. FRANKLIN"S MILIEU: THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Benjamin Franklin"s reputation, according to John Adams, "was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them."[i-1]
The historical critic recognizes increasingly that Adams was not thinking idly when he doubted whether Franklin"s panegyrical and international reputation could ever be explained without doing "a complete history of the philosophy and politics of the eighteenth century." Adams conceived that an explication of Franklin"s mind and activities integrated with the thought patterns of the epoch which fathered him "would be one of the most important that ever was written; much more interesting to this and future ages than the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."" And such a historical and critical colossus is still among the works hoped for but yet unborn. Too often, even in the scholarly mind, Franklin has become a symbol, and it may be confessed, not a winged one, of the self-made man, of New-World practicality, of the successful tradesman, of the Sage of _Poor Richard_ with his penny-saving economy and frugality. In short, the Franklin legend fails to transcend an allegory of the success of the _doer_ in an America allegedly materialistic, uncreative, and unimaginative.
It is the purpose of this essay to show that Franklin, the American Voltaire,--always reasonable if not intuitive, encyclopedic if not sublimely profound, humane if not saintly,--is best explained with reference to the Age of Enlightenment, of which he was the completest colonial representative. Due attention will, however, be paid to other factors. And therefore it is necessary to begin with a brief survey of the pattern of ideas of the age to which he was responsive. Not without reason does one critic name him as "the most complete representative of his century that any nation can point to."[i-2]
When Voltaire, "the patriarch of the _philosophes_," in 1726 took refuge in England, he at once discovered minds and an att.i.tude toward human experience which were to prove the seminal factors of the Age of Enlightenment. He found that Englishmen had acclaimed Bacon "the father of experimental philosophy," and that Newton, "the destroyer of the Cartesian system," was "as the Hercules of fabulous story, to whom the ignorant ascribed all the feats of ancient heroes." Voltaire then paused to praise Locke, who "destroyed innate ideas," Locke, than whom "no man ever had a more judicious or more methodical genius, or was a more acute logician." Bacon, Newton, and Locke brooded over the currents of eighteenth-century thought and were formative factors of much that is most characteristic of the Enlightenment.
To Bacon was given the honor of having distinguished between the fantasies of old wives" tales and the certainty of empiricism. Moved by the ghost of Bacon, the Royal Society had for its purpose, according to Hooke, "To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engynes and Inventions by Experiments."[i-3] The zeal for experiment was equaled only by its miscellaneousness. Cheese making, the eclipses of comets, and the intestines of gnats were alike the objects of telescopic or microscopic scrutiny. The full implication of Baconian empiricism came to fruition in Newton, who in 1672 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Bacon was not the least of those giants upon whose shoulders Newton stood. To the experimental tradition of Kepler, Brahe, Harvey, Copernicus, Galileo, and Bacon, Newton joined the mathematical genius of Descartes; and as a result became "as thoroughgoing an empiricist as he was a consummate mathematician," for whom there was "no _a priori_ certainty."[i-4] At this time it is enough to note of Newtonianism, that for the incomparable physicist "science was composed of laws stating the mathematical behaviour of nature solely--laws clearly deducible from phenomena and exactly verifiable in phenomena--everything further is to be swept out of science, which thus becomes a body of absolutely certain truth about the doings of the physical world."[i-5] The pattern of ideas known as Newtonianism may be summarized as embracing a belief in (1) a universe governed by immutable natural laws, (2) which laws const.i.tute a sublimely harmonious system, (3) reflecting a benevolent and all-wise Geometrician; (4) thus man desires to effect a correspondingly harmonious inner heaven; (5) and feels a.s.sured of the plausibility of an immortal life. Newton was a believer in scriptural revelation. It is ironical that through his cosmological system, mathematically demonstrable, he lent reinforcement to deism, the most destructive intellectual solvent of the authority of the altar.
Deists, as defined by their contemporary, Ephraim Chambers (in his _Cyclopaedia ..._, London, 1728), are those "whose distinguishing character it is, not to profess any particular form, or system of religion; but only to acknowledge the existence of a G.o.d, without rendering him any external 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 G.o.d, which is the only truth agreed to by all nations." They "reject all revelations as an imposition, and believe no more than what natural light discovers to them...."[i-6] The "simplicity of nature" signifies "the established order, and course of natural things; the series of second causes; or the laws which G.o.d has imposed on the motions impressed by him."[i-7] And attraction, a kind of _conatus accedendi_, is the crown, according to the eighteenth century, of the series of secondary causes. Hence, Newtonian physics became the surest ally of the deist in his quest for a religion, immutable and universal. The Newtonian progeny were legion: among them were Boyle, Keill, Desaguliers, Shaftesbury, Locke, Samuel Clarke, "sGravesande, Boerhaave, Diderot, Trenchard and Gordon, Voltaire, Gregory, Maclaurin, Pemberton, and others. The eighteenth century echoed Fontenelle"s eulogy that Newtonianism was "sublime geometry." If, as Boyle wrote, mathematical and mechanical principles were "the alphabet, in which G.o.d wrote the world," Newtonian science and empiricism were the lexicons which the deists used to read the cosmic volume in which the universal laws were inscribed. And the deists and the liberal political theorists "found the fulcrum for subverting existing inst.i.tutions and standards only in the laws of nature, discovered, as they supposed, by mathematicians and astronomers."[i-8]
Complementary to Newtonian science was the sensationalism of John Locke.
Conceiving the mind as _tabula rasa_, discrediting innate ideas, Lockian psychology undermined such a theological dogma as total depravity--man"s innate and inveterate malevolence--and hence was itself a kind of _tabula rasa_ on which later were written the optimistic opinions of those who credited man"s capacity for altruism. If it remained for the French _philosophes_ to deify Reason, Locke honored it as the crowning experience of his sensational psychology.[i-9] Then, too, as Miss Lois Whitney has ably demonstrated, Lockian psychology "cleared the ground for either primitivism or a theory of progress."[i-10] In addition, his social compact theory, augmenting seventeenth-century liberalism, furnished the political theorists of the Enlightenment with "the principle of Consent"[i-11] in their antipathy for monarchial obscurantism. Locke has been described as the "originator of a psychology which provided democratic government with a scientific basis."[i-12] The full impact of Locke will be felt when philosophers deduce that if sensations and reflections are the product of outward stimuli--those of nature, society, and inst.i.tutions--then to reform man one needs only to reform society and inst.i.tutions, or remove to some tropical isle. We remember that the French Encyclopedists, for example, were motivated by their faith in the "indefinite malleability of human nature by education and inst.i.tutions."[i-13]
"With the possible exception of John Locke," C. A. Moore observes, "Shaftesbury was more generally known in the mid-century than any other English philosopher."[i-14] Shaftesbury"s a priori "virtuoso theory of benevolence" may be viewed as complementary to Locke"s psychology to the extent that both have within them the implication that through education and reform man may become perfectible. Both tend to undermine social, political, and religious authoritarianism. Shaftesbury"s insistence upon man"s innate altruism and compa.s.sion, coupled with the deistic and rationalistic divorce between theology and morality, resulted in the dogma that the most acceptable service to G.o.d is expressed in kindness to G.o.d"s other children and helped to motivate the rise of humanitarianism.
The idea of progress[i-15] was popularized (if not born) in the eighteenth century. It has been recently shown that not only the results of scientific investigations but also Anglican defenses of revealed religion served to accelerate a belief in progress. In answer to the atheists and deists who indicted revealed religion because revelation was given so late in the growth of the human family and hence was not eternal, universal, and immutable, the Anglican apologists were forced into the position of a.s.serting that man enjoyed a progressive ascent, that the religious education of mankind is like that of the individual. If, as the deists charged, Christ appeared rather belatedly, the apologists countered that he was sent only when the race was prepared to profit by his coming. G.o.d"s revelations thus were adjusted to progressive needs and capacities.[i-16]
Carl Becker has suggestively dissected the Enlightenment in a series of ant.i.theses between its credulity and its skepticism. If the eighteenth-century philosopher renounced Eden, he discovered Arcadia in distant isles and America. Rejecting the authority of the Bible and church, he accepted the authority of "nature," natural law, and reason.
Although scorning metaphysics, he desired to be considered philosophical. If he denied miracles, he yet had a fond faith in the perfectibility of the species.[i-17]
Even as Voltaire had his liberal tendencies stoutly reinforced by contact with English rationalism and deism,[i-18] so were the other French _philosophes_, united in their common hatred of the Roman Catholic church, also united in their indebtedness to exponents of English liberalism, dominated by Locke and Newton. If, as Madame de Lambert wrote in 1715, Bayle more than others of his age shook "the Yoke of authority and opinion," English free thought powerfully reinforced the native French revolt against authoritarianism. After 1730 English was the model for French thought.[i-19] Nearly all of Locke"s works had been translated in France before 1700. Voltaire"s affinity for the English mind has already been touched on. D"Alembert comments, "When we measure the interval between a Scotus and a Newton, or rather between the works of Scotus and those of Newton, we must cry out with Terence, _h.o.m.o homini quid praestat_."[i-20]
Any doctrine was intensely welcome which would allow the Frenchman to regain his natural rights curtailed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by the inequalities of a state vitiated by privileges, by an economic structure tottering because of bankruptcy attending unsuccessful wars and the upkeep of a Versailles with its dazzling ornaments, and by a religious program dominated by a Jesuit rather than a Gallican church.[i-21] Economic, political, and religious abuses were inextricably united; the spirit of revolt did not feel obliged to discriminate between the authority of the crown and n.o.bles 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 G.o.d in all their native beauty."[i-22] In addition to furnishing the new Canaan with ecclesiastical and political precedent, Scripture provided "not a partiall, but a perfect rule of Faith, and manners." Any dogma contravening the "ancient oracle" was a weed sown by Satan and fit only to be uprooted and thrown in the fire. The colonial seventeenth century was one which, like John Cotton, regularly sweetened its mouth "with a piece of Calvin." One need not be reminded that Calvinism was inveterately and completely ant.i.thetical to the dogma of the Enlightenment.[i-23] Calvinistic bibliolatry contended with "the sacred book of nature." Its wrathful though just Deity was unlike the compa.s.sionate, 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 inst.i.tutions, especially the tyrannical forms of kings and priests. Calvin"s forlorn and depraved man became a creature naturally compa.s.sionate. If once man worshipped the Deity through seeking to parallel the divine laws scripturally revealed, in the eighteenth century he honored his benevolent G.o.d, who was above demanding worship, through kindnesses shown G.o.d"s other children. The individual was lost in society, self-perfection gave way to humanitarianism, G.o.d 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 a.s.serted that "the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser."[i-24] If the seventeenth-century college was a cloister for clerical education, the Enlightenment sought to train the layman for citizenship.
With the turn of the seventeenth century several forces came into prominence, undermining New England"s Puritan heritage. Among those relevant for our study are: the ubiquitous frontier, and the rise of Quakerism, deism, Methodism, and science. The impact of the frontier was neglected until Professor Turner called attention to its existence; he writes that "the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe.... It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.... The frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution...."[i-25] In the period included in our survey the frontier receded from the coast to the fall line to the Alleghenies: at each stage it "did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier."[i-26] One recalls the spirited satire on frontier conditions, as the above aspects give birth to violence and disregard for law, in Hugh Brackenridge"s _Modern Chivalry_. Under the satire one feels the justness of the attack, intensified by our knowledge that Brackenridge grew up "in a democratic Scotch-Irish back-country settlement." If the frontiersmen during the eighteenth century did not place their dirty boots on their governors" desks, they were partially responsible for an inveterate spirit of revolt, shown so brutally in the "ma.s.sacres" 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 att.i.tudes of Hobbes and Mandeville in attacking man"s nature, and hence by reaction tended to provoke "a primitivism based on the doctrine of natural benevolence."[i-27]
The "New English Israel" was harried by the Quakers,[i-28] who preached the priesthood of all believers and the right of private judgment. They denied the total depravity of the natural man and the doctrine of election; they gloried in a loving Father, and scourged the ecclesiastical pomp and ceremony of other religions. They were possessed by a blunt enthusiasm which held the immediate private revelation anterior to scriptural revelation. Faithful to the inner light, the Quakers seemed to neglect Scripture. Although the less extreme Quakers, such as John Woolman, did not blind themselves to the need for personal introspection and self-conquest, Quakerism as a movement tended to place the greater emphasis on morality articulate in terms of fellow-service, and lent momentum to the rise of humanitarianism expressed in prison reform and anti-slavery agitation. Also one may wonder to what extent colonial Quakerism tended to lend sanction to the rising democratic spirit.
In the person of Cotton Mather, until recently considered a bigoted incarnation of the "Puritan spirit ... become ossified," are discovered forces which, when divorced from Puritan theology, were to become the sharpest wedges splintering the deep-rooted oak of the Old Way. These forces were the authority of reason and science. In _The Christian Philosopher_,[i-29] basing his att.i.tude on the works of Ray, Derham, Cheyne, and Grew,[i-30] Mather attempted to shatter the Calvinists"
ant.i.thesis between science and theology, a.s.serting "that [Natural]
Philosophy is no Enemy, but a mighty and wondrous Incentive to Religion."[i-31] He warned that since even Mahomet with the aid of reason found the Workman in his Work, Christian theologians should fear "lest a Mahometan be called in for thy Condemnation!"[i-32] Studying nature"s sublime order, one must be blind if his thoughts are not carried heavenward to "admire that Wisdom itself!" Although Mather mistrusted Reason, he accepted it as "the voice of G.o.d"--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 G.o.d could have created it. If Reason is no complete subst.i.tute 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 G.o.d that is above."[i-33] Sir Isaac Newton with his mathematical and experimental proof of the sublime universal order strung on invariable secondary causes, Mather confessed, is "our perpetual Dictator."[i-34] Conceiving of science as a rebuke to the atheist, and a natural ally to scriptural theology, Mather, like a Newton himself, juxtaposed rationalism and faith in one pyramidal confirmation of the existence, omnipotence, and benevolence of G.o.d. 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 lat.i.tudinarian policy which, as a mode of thought, tended to promote deism by emphasizing rational religion and minimizing revelation."[i-35] It was to be expected that in colonies created by Puritans (or even Quakers), deism would have a less spectacular and extensive success than it appears to have had in the mother country. If militant deism remained an aristocratic cult until the Revolution,[i-36] scientific rationalism (Newtonianism) long before this, from the time of Mather, became a common ally of orthodoxy. If a "religion of nature" may be defined with Tillotson as "obedience to Natural Law, and the performance of such duties as Natural Light, without any express and supernatural revelation, doth dictate to man,"
then it was in the colonies, prior to the Revolution, more commonly a b.u.t.tress 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 Ma.s.sachusetts inn an "Abridgment of Newton"s Philosophy"; whereupon he "put some questions"
to his host "on physics and geometry," with which he "found him well acquainted."[i-37] Now, even a superficial reading of the eighteenth century discloses countless allusions to Newton, his popularizers, and the implications of his physics and cosmology. As Mr. Brasch suggests, "From the standpoint of the history of science," the extent of the vogue of Newtonianism "is yet very largely unknown history."[i-38]
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."[i-39] 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. .h.i.therto as much believed as the Scriptures, but they soon cleared up and established the Copernican by the help of Whiston"s Lectures, Derham, etc."[i-40] 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[i-41] 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 ill.u.s.trate Rohault as to make him the Vehicle of conveying the peculiarities of the sublimer Newtonian Philosophy."[i-42] This work was used until 1743 when "sGravesande"s _Natural Philosophy_ was wisely subst.i.tuted. 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,[i-43] it is almost startling to learn that probably by 1659 the Copernican system was openly avowed at Harvard.[i-44] 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."[i-45] 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."[i-46] Although Thomas Robie and Nathan Prince are thought to have known Newton"s physics through secondary sources,[i-47] and, as Harvard tutors, indoctrinated their charges with Newtonianism, it was left to Isaac Greenwood[i-48] 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.[i-49]
He learned that Scripture is "to teach us Morality, and our Articles of Faith" but not to serve as an instructor in natural philosophy.[i-50] 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.[i-51] Greenwood accepted, and until 1737 was at Harvard a propagandist of the new science. In 1727 he advertised in the _Boston News-Letter_[i-52] 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.[i-53]
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."[i-54] 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."[i-55] 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.[i-56]
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,[i-57] Voltaire, and Locke, Mayhew revolts against total depravity[i-58] and the doctrines of election and the Trinity, arraigns himself against authoritarianism and obscurantism, and though he draws upon reason for revelation of G.o.d"s will, he does not seem to have been lat.i.tudinarian in respect to the holy oracles. Although he often wrote ambiguously concerning the nature of Christ, he a.s.serted: "That I ever denied, or treated in a bold or ludicrous manner, the divinity of the Son of G.o.d, as revealed in scripture, I absolutely deny."[i-59] He is antagonistic toward the mystical in Calvinism, convinced that "The love of G.o.d is a calm and rational thing, the result of thought and consideration."[i-60] His biographer thinks that Mayhew was "the first clergyman in New England who expressly and openly opposed the scholastic doctrine of the trinity."[i-61] 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."[i-62] 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 G.o.d."[i-63] 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 G.o.d, not only as the maker, but also as the governor of all things."[i-64] "Revelation comes in to the a.s.sistance 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."[i-65] Rev. Henry c.u.mings, ill.u.s.trating his indebtedness to scientific rationalism, honors "the gracious Parent of the universe, whose tender mercies are over all his works ...,"[i-66] 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."[i-67] Simeon Howard discovers the "perfections of the Deity, as displayed in the Creation" as well as in the "government and redemption of the world."[i-68] Both Phillips Payson[i-69] and Andrew Eliot[i-70] affirm the ident.i.ty of "the voice of reason, and the voice of G.o.d."
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.[i-71] If he finally, as a result of his trembling and fearful doubt, reaffirmed zealously his faith in the bibliolatry and relentless dogma of Calvinism,[i-72] Newtonian rationalism was a means to his recovery, and throughout his life a complement to his Calvinism.[i-73] 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,[i-74] 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[i-75]--against a cosmic, social, and individual att.i.tude, 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.