HKB
in other fields, Franklin sought his greatest intellectual pleasure in scientific research and speculation, and that his doctrines of scientific deism antedated and conditioned his political, economic, and humanitarian interests.
If Franklin's inventions have been justly praised, his affections for the empirical scientific method and his philosophic interest in Nature's laws have been unjustly ignored. He observed to Ebenezer Kinnersley "that a philosopher cannot be too much on his guard in crediting their ["careless observers'"] relations of things extraordinary, and should never build an hypothesis on any thing but clear facts and experiments, or it will be in danger of soon falling ... like a house of cards";[i-380] and to 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."[i-381] In 1782 he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, that he longed to "sit down in sweet Society with my English philosophic Friends, communicating to each other new Discoveries, and proposing Improvements of old ones; all tending to extend the Power of Man over Matter, avert or diminish the Evils he is subject to, or augment the Number of his Enjoyments."[i-382] A careful study of his scientific papers discloses that he was not untrained in the method of hypotheses sustained or rejected by patient and laborious experimentation: not fortuitously did he arrive at conclusions in electricity, which were epochal in (1) "His rejection of the two-fluid theory of electricity and 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."[i-383] Not only an inventor, Franklin inductively observed natural phenomena, and drew conclusions until he had created a virtual Principia of electricity. His contemporaries were not loath to honor him as a second Newton. Franklin, however, was in all of his researches under a self-confessed yoke which doubtless tended to deny him access to the profoundest reaches of scientific inquiry: from Philadelphia he wrote in 1753 to Cadwallader Colden, eminent mathematician (as well as versatile scientist): "Your skill & Expertness in Mathematical Computations, will afford you an Advantage in these Disquisitions [among them, researches in electricity], that I lament the want of, who am like a Man searching for some thing in a dark Room where I can only grope and guess; while you proceed with a Candle in your Hand."[i-384]
In an effort to learn the modus operandi of Franklin's philosophic thought, let us now review its genetic development, its probable sources, its relation to scientific deism, and the degree to which he achieved that serene repose for which he ever strove. A pioneer American rationalist, not without his claims to being "another Voltaire," Franklin as a youth read those works which were forming or interpreting the thought patterns of the age. Born in an epoch presided over by a Locke and a Newton, an epoch of rationalism and "supernatural" rationalism, alike fed by physico-mathematical speculation. Franklin, barely beyond adolescence, felt the impacts of the age of reason. Scholars before and since M. M. Curtis have explained that "in religion he was a Deist of the type of Lord Herbert of Cherbury."[i-385] M. Faÿ has sought, without convincing documentary evidence, to interpret Franklin's philosophic mind in terms of Pythagoreanism.[i-386] We may find that these views are over simple and historically inadequate--even wrong.