Smithsonian Libraries

Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic - 3

Here is a third excerpt from the Libraries' Dibner Library lecture publication, Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity by Joyce E. Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. If you would like to receive the lecture in print, please contact the Dibner Library. If you missed the first two installments, or can't wait for the next one, you may also view the PDF. The publication has also been getting positive notice from the blogosphere.

Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity by Joyce E. Chaplin

He encouraged the readers of Poor Richard to see for themselves the “remarkably entertaining Objects” to be seen under “that admirable Instrument the MICROSCOPE” The device would show them the tiny “Animalcules to be found…in the Infusions of Pepper, Senna, Pinks, Roses, Jessamin, Tea, Raspberry From Adams’s Micrographia illustrata . Stalks, Fennel, Sage, Melons, sour Grapes, Wheat, Hay, Straw, and almost all vegetable Substances.” A microscope would also display a polyp, the tiny aquatic creature that Trembley had described. “What is wonderful, and almost beyond Belief,” Franklin said of the creature, “is, that it will live and feed after it is turned inside out, and even when cut into a great many Pieces, each several Piece becomes a compleat Polype.” Thus inspired to think of colonists as fennel plants and of the first British empire as a many-headed minihydra, Franklin also marveled that the teeming hordes within the microscopic world greatly outnumbered the inhabitants of the human world. “In the [s]melt of a single Cod-fish,” he explained, “ten Times more living Creatures are contained than the [human] Inhabitants of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, taking it for granted, that all Parts of the World are as well peopled as Holland, which is very far from being the Case.” He explained how another animalcule was so tiny that “three Millions of them, or three Times the Number of the Inhabitants of London and Westminster, would not equal the Bulk of a Grain of Sand.”


George Adams, Micrographia illustrata: or, The microscope explained..., 1771

It was interesting to Franklin that animalcules might outnumber Britons, but crucial for him that colonists would eventually do so. He quickly turned his prediction that Americans doubled their numbers every twenty years into the cornerstone of his criticism of British government of the colonies. His was a powerful voice. Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, first published in 1751, made him the best-known British American of his day. In that magnum opus and all his other work in science, Franklin was careful never to favor one side in any argument. Thus he had not, in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, cited any of the other theorists who considered humans to be mere components of the material world, even though that idea had gained some ground since his youth. He did not mention Carolus Linnaeus’s controversial decision, in Systema naturae (1758), to classify humans alongside the other animals. Nor did he cite Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s conclusion, published in 1748, that the human body was, like the rest of nature, a mechanical construction whose material foundation meant humans might well be described as machines.

Stay tuned for our next installment! —Elizabeth Periale

Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic - 2

A second excerpt from the Libraries' Dibner Library lecture publication, Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity by Joyce E. Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. If you would like to receive the lecture in print, please contact the Dibner Library. If you missed the first installment, or can't wait for the next one, you may also view the PDF.

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Œuvres de M. Franklin, Docteur des loix..., 1773

Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity

by Joyce E. Chaplin

All in all, Franklin gave the impression that he considered men and women to be comparable to animals, as creatures endowed only with sensate bodies, not moral souls. Indeed, he stated that "every Creature must be equally esteem'd by the Creator." That was deeply repellent to most of his contemporaries, and the fact that Franklin assaulted conventional arguments for the immortality of the soul and the likelihood of an afterlife would not have consoled readers who hoped that these were the very things that differentiated them from all other natural beings. In his final paragraph, Franklin jeeringly anticipated one possible response to his arguments: "'What! bring ourselves down to an Equality with the Beasts of the Field! with the meanest part of the Creation! 'Tis insufferable!'" To which Franklin answered, "Truth will be Truth tho' it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful."

Those were Franklin's last words on the matter, which he then followed with the emblem of the print-shop under the same motto vitam mortuis reddo that had opened Wollaston's essay. The picture made Franklin's satirical object apparent, as well as his desire to reverse or even upend the Christian tradition. Which dead bodies did he think could be restored to life? Did he mean to imply, on his final page, that animals were as likely to be resurrected as humans or (equally offensive to the orthodox) that humans were no more likely than animals to achieve an afterlife? Works that were not nearly as materialist as Franklin's got their authors imprisoned. To escape prosecution, Franklin printed neither his name nor the name of the print-shop on his pamphlet. (The dedicatee, James Ralph, was surely relieved that Franklin indicated him only by the initials "J. R.") Author and printer could not be traced, and thus eluded the authorities.

Bold at age nineteen, when he paid his London master to have 100 copies of the satirical work printed, Franklin later lost his nerve. He never publicly restated the materialist philosophy of his Dissertation. He instead became outspoken in his acceptance of the argument from design, the idea that the creation was so wondrous and complex that it had to be the handiwork of a Supreme Being. He also publicly accepted the orthodox belief that the human soul would survive death, a fate denied to all other earthly beings. In his 1728 "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion," written three years after he had published the Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, he emphasized that God had "created Man, bestowing Life and Reason, and plac'd him in Dignity superior to thy other earthly Creatures."

Franklin claimed to have burned all but one copy of his Dissertation. Seven of the hundred copies are known to have survived, however-not bad for an early eighteenth-century print run of that size-so Franklin was not as assiduous as he asserted. (Whether he knew it or not, a subsequent edition of 1733 came out in Dublin, so the circulation of his parody was if anything increasing.) His claim to have destroyed his juvenilia nevertheless shows his effort to distance himself from it. In his memoirs, Franklin took care to describe the work as an "Erratum," a printer's term for an error in composition, and Franklin's term for the great errors of his life. As has often been noted, this definition of error hints at Franklin's assumption that his mistakes were correctible, things he could easily change in the next draft.

Stay tuned for our next installment! —Elizabeth Periale

Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic

The Libraries latest published Dibner Library lecture is Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity by Joyce E. Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. Dr. Chaplin received her B. A. at Northwestern University, her M. A. and Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University, and was a Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom in 1985-86. Her most recent book, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. She is currently writing a history of around-the-world travel, from Magellan the Spanish explorer to Magellan the GPS.

We would like to present the first of a few excerpts from the published lecture to pique your interest. if you would like to receive the lecture in print, please contact the Dibner Library. If you can't wait for the next installment, you may also view the PDF.

Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity

by Joyce E. Chaplin

BE A BEAST, Benjamin Franklin counseled his panic-stricken friend, Oliver Neave, when the poor man was trying to learn how to swim. Neave had to put the dangers of deep water out of his mind-the less conscious reflection, the better. "Though we value ourselves on being reasonable knowing creatures," Franklin warned, "reason and knowledge seem on such occasions to be of little use to us; and the brutes to whom we allow scarce a glimmering of either, appear to have the advantage of us." Franklin offered his advice in the 1760s, when comparing humans to brute animals was for him an old habit. The seriousness with which he took the comparison is apparent in his grammatical lapse: "brutes to whom" rather than "brutes to which." Many aspects of Franklin's scientific thought are well-known but not, surprisingly, his materialist implication that people, no less than animals or even plants, were physical bodies embedded in nature, whose so-called higher qualities were overrated.

It was a radical idea. Perhaps because Franklin took little interest in the eighteenth century's other materialist conception of humans - that they (like animals) were mere collections of mechanical phenomena, virtual machines - his opinion has been little noted. Yet it mattered. The conventional belief among Franklin's contemporaries was that humans and animals were different because the former had souls, reason, and finer emotions. Throughout his life, Franklin was skeptical that any of that was true.

After brashly advertising his skepticism in his youth, he thereafter masked it. He nevertheless managed to make it into the centerpiece of his political arithmetic, his analysis of population dynamics in British America, which eventually underpinned his boldest objections to the centralized governance of the British empire. Scholars have noted the importance of Franklin's political arithmetic to the development of the human sciences, as well as its impact, via Thomas Malthus, on the Victorian evolutionists Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin. But to appreciate that impact fully, we should see how Franklin's political arithmetic was read and circulated and see that his efforts were not only part of the human sciences, but part of the natural science within which Wallace and Darwin worked, not least because his assessment, like theirs, daringly assimilated humans to other living creatures.

Stay tuned for our next installment! —Elizabeth Periale