by Nick Bunker
Sixty feet long, with a stone floor and tall windows, it was ideal for printers who needed light to work by and a solid base for their equipment. Someone had built a wooden platform, so that the chapel had two floors, with the lower one occupied by a foundry where Thomas James cast lead type. On the upper level, there was a printing shop, owned by Samuel Palmer, Franklin’s new boss. He had a link with Philadelphia—he had printed some material for a Quaker who had known Aquila Rose—and this may explain how Franklin found his way to Palmer’s door.
In the 1730s, his career would end in bankruptcy, a fate that befell many printers in London, including Sir William Keith’s creditor, John Baskett: the market was simply too competitive. It also required too much capital by way of machines, metal, and paper, and too many customers had, like Sir William, a habit of forgetting to pay their bills. But when Franklin knew him, Samuel Palmer was only thirty-three, and making his name as a fine exponent of his trade.9
At his death, Palmer left behind a manuscript, The Practical Part of Printing, which tells us the qualities he looked for in the people he hired. The choicest skills were those of a compositor, the job Franklin was given. The aristocrats of the workshop, they were highly paid, making about nineteen shillings a week, because their task was, wrote Mr Palmer, “laborious and difficult.” The compositors had to decipher the author’s handwriting, correct his English, and set his prose into type, five or six words at a time. They did so by plucking the lead characters—mostly one sixth of an inch across—out of two wooden cases: the upper case for capitals, and the lower one for smaller letters, punctuation, and spaces.
Using a precision tool, the composing stick, the compositor arranged and justified the text so that it would look clear and inviting. Then he slotted the body of type into the galley, a wooden tray that held columns of print. This had to be done as neatly and as firmly as possible. If not, then when the tray went down to the press, and the ink ball was applied, the ink would spread unevenly and the impression would be blurred. Speed was essential, to meet deadlines and because the men were paid by their volume of output.
The wrist had to be supple, and the arms had to be strong—completed sets of type weighed thirty pounds each, and had to be handled carefully, never dropped or damaged—but it was consistency that counted the most in a compositor. “He ought to be very intent upon his business,” Mr. Palmer wrote. “For if he suffers himself to be distracted, either by singing, chatting, or any other impertinences, I defy him, tho’ he were the ablest workman, to make a correct composition.” He took a dim view of men who ate as they worked and fouled up the galley with grease and crumbs.
“Regularity”: that was Palmer’s watchword. He must have seen it in Franklin, because he gave the young American a formidable assignment. Franklin was told to compose the text for a third edition of a book that was doing well and had to be perfect. The author, who had recently passed away, was a Cambridge graduate who had worked as a schoolmaster, inherited one fortune, married into another, and then devoted himself to learning. His name was William Wollaston, and his book was a work of metaphysics called The Religion of Nature Delineated.
The text was a daunting project, demanding all Franklin’s powers of concentration. The book contained elaborate footnotes, with quotations from Hebrew and Greek as well as Latin. The type had to be set in such a way as to clarify the logical sequence of its ideas, with many sentences placed in italics, and it had to look elegant too: Mr. Palmer had a reputation to maintain. Not content with setting the book up to be printed, Franklin also engaged with what it said. There followed one of the most striking episodes of Franklin’s remarkable young life.
In The Religion of Nature Delineated, Wollaston had produced a subtle, closely argued work of philosophical analysis. It was also very controversial. Although he wished to prove the existence of God—“one supreme and perfect Being,” as Wollaston described him—the means by which he tried to do so were hardly very Christian. “The foundation of religion,” he began, “lies in that difference between the acts of men which distinguishes them into good, evil, and indifferent.” From that simple proposition his argument unfolded, by way of an investigation of the meaning of the words “truth” and “goodness,” until the existence of a deity became self-evident.
It was all done with human logic alone, plus a little help from Sir Isaac Newton and the microscope, whose revelation of the secrets of nature had deeply impressed Mr. Wollaston: surely a cosmos so intricate must have a wise creator? But not once did he mention the name of Jesus. Original sin and the Holy Trinity were absent as well; Wollaston filled his footnotes with Jewish rabbis, not the Christian Fathers; and although he insisted we should all worship God, he would not lay down fixed rules about how to do so. “Every man knows best,” wrote Wollaston, “how he may…perform this duty.”10
In other words, he was a deist, open to the charge of subverting Christianity while pretending to defend it. In 1725, as The Religion of Nature became a best-seller, it led to a flurry of books from other authors, making the case for Wollaston or against him. Even Defoe the Calvinist entered the fray, with a pamphlet attacking the book for its failure to acknowledge the innate depravity of human beings. Benjamin Franklin joined in as well, but from a perspective very different from Defoe’s.11
In the third week of February, at about the time Franklin was finishing work on Wollaston’s book, Andrew Hamilton’s ship reached England at last. As Denham had proposed, the young man tracked the lawyer down to tell him about the machinations of Keith and Riddlesden. The meeting had profound implications for Franklin’s future. Hamilton thanked him, and a bond of friendship was sealed that would endure until Hamilton’s death in 1741. It may also be that Franklin told Hamilton about his latest literary endeavor. Hamilton was yet another skeptic who would understand what Franklin was up to.
At only nineteen, and three thousand miles from home, Franklin wrote his own short essay taking issue with Wollaston. Using one of Palmer’s presses, he printed off one hundred copies. Dedicated to James Ralph, it bore the title A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain. For those who knew the writings of the deists, and especially those of Anthony Collins, the title alone would be a sure sign of what the essay contained. Although it was written in a form of code, its deeper meanings wrapped up in paradox, the message was not too hard to decipher. The Dissertation was a work of unmitigated atheism.
FRANKLIN THE FATALIST
“Truth will be truth,” Franklin wrote, “tho’ it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful.” With that revealing statement he brings the Dissertation to a close, but only after many words clearly meant to be shocking. More than fifty years later, when a friend inquired about the pamphlet, Franklin did not wish to be reminded of this exercise in youthful bravado. He tried to disown the Dissertation, claiming that he soon had second thoughts about it. After giving away a few copies, he had burned the rest, in a fit of remorse for having written something that might have what he called “an ill tendency.”12
Or so he told his friend in 1779. By that time Silence Dogood had long since vanished into obscurity. Nobody—except perhaps Franklin’s sister Jane—remembered The New-England Courant or the name of Samuel Keimer. Franklin was in Paris, eager to avoid any hint of scandal that might jeopardize his diplomatic mission. And so he pretended that he had never really been a skeptic or an atheist, who took pleasure in being provocative.
It was a rather different story in 1725. No one—not even a youth of nineteen—could produce such a pamphlet without knowing precisely what he was doing. In his old age, when he briefly summarized its contents, Franklin said that he merely intended “to prove the doctrine of fate.” This was an innocuous phrase in Paris in the 1770s, but not in the London of Walpole and George I. If you dealt in words like “fate” or “necessity,” you were making a statement about yourself, and you were being political as well. You were aligni
ng yourself with the most radical Whigs, men who could be stigmatized as agents of profanity.13
In 1723, the Tories had found a new tactic for opposing Sir Robert. Using the grand jury of Middlesex, which the Tories controlled, they tried to mount prosecutions of Whigs, accusing them of blasphemy. It was a clever way to get at Walpole by implying that the party he led was a friend to immorality. First the grand jury went after the authors of Cato’s Letters. Then the Tories attacked a physician, Bernard Mandeville, who had friends at the highest level of Walpole’s administration. Mandeville had written a scandalous book, The Fable of the Bees, which seemed to pour scorn on the most sacred notions of religion and morality.
Him the Tories accused of belief in something they called “absolute fate.” In other words, the grand jury alleged that Mandeville had ventured beyond mere deism to become a more outrageous kind of thinker. He was a fatalist, or so the Tories claimed: somebody who regarded human beings as the pawns of blind necessity, impotent cogs in the mechanism of a universe governed by physical laws, with no need for a God to keep it in being. And so “fate” was a loaded word. If you called someone like Mandeville a fatalist, you were saying that he was an atheist as well as a Whig, a man bereft of faith and virtue and an enemy of Christianity: and by writing the Dissertation, his own fatalistic treatise, Franklin placed himself in the same company.14
Behind the word “fate” there lurked the dangerous figure of Spinoza, the philosopher from seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Spinoza, it was said, had been the arch-fatalist, a man whose system of ideas left no room for free will, for morality, or for God. The defenders of religion always went out of their way to condemn Spinoza. And since he was a Jew and a Dutchman, this was easily done, in an England where xenophobia was a way of life. As it happens, Mandeville was Dutch as well. And so it was possible to brand The Fable of the Bees as a Spinozistic work of infamy and unbelief.
Among the writers who denounced Spinoza, there was one whose name will be familiar: the wealthy Mr. Wollaston. In an angry footnote, Wollaston chastised Spinoza for what he called his “impieties and contradictions.” His system was nothing but “gross atheism”; because Spinoza had made out that if there really were a God, then—since God was everywhere, and all powerful—God must also contain “all the follies, madnesses, wickednesses that are in the world.” Or in other words: God had made evil as well as good, and both were equal in God’s eyes. A dreadful suggestion, and one that Wollaston beheld with horror.
But not so Benjamin Franklin. Just as Ralph plunged into the London of actors and writers, Franklin dived into the world of ideas with the same audacity. His pamphlet took the same side as Mandeville and Spinoza, setting out to prove the very notion that Wollaston found so offensive: that God (if he existed at all) had made vice as well as virtue, and found them equally acceptable.
The Dissertation had two parts, the first of which was pretty much the standard bill of fare from a skeptic. Section One, “Of Liberty and Necessity,” did what had been done before, many times, by writers whose arguments Franklin had studied in America. You began by making God your hypothesis, a divinity all knowing and omnipotent. Then, and it was hardly difficult, you developed the idea of the Almighty in such a way as to make him the author of the grievous as well as the beneficial. “Pain, sickness, want, theft, murder etc”—Franklin makes a list—all of these evils could be laid at his door. By doing so, you made God out to be absurd and capricious. You also did away with the concept of free will.
If the cosmos really was a perfect system—“this great machine, the universe,” as Franklin put it—then it had to be the system that Newton had described, working like a clock. Universal gravity and the laws of motion: if they were the source of order in the cosmos, they had to operate everywhere, among the planets but also on earth. In which case: there must be other laws as well, not quite those of Newton but somewhat similar, that governed the behavior of mankind. Permit the intervention of human free will—in Franklin’s words, “an independent self-motion”—and you would disrupt the mechanism of the clock. Necessity and fate versus free will and liberty: Franklin came down on the side of fate, and so on the side of Spinoza.
It was a bleak way of looking at things, but neither new nor very profound. The original part of Franklin’s Dissertation came in Section Two. Having disposed of God and free will, he moves on to demolish the traditional concept of the soul; which means that Franklin also does away with an afterlife. Here Franklin takes on a more formidable adversary: not Wollaston, but John Locke, whose work he had read so carefully.
A man who never ceased to be a Christian, Locke had taken the view that the soul is “an immaterial spirit, a substance that thinks and has a power of motion in a body, by will or thought.” Franklin says something entirely different. Thought is not the quality that marks out life and consciousness from the inactive matter of the universe: instead, Franklin looks to pain—“the sensation of uneasiness”—as the thing that differentiates the living from the dead. According to the Dissertation, the human mind “must first be acted upon before it can react. In the beginning of infancy it is as if it were not; it is not conscious of its own existence, till it has received the first sensation of pain; then, not before, it begins to feel itself, is rous’d, and put into action….Thus is the machine set in work; this is life. We are first mov’d by pain, and the whole succeeding course of our lives is but one continued series of action with a view to be freed from it.” Pleasure was the goal of human life, in other words: by which he meant that everything that human beings do—eating, drinking, making love, good deeds and bad, idleness or industry—are merely efforts to stave off the uneasiness and pain that pursue them from their mother’s breast.
In picturing existence in this way, Franklin stood alongside the most radical thinkers of the period. In the 1720s, a few clandestine writers in France were saying much the same thing. They too conceived of human beings as machines, with the mind and body serving merely as the site of fleeting impulses of pain and pleasure. Franklin cannot have known their work, because it was kept secret, and yet he reached conclusions similar to theirs. Like the French, he had a choice about which way to go next. Having come this far, he could either confine himself to metaphysics, or he could take another path, the road of science—biology, or medicine, perhaps—as a way to develop his ideas about the mechanism of the body and the brain.15
In the Dissertation, Franklin stuck to technical philosophy, which was what he knew from Locke. Firstly he did away with ethics, by arguing that every thought and action—even when it seems to be altruistic—is just another exercise in what he calls “self-love.” Then he discarded Locke’s idea of the soul. According to Franklin, the soul is just “a faculty”—not unlike the skill of the compositor, as he plucks lead type from a tray—for gathering up impressions received by the brain. When the brain ceases to function, the soul must disappear as well. Heaven, hell, or immortality, or the resurrection of the body: none of these is feasible in Franklin’s fatalistic scheme of things. Even if a human being came back to life, he or she could never be the person they had been first time around, because their recollections and their identity had vanished with the brain.
In the twenty-first century, when arguments like these are common currency, it is easy to be sneering about Franklin’s Dissertation. The young man can be patronized, he can be called naive, and holes can be picked in his logic. But nothing can diminish the scale of his achievement. Franklin had first to become an excellent writer of English prose; then he had to read John Locke and much else besides, and understand what the writers said; he also had to master the difficult art of printing; and then he had to cross the Atlantic, survive in an alien city, talk his way into a job, read Wollaston, write the Dissertation, print it himself, and risk the consequences. And Franklin did all this before he left his teens.
This was ingenuity; and the pamphlet attracted the attention it deser
ved. Next door to Franklin’s lodgings at the Golden Fan, there was a bookstore called the Green Dragon, owned by one John Wilcox. He had given Franklin the run of the place, allowing him to borrow what he wanted in return for a modest fee. Wilcox was also a publisher. Among his authors he counted a surgeon, John Lyons, who lived nearby at the Fortune of War in Bartholomew Close. A radical Whig, Lyons had written a book, The Infallibility of Human Judgment, hostile to the clergy and their doctrines, which briefly put him in jail. He read the Dissertation and sought out the young author to discuss his ideas. For Franklin, this would be another fruitful encounter, as Lyons took him into the heart of the avant-garde.
THE MYSTERIOUS MR. LYONS
He was one more of Franklin’s eccentrics. In 1721, at the time of the epidemics in the Mediterranean, John Lyons devised a singular scheme for protecting the people of London. If—as he argued—smallpox and the plague were spread by what he called “malignant atoms,” drifting in the atmosphere, then the best way to prevent infection was to purify the air. So he urged his fellow citizens to lay trails of gunpowder in the streets, to be ignited in a chain of small explosions that would burn away the pestilence. Individuals should arm themselves with miniature pistols, primed with a blank charge. They would pull the trigger when they felt in danger of catching the plague.16
It was a bold suggestion, if a rather noisy one; and it aroused the wrath of the authorities. In December of that year, as Lyons tried to publicize the scheme by writing a column for Applebee’s Weekly Journal above the byline of “Pythagoras,” he quoted some outspoken lines from his book about human judgment. Summoned before the officials who monitored the press, Lyons had to grovel and apologize. He escaped with a warning. After that, he continued to bring out new editions of The Infallibility, assuming that he had the approval of the government. Alas, in the spring of 1723, when the Tories were pursuing Mandeville, somebody complained about Lyons as well. And so Walpole’s Whig administration felt obliged to act, if only to distance themselves from a writer so appalling.