The Society for Useful Knowledge (7 page)

The pugnacious Mandeville and his circle at the Horns tavern clearly saw the youthful author of
A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity
as one of their own. After all, Franklin had zeroed in ruthlessly on the essential human arrogance—“Whatever … tends to exalt our Species above the rest of the Creation, we are pleased with and easily believe”—that underpinned the orthodox approach to natural religion. For his part, Franklin rejoiced in his newfound celebrity friends. Years later he still fondly recalled Mandeville as a “most facetious entertaining Companion.”
³⁴

Lyons also took Franklin to Batson's coffeehouse to meet Dr. Henry Pemberton, secretary of the Royal Society. Pemberton, who introduced Newton's complex works to a curious and enthusiastic general public, even held out the possibility of a meeting with the revered mathematician. To Franklin's lifelong regret, this never came to pass. Nevertheless, the young American had gained a seat at the table with some of London's most accomplished virtuosi—those philosophers, mathematicians, and inventors who dominated Enlightenment science—as well as its leading essayists and wits.

Through Pemberton, he made the acquaintance of Sir Hans Sloane, soon to succeed Newton as president of the Royal Society. Franklin cannot help but strike a certain note of self-satisfaction in the earliest section of his memoirs, written with a close eye on his personal legacy more than four decades after the event, when he recounts his first meeting with Sloane, a prominent court physician whose famed “Cabinet,” or scientific collection, later formed the basis of the British Museum.

“I had brought over a few Curiosities among which the principal was a Purse made of the Asbestos.… Sir Hans Sloane heard of it, came to see me, and invited me to his House in Bloomsbury Square, where he showed me all his Curiosities, and persuaded me to let him add that to the Number, for which he paid me handsomely.”
³⁵
In fact, a surviving letter to Sloane, dated June 2, 1725, makes it clear that it was Franklin who solicited Sloane's interest in buying the purse and other items. He also resorted to something of a high-pressure sales tactic: “p.s. I expect to be out of Town in 2 or 3 Days, and therefore beg an immediate Answer.”
³⁶

Franklin later numbered Pemberton and Sloane among the prominent acquaintances whom he began to encounter on his early forays into London's intellectual world, a world comprised largely of those physicians, clerics, artisans, scholars, nobles, and businessmen in and around the Royal Society. And it was from this circle that Franklin first gleaned a real appreciation for the value and power of science, and intellectual pursuits in general, as well as an understanding of how such inquiries were conducted, evaluated, and disseminated to one's colleagues.

According to the association's statutes, the Royal Society was formed “to improve the knowledge of natural things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments.”
³⁷
Despite the king's imprimatur, the Royal Society long retained the informal character of the irregular gatherings of scientists and inventors in London and Oxford—many of them dedicated amateurs—from which it had first sprung.
³⁸
The broad scope of members' interests and their diverse social stations proved one of the Society's greatest strengths, and for decades these attributes shaped its investigations into matters well beyond the narrow boundaries of modern science.

“All places and corners are now busy, and warm about this Work,” wrote Thomas Sprat, the Society's first historian, in 1667, “and we find many Noble Rarities to be every day given in, not only by the hands of the Learned and professed Philosophers, but from the Shops of
Mechanics
, from the Voyages of
Merchants
, from the Ploughs of
Husbandmen
, from the Sports, the Fishponds, the Parks, the Gardens of
Gentlemen
.”
³⁹
The index to that year's volume of the Society's journal,
Philosophical Transactions
, lists recent “undertakings” on everything from: A, “Air, being exhausted, vegetables do not grow” to Y, “Yellow Amber. See Amber.”
⁴⁰

The success of the Royal Society's project did not depend on “perfect Philosophers” trained in science but relied instead on decidedly amateur enthusiasts. “It suffices,” announced Sprat, “if many of them be plain, diligent, and laborious observers: such, who, though they bring not much knowledge, yet bring their hands, and their eyes uncorrupted: such as have their Brains infected by false Images.… Greater things are produced, by the
free
way, than the
formal
.”
⁴¹

Although Sprat was writing almost five decades before Franklin first began to roam London's coffeehouses and taverns, it is hard to imagine a
better candidate for such work than the young colonial printer. Franklin was meticulous, hardworking, observant, broadly curious, and already skilled at recording nuance and capturing subtlety in the written word. What is more, his was a brain largely uninfected with the “false Images” implanted by formal education or tradition. And he would soon have access to the vast unstudied and uncataloged physical wonders of the New World, about which the fellows of the Royal Society—and European science in general—yearned to learn as much as possible.

But if Franklin had much to offer to the new scientific enterprise, so too did the emerging idiom of experimental science and observation have much to give in return. Here was an endeavor that promised to cut across social and educational boundaries, a project in which all who participated—even junior colonial artisans with just two years of schooling—could both advance themselves and contribute to the expanding storehouse of human knowledge. Franklin had already come into contact with such luminaries of British science as Sloane and Pemberton, and he narrowly failed to meet the great Newton himself. Clearly, the pursuit of scientific experimentation and observation promised access to a powerful social, intellectual, and political network that would otherwise remain unattainable.

Yet Franklin's newfound social and intellectual success in the taverns and coffeehouses, as well as his minor dealings in American “Curiosities” and the demand for his services among the city's better printers, could not obscure the growing realization that he was now effectively marooned in London, with few financial resources and no real future. He had left Palmer's printing house for higher pay at John Watt's more prestigious establishment, and he reduced his rent by moving to cheaper digs and negotiating aggressively with his new landlady. Still, he could save no money.

Franklin had recently broken with his American traveling partner James Ralph—later a London-based writer and critic—over his inopportune advances toward Ralph's mistress. This not only cost him Ralph's friendship but also the considerable sum of twenty-seven pounds, which the latter still owed him for living and travel expenses. Notes for the final section of Franklin's never-completed
Autobiography
reveal how much the affair still rankled, sixty years after the fact: “My Diligence and yet poor through Ralph.”
⁴²

Franklin began to have other regrets, chief among them the publication of his underground pamphlet, the
Dissertation on Liberty
, which on reflection led to
a disquieting world without any distinction between good and evil. It might make for impeccable logic but it was, he began to realize with alarm, completely unthinkable in moral terms and thoroughly unworkable in social ones. A clearly embarrassed Franklin later wrote to an old friend that he soon refuted the
Dissertation
and then put such matters behind him altogether. He went on to assure his correspondent that he had burned as many copies of the offending pamphlet as he could find to keep them from exercising an “ill Tendency” on his circle of intimates.
⁴³
Just four copies are known to have survived intact.
^c

Preparing the first installment of his memoirs, an older, more reflective Franklin reached a gentler verdict on the
Dissertation
, dipping into his printer's lexicon to dismiss this “little metaphysical Piece” as one of life's “Errata”—in essence, a mistake in moral typography. Other youthful errata included running away from his legally binding apprenticeship to his older brother; misusing funds that had been left in his care by a family friend; propositioning his best friend's lover; and abandoning Deborah Read—temporarily, as it turned out, for they later married—after having “interchanged some Promises” back in Philadelphia.
⁴⁴

Nevertheless, Franklin would spend much of the rest of his long public life seeking to expiate the “great Uncertainty, … the wide Contradictions and endless Disputes” he had found in his early pursuit of “the metaphysical Way.” And he confessed that he still rued “the horrible Errors I led myself into when a young Man, by drawing a Chain of plain Consequences as I thought them, from true Principles, [which] have given me a Disgust to what I was once extremely fond of.”
⁴⁵

Here, the exploits of the Royal Society came to the rescue of the remorseful young author of the
Dissertation on Liberty
, for their approach to natural science offered a way out of the moral and ethical dead end posed by this troubling essay. By following his “Chain of plain Consequences,” Franklin had worked out a conclusion on the basis of one of more premises or hypotheses—a method known as deductive reasoning—in this case about the nature of God.

Conversely, the inquiries of the London virtuosi tended to work in the other direction. They first made observations and collected experimental data and
only then proceeded to construct a reasoned argument or theory. This method, so-called inductive reasoning, has long tantalized philosophers: does it really lead to knowledge? Critics challenge both the reliability of generalizing from a limited number of observations and the underlying assumption that what we might term physical laws will continue to operate in the future as they have apparently always acted in the past.

Nevertheless, this approach is a good proxy for the way we humans perceive the natural world and act upon our experiences. As such, it appealed directly to Franklin and other educated laymen, for it allowed them to make observations and carry out experiments in the course of their daily lives without necessarily constructing “Hypotheses and … imaginary Systems.” The farmer, the printer, or the carpenter, as much as the learned gentleman of leisure, could now contribute to the growing body of useful knowledge. Moreover, they were inspired by the fact that the leading scientists and philosophers of the Enlightenment had left no doubt that experimentation and observation could produce definitive truths.
⁴⁶

Franklin and his collaborators were avid readers of Newton's
Opticks
, published in 1704. This popular book clearly spelled out the value of experimentation, and it was far more accessible to these amateur scientists than his more complex theoretical work, with its heavy reliance on higher mathematics. Franklin was also a careful student of Theophilus Desaguliers's
A Course in Experimental Philosophy
(1734–44), an illustrated work that showed the use of different types of scientific apparatus.
⁴⁷

For the rest of his life, Franklin would eschew the deductive approach that had led him into such difficulties with the
Dissertation
. In its place, he championed the inductive methods of Europe's new scientists, applying them to his world-class research on electricity and sharing them with others at the forefront of the American pursuit of useful knowledge.
⁴⁸

But there were other things weighing on Franklin's mind. Foremost was the burning desire to better his modest station in life. On this score, Franklin's first road trip to London had been a failure: he would not after all be heading home as the proud owner of a new printing press and sets of type, able to go into business for himself in the fastest-growing city in the colonies. Throughout his stay in the capital, money had remained a steady worry. At one point, Franklin seriously considered a proposal to tour Europe and support himself by giving
swimming lessons to sons of the nobility. He had already taught two friends, including a fellow printer, how to swim, and several London gentlemen sought instruction after witnessing Franklin's “many Feats of Activity both upon and under Water, that surprised and pleased those to whom they were Novelties.”
⁴⁹
Typically much of the inspiration had come straight from a book:
The Art of Swimming
, by Melchisédec de Thévenot, the much-traveled inventor of the spirit level and librarian to the French king.

Once again, Franklin turned for advice to Thomas Denham, the Philadelphia merchant, who headed off Franklin's teaching scheme. “I was once inclined to it. But mentioning it to me good Friend Mr. Denham, with whom I often spent an Hour, when I had Leisure. He dissuaded me from it, advising me to think only of returning to Pennsylvania, which he was now about to do.”
⁵⁰
The Quaker merchant then made Franklin a counter-offer. He would take on the young man as a clerk in his Philadelphia firm, with the prospect that one day Franklin could trade for his own account. He even offered to stake Franklin the ten pounds for ship's passage as part of their future business relationship.

“The Thing pleased me, for I was grown tired of London, remembered with Pleasure the happy Months I had spent in Pennsylvania, and wished again to see it,” according to Franklin's account. “Therefore I immediately agreed, on the Terms of Fifty Pounds a Year, Pennsylvania Money; less indeed than my present Gettings … but affording a better Prospect.”
⁵¹
The pair soon set about procuring goods and working out contractual arrangements for their new venture and then boarded the
Berkshire
for the return home.