The Society for Useful Knowledge (11 page)

By the age of forty, Benjamin Franklin had established himself at the very heart of commercial, civic, and political life of Pennsylvania. In addition to serving as local postmaster and publishing one of America's leading newspapers and the bestselling
Poor Richard
almanacs, he held the position of clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly. This post effectively guaranteed valuable contracts to print public ordinances, currency, and other official documents. Business was going so well that Franklin began gradually to withdraw from day-to-day management of what was becoming a publishing empire, with interests and affiliates—primarily presses, newspapers, and paper mills—reaching from the Caribbean to New England. He could now afford to devote himself more fully to his many scientific and civic projects.

In a letter to Cadwallader Colden of New York, one of his scientifically inclined correspondents, Franklin announced his decision to hand his printing operations over to a business partner and accept a steady income in return. “Thus you see I am in a fair Way of having no other Tasks than such as I shall like to give myself, and of enjoying what I look upon as a great Happiness, Leisure to read, study, make Experiments, and converse at large with such ingenious and worthy Men as are pleased to honor me with their Friendship or Acquaintance, on such Points as may produce something for the common Benefit of Mankind.”
⁵²

This same impulse had already convinced Franklin and a small circle of collaborators, including Colden and the botanist John Bartram, that the colonies could support their own useful knowledge society, modeled directly on the Royal Society of London. The result was Franklin's public appeal for formation of an American Philosophical Society, outlined in his “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America.” In effect, he set out to create a Leather Apron Club writ large across the American colonial landscape.

In Franklin's vision, the scope of the Society's interests would range far and wide, from improvements in brewing and wine making to “all philosophical
Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things.” Also included were “all new Arts, Trades, Manufactures, &c. that may be proposed or thought of,” as well as new mechanical inventions, the sampling and testing of soil, and the drawing of maps and coastal charts.
⁵³

This new society's endeavors revolved around one central guiding principle—the harnessing of man's intellectual and creative powers for the direct betterment of his estate, an idea that had been gently gestating in Europe for centuries. With the arrival of the Enlightenment, in full swing by the time of Franklin's birth, this principle was now completely bound up with the notion of the ineluctable scientific, social, and economic advancement of society under the benign influence of Reason.

All that was required to pursue these new arts, declared Franklin's “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge,” were sufficient economic resources, adequate time, and an efficient medium of intellectual exchange and social collaboration. Now that the “first Drudgery” of creating successful colonial cities and towns had been completed, Americans were ready to apply experimentation and their own powers of observation to the quest for useful knowledge. “To such of these who are Men of Speculation, many Hints must from time to time arise, many Observations occur, which if well-examined, pursued and improved, might produce Discoveries to the Advantage of some or all of the … [colonies], or to the Benefit of Mankind in general.”
⁵⁴

a
To avoid confusion, I have capitalized Leather Aprons when referring to specific members of Franklin's club by the same name and used the lower case when referring more generally to the artisans, craftsmen, and mechanics who made up an incipient middle class in early America.

b
“The first sensible analysis of exchange value as labor-time, made so clear as to seem almost commonplace, is to be found in the work of a man of the New World,” wrote Marx. “That man is Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the fundamental law of modern political economy … when a mere youth.” Karl Marx,
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
[1859], translated by N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), 62. It seems likely, however, that Franklin developed his thinking on the subject from the earlier work of the Puritan reformer William Petty. See I. Bernard Cohen,
Science and the Founding Fathers
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 151.

It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve forever in a circle of mean and contemptible progress.
—Francis Bacon

The Royal society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge received its first official charter in 1662, but informal learned gatherings were already being held in London and Oxford more than fifteen years beforehand among “a small circle of diverse worthy persons, inquisitive into natural philosophy, and other parts of human learning: and particularly of what hath been called the
New Philosophy
, or
Experimental Philosophy
.”
¹
Whatever the Society's precise provenance, there can be no doubt that it was the intellectual stepchild of Francis Bacon, the English philosopher and one-time chancellor of England, who died in 1626.

Bacon had called for nothing short of a cultural revolution that would interdict the West's reflexive adherence to the outmoded teachings dating back to the Middle Ages and beyond. Such a revolution must be based on a new approach to knowledge, rather than simply “the engrafting of new things upon old.”
²
To break a pattern that had sorely retarded human progress, Bacon advocated the pursuit of knowledge based on direct observation and experimentation. “The office of the sense shall be only to judge of the experiment, and … the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.”
³

Running throughout Bacon's thinking was a profound optimism at odds with much of prevailing opinion that nature and society were caught up in inevitable decay and doomed to unchecked degeneration. The world, argued the naysayers, could never again hope to attain the heights of the medieval or
ancient thinkers. If today's philosophers had achieved anything worthwhile, it was only because they had relied heavily on the accomplishments of bygone eras. This same attitude tended to bolster unstinting reverence for the works of antiquity, in particular the great Greek and Roman authors.
⁴

Bacon also emphasized the social application of knowledge, as well as the collective nature of its acquisition, analysis, and dissemination. An educated cohort of citizens, rather than the romantic, solitary figure of genius, offered the surest source of scientific intellectual advancement and civic success. Preference in schools and universities must be given to utilitarian subjects over the classics that had long dominated the traditional curriculum. “There is no collegiate education designed for these purposes,” Bacon lamented, “where men … might give themselves especially to histories, modern languages, books of policy and civil discourse.”
⁵
Other arts worthy of study included agriculture and cookery, chemistry, and the production of gunpowder, enamel, glass, and paper.

In short, Bacon proposed an entirely new intellectual project—he called his work the
Novum Organon
, or New Instrument, to underscore this point—and he sought to enlist the support of both state and society to see it through.
^a
The complexities of such an ambitious program would clearly require a new social or collective orientation toward natural philosophy, as well as increased reliance on the kind of empirical evidence produced by experimentation and a simplified language of science that would reveal, rather than obscure, the matter at hand.

It would also, Bacon argued, alter the balance of power in intellectual life, opening up what had been the exclusive preserve of the small ruling class to a much broader cross-section of society. “The practical skills and diligence which characterized the approach of the artisan, freed from an attachment to immediate ends, must be carried into the realm of the intellect, itself freed from subservience to preconceived opinion.”
⁶
Public encouragement and funding were required, as was the patience and organization to carry the work well beyond the span of “one man's life.”
⁷

The small circles of the learned and the inventive figures who responded to such a call—the future virtuosi—adopted Bacon's program, in particular what
they saw as his strong utilitarian streak, with enthusiasm. “I shall only mention one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole of this Enterprise, as it is now set on foot; and that is, the Lord Bacon,” wrote the Royal Society's first historian, Thomas Sprat, in 1667. “If my desires could have prevailed … there should have been no other Preface to the History of the Royal Society but some of his Writings.”
⁸

Not only had Bacon proposed a new science, but he also had sketched out the prototype of the new scientist. Sprat's official account of the founding of the Royal Society, begun immediately after its formal incorporation, lauded Bacon throughout for creating a new breed of philosophers, “free from the colors of
Rhetoric
, the devices of
Fancy
, or the delightful deceit of
Fables
” and armed with a new, practical approach to nature. “They have attempted, to free it from Artifice, and Humors, and Passions of Sects, to render it an Instrument, whereby Mankind may obtain a Dominion over
Things
, and not only over one another's
Judgments
.”
⁹

Europe's first experimental scientific society, the Academia Secretorum Naturae, appeared in Naples as early as 1560, followed by similar endeavors in Rome, Florence, Leipzig, and Berlin. Others were later formed in Dublin, Paris, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere on the Continent.
¹⁰
Accompanying these new knowledge societies was the production of almanacs and other publications aimed at bringing the rudiments of science, technology, and word of new discoveries to the general public. In a similar vein, night schools, lectures, and reading rooms flourished, all serving to help break down traditional barriers that had restricted learning to only the most privileged elements of society.

Bacon's prescription represented perhaps the most ambitious and far-reaching attempt to date to come to terms with the social, political, and theological implications of the new scientific advances that came to characterize the seventeenth century. This was the age of scientific apparatus—the telescope, the microscope, the air pump, the pendulum, the barometer, and so on—that sealed Europe's final break with medieval notions of natural philosophy and marked the beginning of a recognizably “modern” science. The ever-expanding voyages of the European explorers, meanwhile, introduced the exotic flora of Africa and the Americas, prompting advances in botany and fueling early attempts at the classification of plant life as the basis for organized study.
¹¹

In the hands of the Royal Society's early members, the implicit utilitarianism running throughout Bacon's work was accentuated and pushed to the fore.
King Charles II, newly restored to the throne after the collapse of Puritan rule under Oliver Cromwell, signed the Society's first charter in the summer of 1662, charging its membership with “promoting by the authority of experiments the sciences of natural things and of useful arts.”
¹²

The king reinforced this practical mission with a decree that no patent would be issued for “any philosophical or mechanical invention, until examined by the Society.” There would be, the Society promised in return, no “meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Morals, Politics, … or Logic.”
¹³
This was an explicit pledge that the Royal Society, with its roots deep in the intellectual ferment of the Puritan Revolution, would steer clear of political and religious controversy now that the king and the Church of England were both fully back in power.

The emphasis on experimental science, direct experience, and useful knowledge in general flowing from the works of Bacon dovetailed neatly with the views of the Puritans and many of England's other sectaries, including the dissident Quakers who founded Pennsylvania. These movements shared a general stress on the utility of knowledge in the pursuit of religious truth and the general advancement of society. They were also eager to overhaul those institutions that supported the persecution of their members and acted as an impediment to social, religious, and political reform. This was particularly the case with the English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which were closed to all dissenters from the official Church of England.

More broadly, the evangelical approach to reading scripture ushered in by the Reformation had already established the primacy, at least in theory, of the believer's own relationship to the written text over any intermediary role on the part of a priestly caste or other elite. For many of these new Protestant readers, common sense, not churchly tradition or academic philosophizing, was the best guide to understanding. George Fox, founder of the Quakers, took direct aim at the religious legitimacy of the universities, whose chief mission was the training of ministers for the state church. “Being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers to God,” Fox wrote in 1646 after one of his spiritual insights or “openings,” for all men are “born of God” and thus are capable of true religious understanding.
¹⁴

Writing of his close friend Fox, William Penn reported that the Quaker founder was “ignorant of useless and sophistical science, … [and] had in him the grounds for useful and commendable knowledge, and cherished it
everywhere.”
¹⁵
Penn was a member in good standing of the Royal Society, and he was personally acquainted with many of his prominent contemporaries, including Isaac Newton and the philosopher John Locke, who forcefully advocated teaching “only what is most necessary.”