Science and the Founding Fathers: “an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood”

I am now reading a very interesting book called Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison, by I. Bernard Cohen (sent to me by the wonderful peteb).

Mr. Cohen is a professor of the history of science at Harvard – and I am very much liking the dovetailed-nature of this book: the way scientific discoveries in the 17th and 18th centuries informed political thought.

The description of the book reads:

For Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison, science was an integral part of life — including political life. This is the story of their scientific education and of how they employed that knowledge in shaping the political issues of the day, incorporating scientific reasoning even into the Constitution.

I took a “History of Science” class in college – taught by the wonderful Mort Briggs – and it was one of my favorite classes I ever took. I took it just for the hell of it, I needed the credit, and I knew Mort quite well. He was a professor, but he also acted in the university shows … so I knew him that way. It’s fascinating to learn about the developments of different theories – how scientists build on those who came before (the whole “shoulders of giants” thing) …

So this new book is not only a look at the scientific interests of those Founding fathers guys, but also a really interesting history of science in general.

A couple of excerpts from Science and the Founding Fathers below:

From Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison, by I. Bernard Cohen

James Harrington, the seventeenth-century political theorist whose Oceana has been called a “constitutional blueprint,” described his method as a “political anatomy”. He was a great admirer of William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and made use of a number of analogies based on Harvey’s work. Thus, he argued for a bicameral legislation on the analogy with Harvey’s discovery of the functions of the two ventricles of the human heart, even making use in his argument of the difference in size and strength between the ventricles. This political analogy included Harvey’s discussion of the difference between the blood pumped out by each ventricle, concluding that the two houses of the legislature would similarly have different functions. Only a historian of science or someone really familiar with the nature of Harvey’s discoveries would fully appreciate this analogy. Furthermore, only a historian of science who knew Harvey’s work on animal generation would recognize the Harveyan origins of other political analogies used by Harrington, including one introduced by the bold statement, Everything comes from the egg, taken directly from the motto “Ex ovo omnia” in the frontispiece to Harvey’s Latin treatise De Generatione Animalium. Similarly, only a historian of science or someone familiar with the text of Newton’s Pincipia would recognize the Newtonian source of Jefferson’s paraphrase in his Notes on the State of Virginia…

In the days of the Founding Fathers, only one political leader, Benjamin Franklin, had a real scientific reputation; he was recognized the world over as one of the foremost scientists of his day. Many of our historians, however, have not had sufficient knowledge and understanding of science to evaluate his scientific achievement at its true worth. As a result, historians have generally either belittled his contributions to basic science and his scientific stature or confused the advance of knowledge with its applications, treating his scientific research as if it were on the same level as the invention of gadgets such as a rocking chair, bifocal glasses, or his “armonica”.

Having read a number of biographies of Benjamin Franklin, I have to say that this observation is pretty much spot-on.

One more excerpt:

American political thought in the age of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution exhibits two seemingly different qualities. One is deductive, the other inductive. The deductive feature emulates mathematics and logic as the expression of human reason, finding a model in the geometry of Euclid and in Newton’s Principia. An example would be some of the Federalist papers, in which certain general principles are held to be the axioms of political thought from which some features of the Constitution are derived or defended. So extreme did this procedure seem to critics that one of them pilloried Madison for the form of arguments in the Federalist. He would, the correspondent wrote, “next have recourse to CONIC SECTIONS, by which he will be enabled with greater facility, to discover the many windings of his favorite system.” This deductive quality is a feature of the Declaration of Independence, where certain general principles are set forth in the preamble, followed by particular grievances seen in consequence.

The inductive feature is more closely related to experience than to logic or mathematics. A reliance on the lessons of experience rather than on the simple powers of reason characterizes this approach. John Adams was expressing the viewpoint of many of his fellow Americans when he wrote that “the two sources of true government are reason and experience”. This notion of a test by experience was a feature of Lincoln’s famed Gettysburg Address, when he spoke of a test whether a “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” can “long endure”.

In the days of the Declaration and the Constitution, the two chief prophets of the deductive and the inductive points of view were Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, respectively. Jefferson’s great trio of immortals, the highest incarnation of the human mind, were Bacon and Newton plus John Locke. He commissioned their portraits and hung them in a place of prominence in his office in the State Department, where they were duly admired by Alexander Hamilton, and he later displayed them prominently in his house at Monticello.

The inductive approach, with its grounding on experience, had certain features which made it seem particularly attractive to Americans. The constant regard for the lessons of experience had to be significant to citizens of the New World in a way that was not the case for Europeans, simply because in the New World there was a consciousness of a frontier, even for those who lived in urban centers or on farms and plantations far removed from the boundaries of the wilderness and the domains of the Indians. Woe to anyone who was so wedded to theory or abstractions as to neglect the hard facts of brute experience. “Experience,” as Franklin had Poor Richard say, “keeps a dear school”…

The role of experience was a principal factor of the philosophy of the third of Jefferson’s trio of immortals, John Locke. Locke, it will be recalled, held that infants are born with an empty mind, a “tabula rasa”, with no “innate” ideas. Ideas come to be formed, he argued, on the basis of the impinging of the sense-data or impressions of experience. In this context it must not be forgotten that Newton’s two masterpieces of physical science, the Principia and the Opticks, were both based ultimately on experience and on induction. Newton’s third and fourth “Rules for Natural Philosophy” in the Principia are concerned with the method of induction. In the final “Query” of the Opticks Newton gave the reader a guide to the way of “arguing from Experiments and Observations by Induction,” the method of proceeding “from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general.” Newton even expressed the hope that “if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged.”

In the age of the Constitution the veneration of Newton did not preclude placing a high value on the new and post-Newtonian sciences based on direct interrogation of nature by experiment and observation. The most famous American at the Convention was Benjamin Franklin, a scientist renowned for his experiments and for a theory devised to explain the features of experiential knowledge. His celebrated treatise was, in fact, called Experiments and Observations on Electricity. One of the scientific heroes of the Enlightenment was Linnaeus, founder of the great system of classification of plants that bore his name. Linnaeus had proceeded by observation and not by mathematics or deduction.

Political creeds are always ultimately based on religious beliefs or political or social philosophies, a set of general beliefs or axioms from which particular conclusions are derived. In considering the political thought of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and who framed the Constitution, therefore, we cannot neglect the impress on their mind-set of the intellectual background of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. Even George Washington, not usually noted for a deep reading of the philosophers, was aware of the importance of Enlightenment thinkers in making possible the political new world of America being created after independence. In a circular letter to the states, announcing his retirement as commander-in-chief of the army and declaring his return to private life, George Washington took note that the establishment of the new nation did not occur “in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition” but rather “at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.” Washington attributed this change to the successful “researches of the human mind, after social happiness,” to the “collected wisdom” acquired by the “labours of Philosophers,” and of “Sages and Legislatures”.