Benjamin Franklin : $b Representative selections, with introduction, bibliograpy, and notesFranklin, Benjamin
General
Benjamin Franklin : $b Representative selections, with introduction, bibliograpy, and notes
Franklin, Benjamin
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790
Complementary to Newtonian science was the sensationalism of John Locke.
Conceiving the mind as _tabula rasa_, discrediting innate ideas, Lockian
psychology undermined such a theological dogma as total depravity--man's
innate and inveterate malevolence--and hence was itself a kind of
_tabula rasa_ on which later were written the optimistic opinions of
those who credited man's capacity for altruism. If it remained for the
French _philosophes_ to deify Reason, Locke honored it as the crowning
experience of his sensational psychology.[i-9] Then, too, as Miss Lois
Whitney has ably demonstrated, Lockian psychology "cleared the ground
for either primitivism or a theory of progress."[i-10] In addition, his
social compact theory, augmenting seventeenth-century liberalism,
furnished the political theorists of the Enlightenment with "the
principle of Consent"[i-11] in their antipathy for monarchial
obscurantism. Locke has been described as the "originator of a
psychology which provided democratic government with a scientific
basis."[i-12] The full impact of Locke will be felt when philosophers
deduce that if sensations and reflections are the product of outward
stimuli--those of nature, society, and institutions--then to reform man
one needs only to reform society and institutions, or remove to some
tropical isle. We remember that the French Encyclopedists, for example,
were motivated by their faith in the "indefinite malleability of human
nature by education and institutions."[i-13]
"With the possible exception of John Locke," C. A. Moore observes,
"Shaftesbury was more generally known in the mid-century than any other
English philosopher."[i-14] Shaftesbury's a priori "virtuoso theory of
benevolence" may be viewed as complementary to Locke's psychology to the
extent that both have within them the implication that through education
and reform man may become perfectible. Both tend to undermine social,
political, and religious authoritarianism. Shaftesbury's insistence upon
man's innate altruism and compassion, coupled with the deistic and
rationalistic divorce between theology and morality, resulted in the
dogma that the most acceptable service to God is expressed in kindness
to God's other children and helped to motivate the rise of
humanitarianism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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