he was not blithely confident that science and the knowledge gained from experimentation would create a more rigorously moral race. He wrote to Priestley in 1782: "I should rejoice much, if I could once more recover the Leisure to search with you into the Works of Nature; I mean the _inanimate_, not the _animate_ or moral part of them, the more I discover'd of the former, the more I admir'd them; the more I know of the latter, the more I am disgusted with them."[i-117] He often suggested, "As Men grow more enlightened," but seldom did this clause carry more than an intellectual connotation. Progress in knowledge[i-118] did not on the whole suggest to Franklin progress in morals or the general progress of mankind. Essentially classical in morality, extolling a temperance like that of Xenophon, Epictetus, Cicero, Socrates, and Aristotle, Franklin could not cheerily champion the moderns without serious reservations. Considering only progress in knowledge, man may be considered as _pedetentim progredientes_, but, Franklin thought, man seemed to have found it easier to conquer lightning than himself. If science and other contemporaneous knowledge detracted from cosmic terror, it did not solve the problem of the mystery of evil and sin: like Shakespeare, Franklin was perplexed by the inexplicability and ruthlessness of Man's potential and actual malevolence.[i-119] Thus in stressing utility and vocational adaptiveness, Franklin did not forget to stress the need for development of character, man's internal self, and here he did not find the ancients dispensable.[i-120] If unlike Socrates in his studies of physical nature, he was like the Athenian gadfly in his quest for moral perfection in the teeth of "perpetual temptation," in his strenuous and sober effort to know himself. Too little attention has been paid Franklin's Hellenic sobriety--even as it has had too meagre an influence. Let Molière challenge, "The ancients are the ancients, we are the people of today"; Franklin, although confident that he could learn more of physical nature from Newton than from Aristotle, was not convinced that the wisdom of Epictetus or the Golden Verses of Pythagoras were less salutary than the wit of his own age. A modern in his confidence in the progress of knowledge, Franklin, approaching the problem of morality, wisely saw the ancients and moderns as complementary. Aware of the continuity of the mind and race, he was not willing to dismiss the ancients as fit to be imitated. Yet he failed to discover in the welter of egoistic men any continuous moral progress, although, unlike the determinists, he thought that the individual could improve himself through self-knowledge and self-control. Unlike contemporary exponents of the "original genius" cult who scorned industrious rational study and conformity, Franklin as an educational theorist was the exponent of reason and of conscious intellectual industry and thrift; he would mediate between the study of nature and of