Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings — John Shaqi
Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own WritingsBruce, Wiliam Cabell
History
Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings
Bruce, Wiliam Cabell
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790
This prudential view of morality also found utterance in other forms in the
writings of Franklin. In the first of the two graceful dialogues between
Philocles, the Man of Reason and Virtue, and Horatio, the Man of Pleasure,
which appeared in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_, the former warns the latter
in honeyed words that he would lose even as a man of pleasure, if, in the
pursuit of pleasure, he did not practice self-denial, by taking as much
care of his future as his present happiness, and not building one upon the
ruins of the other; all of which, of course, was more epigrammatically
embodied in that other injunction of Poor Richard, "Deny self for self's
sake." No wonder that Horatio was so delighted with a theory of
self-denial, which left him still such a comfortable margin for sensual
enjoyment, that, when Philocles bids him good night, he replies: "Adieu!
thou enchanting Reasoner!"
"Money makes men virtuous, Virtue makes them happy"; this is perhaps an
unfair way of summarizing Franklin's moral precepts, but it is not remote
from fairness. "Truth and Sincerity," he had written in his _Journal of a
Voyage from London to Philadelphia_, when he was but twenty years of age,
"have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them, which cannot be
perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be
painted." It would have been well for the moralist of later years to have
remembered this statement when he made up his mind to contract the habit of
moral perfection. His Milton, from which he borrowed the _Hymn to the
Creator_ that is a part of his _Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion_,
might have told him,
"Virtue could see to do what Virtue would
By her own radiant light, though sun and moon
Were in the flat sea sunk,"
or in those other words from the same strains of supernal melody,
"If Virtue feeble were
Heaven itself would stoop to her."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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