The Arising of Philadelphia as the Intellectual Capital of America

If America had an intellectual capital before 1740, then it would had to have been Boston. The two major printers of books in the British colonies in the late 1600’s, Samuel Green and John Foster, were both headquartered in Boston or its neighboring towns. Boston led the way on the number of active book sellers, with as many as 15 by 1740. Having Harvard college as its near neighbor also guaranteed a certain critical intellectual mass to the Boston area. But Boston was also home to an equally critical artistic mass. As Boston’s merchants prospered, they celebrated their successes by commissioning portraits of themselves. By the mid 1700’s, Boston had developed, if not exactly a school of portraiture, then at least a self-conscious concentration of highly talented portrait artists: John Smybert, John Greenwood, Joseph Badger; and the finest painter colonial America would ever produce: John Singleton Copley.

Yet, all of these achievements somehow added up to less than the sum of the Bostonian parts. Copley was exasperated that his talents had to be changed to turning out likenesses of businessmen and merchants, and he yearned for the opportunity to turn his self-taught hand to classical history painting. Was it not for preserving the resemblance of particular persons, painting would not be known in this place, Copley complained. The people generally regarded it no more than any other useful trade like carpentry or shoemaker, nor as one of the most noble arts in the world, which is not a little mortifying to me.

When the political winds of the revolution began to blow in directions that Copley found congenial, he left for New York, and in 1774, for London, never to return to America.

The Quaker’s Pennsylvania

Whatever intellectual dominance Boston enjoyed before 1740, it came mainly by default rather than design. The prize, after 1740, of being an intellectual capital, increasingly belonged not to Boston but to Philadelphia. Founded in 1682 as the capital of William Penn’s Pennsylvania, Philadelphia enjoyed nothing like a promising beginning as an intellectual capital for America.

The Quakers, William Penn’s religious society of friends, as they preferred to call themselves, was the last and most radical of the radical sects spun by English Puritanism in the 17th century. Where the Puritans had questioned the authority of bishops, the Quakers questioned the authority of any clergy. Where the Puritans refused to accept anything but the text of scripture as their religious authority, the Quakers refused to accept even that, considering it too carnal and worldly. They looked to their own religious consciousness for the testimony of the light within. And where the Puritans understood that depravity was too deeply rooted in the human heart for any discipline to expect to succeed entirely, the Quakers fully expected that they could and should attain perfection for themselves and their neighbors.

These were not people with much use for theological, philosophical or classical learning. Penn’s goal for his colony and his city was a social uniformity that would made Boston look like Las Vegas. Untrustworthy of traditional cities, Penn laid out Philadelphia as a city with broad streets meeting at right angles, so that vice and misery might have no place to hide from the inspection of those perfected by the light within. He expected the countryside around Pennsylvania would be laid out for farmers and settlers in continuous townships, with Quaker meeting houses located serenely in the center, to give order and happiness to Quaker life. For, as Penn put it, the most convenient bringing up of youth.

A Varied Landscape

Well, there are no optimists more surely destined for disappointment than those who believe in human perfectibility. William Penn became a good lesson in that kind of disappointment. Penn’s fellow Quakers showed little disposition to join him in creating a Quaker paradise in Pennsylvania. They never numbered more than a fraction of the total population, and Penn could only sell land in Pennsylvania by offering it to a wide and dismaying variety of non-Quakers, even non-English. That rapidly turned Pennsylvania into a mixture of European nationalities, religions and languages. Specially religions.

Pennsylvania became the stopping point for Mennonites from Switzerland, Dunkers from the German principalities, German Lutherans, German Calvinists, Scot-Irish Presbyterians, English Baptists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics. Some of these immigrants were fully as radical and fully as suspicious of any learning that seemed to dump on the impulse of the spirit as the Quakers. But the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the German Calvinists and the Anglicans, that together amounted to half of Pennsylvania’s population by the time of the revolution, came from traditions with long intellectual allegiances, and had a strong tendency for establishing schools to reinforce those allegiances.

When the pro-Whitefield Presbyterians split from the anti-revival Presbyterians during the Great Awakening, they had to find new ways of training pro-revival clergy. So, they ended up founding four separate theological academies, starting with the Log College. And instead of turning to finishing schools for renters, all of these academies quickly settled down to promoting learned languages, liberal arts, sciences and divinity. The Moravians, the Baptists, even the Quakers, all organized religious schools to nurture their offspring between 1720 and 1740. And anti-revival Church of England people were the leading hand behind the creation of the Academy of Philadelphia in 1751, which became the College of Philadelphia, and then the University of Pennsylvania.

By 1773, even the Lutherans in Pennsylvania had organized a German seminary. Certainly, one factor which made this proliferation of schools possible was Philadelphia’s rise to commercial power in the British colonies. From a population of 13000 in 1740, Philadelphia grew to 40000 in 1776. And its commerce down to Delaware Bay dominated the colonial coastal trade. Philadelphia’s wealth, combined with the need of its competing factions of self-justification and self-promotion, certainly provided a wide variety of forms for a good deal of self-justification and self-promotion, including 120 licenses to taverns, the American Philosophical Society, the College of Physicians and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

But Philadelphia’s richest intellectual assets laid in the remarkable cluster of Enlightenment thinkers who came to gather there between 1740 and 1790, to make Philadelphia not just America’s preeminent intellectual city, but the Enlightenment’s preeminent outpost in America. Among those thinkers, none enjoyed greatest standing, at home or abroad, than Benjamin Franklin.

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A Close Look at the American Revolution

When in the 1660’s, the English Parliament began its first halting attempts at regulating the external commercial traffic of the colonies across the Atlantic, regulation of external commerce was not a new idea. Europeans governments had always kept a mistrustful grip on business. In societies where monarchs and land-owning noblemen were understood to have a heaven right to rule, merchants and entrepreneurs were regarded as a pretty suspicious, maybe even subversive lot. After all, the profit of merchants and entrepreneurs and businessmen were not based on land. They did not rise or fall according to the nobility or their forbears. In a world that praised stability, commerce and enterprise meant instability. So, kings regularly shackled it by handing out monopoly charters over large stretches of their economies.

But the Enlightenment put its faith in measurable realities. The most obvious measurable reality was that commerce could do the empire a whole lot more good if it was directed intelligently and with the due respect for the numbers rather than for some chicken-brained duke or earl. So, hand in hand with Isaac Newton’s effort to reduce motion in the universe to equations, Enlightenment’s imperial planners in London began fashioning regulatory legislation over the colonies and their transatlantic commerce, which would reap profits in taxes and duties for the empire. They were not particularly successful, at least at first. Regulation may generate revenue, but it also costs money to enforce. The Crown was pathologically reluctant to pay the kinds of troops and ships it needed for the proper enforcement of the regulation of transatlantic commerce.

The Cost of War and the New Taxation

Then began the great imperial wars with France, during seven years from 1755 to 1763. Britain emerged from those imperial wars as the victor over France and the world’s first super-power, but at a hideous cost in public borrowing to finance the wars. In casting its eyes around for potential sources of servicing its war-time debts, Parliament’s eyes fell on the American colonies. Regulation, up to this point, has after all only taxed the colonies’ external trade across the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing had been done about extending the hand of the taxman into the internal economies of the colonies to raise taxes, because taxation of the colonies’ domestic economies was something which was done by the colonial legislators. However, the Parliament was the legislature of the Empire, and the colonies were technically simply plantations. If Parliament had needed to raise funds to meet the costs it incurred defending those plantations, why not exercise Parliament’s lawful right to tax the internal colonial economies as well as their commerce over the high seas.

And so, in 1764 began that long and dreary procession of confrontations over tax bills; between the Parliament on one hand, which could not comprehend through its fury why the colonials thought they enjoyed some sort of immunity from taxation of their economies; and the colonies, who could not comprehend through their even greater fury why Parliament would think it could simply take the rights that their legislators had built up without any serious questioning over the course of more than a century.

To the party of the King in Parliament, the Tories, the answer to this conundrum was a simple, traditional and pre-Newtonian one: Americans were rebels by nature and needed to be subordinated to the will of their God-given master, the King. To the colonies, the answer was equally simple, a good deal of it was found in John Locke: societies emerge from the State of Nature, as individuals agree to sacrifice a part of their natural liberty in order to protect the remainder of their liberty and property, a process more than confirmed by the experience of their own settlements. They had never been plantations, for the very obvious reason that Britain had never treated them that way, or at least never bothered to offer the funding and support which would had made the claim that the colonies were only Parliamentary plantations believable.

So, the colonial legislators were in the mind of the colonists the one true creation of the people of the colonies for their own government. In the first great revolutionary tract, James Otis’ “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” in 1764, Otis insisted that these supreme powers of legislation should be free and sacred in the hands where the community has once rightfully placed them. That meant the colonial legislators, and not Parliament.

All of this, as the Scottish common sense realist would have said, was open and self-evident to anyone with an unperverted moral sense. But the moral sense can, of course, become perverted if, as John Locke warned, sufficient corruption and degradation occur on the part of the government. Americans who read Whigs satire, or who had long-time beliefs that Anglican bishops were the emissaries of the Antichrist, or that who had to put up with snobs of blue-blood English officers and tax officials, not to mention those who knew the behavior of the average English soldier during his posting in the colonies during the French and Indian wars; did not require much convincing that the mother country was swiftly descending into the mother of whores, and that the whole controversy over taxation was a plot by what Mercy Otis Warren called the “intrigues of artful and ambitious men”.

The Beginnings of the Revolution

It only remained for Thomas Paine, in the revolution’s most sensational pamphlet, “Common Sense”, to conclude that a King had little more to do than to wage war and give away places, which in plain terms is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. However, old habits and sentimental attachments to the old country did not die quickly. It took ten years, from 1764 to 1774, for the mounting cycle of accusation and confrontation to turn into violent resistance on the part of the colonials in the infamous Boston tea party of December 1774. After that, though, the trajectory of violence turned sharply upwards.

In April, British troops stationed in Boston tried to seize arms and ammunition stored by the colonial militia at Lexington and Concord. They found themselves trapped in a full-scale firefight that became the first battle of the revolution against British authority. In July 1776, the representatives of 13 of the British North American colonies, called together as the Continental Congress, announced that their allegiance to Great Britain was at an end, and declared the formation of an independent league, known as the United States of America.

The American Revolution managed to carry along with it almost all the desperate streams of intellectual resistance that set the stage for it, whether or not those streams were like oil and water. Presbyterian preachers, who saw in the new imperial taxation schemes the entering path for an American-Anglican episcopate, turned out in such numbers for the continental army that the Chief Justice of Massachusetts referred to the dissenting clergy who took so active a part in the rebellion as Mr. Otis’ black regiment walking straight out of the days of Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan hosts.

Out of the other stream, John Adams, the most talented theorist of what are called Revolution Principles, rejoiced to see in the Revolution the dawning of Enlightenment politics.

The Secular Principles of America

For the time being, the principles of nature and eternal reason, not Puritanism, would have the upper hand in the shaping of the new American order. When the Continental Congress finally casted its vote for independence, it delegated the writing of a legal declaration to preface the independence motion. The independence motion read “that these united colonies are and ought to be free and independent states”. Congress delegated the writing of that declaration to Thomas Jefferson, who in less than two days produced a draft declaration which is one of the most memorable political documents in the English language and a monument of Lockean simplicity and Scottish moral sense philosophy.

One reason why Thomas Jefferson was delegated to write that declaration was that in one sense he had already done so. In 1774, Jefferson had made his first public mark in defense of American rights with a summary view of the rights of British America, which listed in detail the offences of which the imperial government was guilty. To compose a declaration for the independence motion really required little more of Jefferson than the crafting of a series of statements of those offences which justified independence. In fact, a list of 21 such offences forms the bulk of Jefferson’s declaration. The really memorable part of the declaration grew out of Jefferson’s decision to write a preamble to the list. That lifted this otherwise pedestrian document into the realm of Enlightenment political philosophy.

In one long sentence, Jefferson captured the core of the Lockean and Scottish critique of tradition and hierarchy, and made it the nuclear core of the American Revolution.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”, self evident at least to anyone, as the Scots insisted, possessing an uncorrupted moral sense.

“That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. These, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are what we find in the State of Nature, that is what people are born with naturally.

“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men”. In other words, in an environment of scarcity with lack of security, to preserve these rights, people create governments. Now, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. They don’t come from God and heaven, they don’t come from history and tradition, they don’t come from the nobility or whoever your parents might have been. They come from the consent of the governed.

“That whenever any form of government becomes disruptive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

These words of Jefferson are so familiar that we are no longer shocked by their frankly secular tone, or by the ease with which Jefferson folded so much of the territory of Enlightenment and Whig thinking into one single sentence. Nor are we shocked any longer at the sheer audacity with which the Declaration of Independence propelled American revolutionaries into the front rank of the Enlightenment’s experiment in rewriting the foundations of human society. More than merely signaling America’s political dissolution from the British empire, these words pegged the republic Americans would create to the expectations and principles of the Enlightenment: to Locke, to the classical and liberal republicans, to Harrington and others. Thus Americans dissolved not only their political ties to Britain, but their intellectual ties to the long train of the traditional European past.

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Intellectual Problems in the Age of Enlightenment and Arising of the Great Awakening

The Enlightenment, in Europe and in America, made a lot of questions. But at the end of the day, its fundamental question was about epistemology, about how we know things. For instance, when we have an idea in our minds, what causes it? If we have an idea of a chair, what is the relationship between the idea of the chair that we have and the chair itself? Does the chair cause the idea to be formed in our minds? If we press that question, it strongly implies that our minds are passive, simply waiting for things like chairs to cause them. If so, is the physical process which communicates information about the chair (our five senses) reliable? When we have an idea, is that idea presented to a mind, which is to say, a spiritual non-material consciousness that can deliberate and exercise free will about how to respond to the idea; or simply is received by a brain, which is to say an electrically charged assembly of gray matter that responds to certain kinds of simulations. In the later case free will is an illusion, and the notion that we have a conscious soul is just another religious deception.

The Enlightenment invented three basic responses to the question of how we know things. The first of which was simply materialism, in other words, human beings are composed entirely of material substance. In fact, the universe itself is composed only of material substance. And those substances obey the same scientific laws that all other substances obey. Minds, therefore, are only brains. Ideas, only responses to stimulus. Likewise, freedom of will, a charming illusion. Religion, little more than a human device for coping with fear and curiosity.

Materialism and Immaterialism

This position first was stated out in the English-speaking world by Thomas Hobbes, the skeptical and atheistic political philosopher; but its most successful popularization came in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690. Like Hobbes, Locke located the source of human ideas in physical sensation, and although his analysis of the mind’s operation was a lot more sophisticated than Hobbes’, the basic result was the same: human thought was a process explainable as the result of physical sensation. According to Locke, ideas were not spiritual entities or beings prepackaged in our minds at birth or communicated by God through divine illumination. Ideas are nothing more than the object of the mind’s attention at any given moment. Locke was careful to deny that this made him an atheist like Hobbes, but he was repeatedly accused of being Hobbes’ Trojan horse.

This materialism, however, provoked an equal but opposite reaction. That reaction was contained in the immaterialism of Bishop George Berkeley. Berkeley attacked Locke’s analysis of ideas by pointing out that Locke had unwillingly painted himself into a corner on this one critical point: how did the mind actually know that the information that it was receiving from the senses was reliable. Locke had to admit that our ideas can only represent objects, the objects themselves only make impressions on the senses, and the senses convey impulses to the mind, where an idea of the object is assembled. But the mind never comes into direct contact with the objects themselves, our sensations are all that our minds ever have direct contact with. Knowledge is really only accumulated from the representations made by the senses.

So, Locke was a realist, in other words, knowledge is based on our sensations of real objects, which have real existence outside our thoughts. Locke was a representational realist, because the mind never gets into actual contact with those objects, only with their representations in the form of ideas. But Bishop Berkeley observed on that basis that we have no guarantee whatsoever that our ideas represent anything, or that they arise from sensation of objects outside our consciousness. If we have no knowledge except about our ideas, then we have no way to get around those ideas and start talking about a world that exists beyond our ideas. That, in turn, raised the question of where our ideas actually come from. Ideas do not possess wills of their own with which to cause their own existence. They are not like pop-ups in a computer screen. Berkeley’s answer was the other end antithesis of Hobbes’ and Locke’: God causes all our ideas.

Everything which we know is in fact a creation of God directly on our minds. The real source of our ideas is not in objects, but in the perception of objects. And the only perception of objects are ideas formed in our minds by God.

All this may be philosophically fun, but the fact was that Berkeley’s immaterialism was almost as unacceptable to the majority of European thinkers as an explanation of how we know things as Hobbes’ atheism. Immaterialism never amounted to more than a minority report in the Enlightenment. The majority report was, as usual, left to a compromise position. This is why the Cartesian method won so many converts. Descartes could doubt the existence of everything, except the operations of his own mind. But since the mind was capable of discovering and proving its own existence, that showed that the mind had an existence independent of matter. So, spiritual substances (minds), and material substances (bodies and objects), could coexist in the universe.

The best illustration of this coexistence was Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Gravity was nothing if not the ideal way of showing how spirit, in this case God, could operate upon matter without needing to directly move or alter it beyond the laws of physics. Just as planets move effortlessly through empty space in their own unsupported orbits, so the entire universe could function just as effortlessly. Both Descartes and Newton opened up a way to have the new philosophy and still have God. But it was clear that the God who emerged from their debates was no longer the God of the Bible or the God of the Reformation, but a God defined by what the natural order would allow them to say about spiritual substance. This may have satisfied Descartes and Newton, but not the broad spectrum of European opinion in the Enlightenment, which is why in the midst of this Enlightenment there occurs a remarkably and utterly impressive reawakening of the most intense and “aggressive” forms of Evangelical Christianity.

The Great Awakening

In protestant Germany it appeared in the form of what became known as Pietism. In England it appeared in the Methodist revival of John Wesley. But in all of them, the most intense and passionate Christian piety was reawakened across Europe, in great number and force, which made the Enlightenment look shallow and inconsequential. Even though nothing could be more certain than the spiritual and intellectual gulf which separates these awakenings from the spirit of the Enlightenment, it is important to see that the Enlightenment and the Awakenings shared some important common ground.

There was, as it turned out, more than one way to have a revolution against Aristotle. In general, the awakenings shared with the Enlightenment the skepticism about the usefulness and virtue of the established churches in Europe, Protestant and Roman Catholic alike. They also shared the impulse to find a more authentic and natural kind of experience. The Enlightenment wanted to abandon Christianity almost entirely and uncover a more basic and authentic religion of nature. The Awakeners did not want to abandon Christianity, but they sought to recover a more basic and authentic religion as well. Not the religion of nature, but the religion of the heart. The true piety of primitive basic Christianity.

These Awakeners would read the new science, but use it to prove the impotence and limitations of the human reason before a universal system so vast and incomprehensible. It is at this point in the history of the American mind that the name of Jonathan Edwards springs almost automatically to the lips.

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The Enlightenment in America

Harvard was not the only place in America which had to face the challenges of a new philosophy. The English colony of Virginia had been founded more than two decades before Massachusetts Bay, but its settlers had no guiding religious vision and no incentive to found colleges. In fact, not much incentive to do anything else than hunger after quick fortunes in America’s first commodity: tobacco. Like Massachusetts, Virginia had been founded as a private corporate enterprise by the Virginia company in 1607. The Virginia company never paid a single dividend to stockholders and went bankrupt in 1622. At that point, the Crown might had decided to retrieve the unhappy employees in Virginia and give up on licensing fruitless commercial ventures in America. But the Crown wanted no responsibility for American enterprises, whether starting or ending them. Instead, the royal government in London left the employees of the Virginia company in Virginia to organize their affairs there as best as they could, sending a governor or two to give some semblance of English authority to matters. Until 1685, the Crown’s interest in America never moved much beyond that.

The Crown handed out ridiculous awards of land in America to Court favorites. For the most part, the government allowed the colonies to develop their own ad hoc assemblies and behave almost as they were little sovereignities of their own. With 3000 ocean miles between England and America, no one on either side was much inclined to complain. At least not until the end of the 1600’s. Then the attitudes of the imperial planners in London began to change for an unexpected reason.

So long as colony planning in America looked like digging a bottomless money pit, the royal government in London wanted nothing to do with any responsibility for colonial affairs. By the end of the 1600’s, however, the colonies had managed to invert this proposition completely. America had proven so fertile, and the religiously eccentrics England had sent there so unpredictably resourceful; that the mother country was beginning to sustain an unfavorable balance of trade with America. What was more; England’s great rivals, the French, had begun to awaken to the importance of waging imperial war on England through its own American colonies. Between 1690 and 1763 France and England became entangled in a series of wars in America that forced the British Crown to pour vital military resources into the protection of its North American colonies.

In process, the British could not help noticing several things in passing. First of all, they noticed that the Americans were quite happy to have the British carrying the burden of imperial expenses. Secondly, they noticed that the Americans were surprisingly prosperous, unregulated by British law. And many colonials assumed that they were good Englishmen as one could find in Britain. The more prosperous the Americans became, the more they wanted to wear the newest English style, read the newest English literature, become members of English learned societies, and in general, to behave as though they were decent Englishmen; and not the Robinson Crusoes the earlier generation had been.

Throughout the colonies, there was a self-conscious effort to Anglicize colonial life through the deliberate imitation of metropolitan institutions, values and cultures. They wanted, in other words, to think of themselves primarily as Britons rather than the descendants of convicts and religious oddballs.

The Empire surely understood how they should be treating them. From the 1690’s onwards, Britain began gradually reaching for more and more of the control it had once claimed to be too expensive. By the same turn, fewer and fewer Americans seemed to object to it. This included the intellectual life of the colonies.

As much as France is routinely thought of as the national capital of the Enlightenment, both the French and the rest of Europe thought of England as the nation of Enlightenment par excellence. England had a government with a Parliament far more powerful, and a monarch far less arbitrary than any other in Europe. It possessed a commercial culture that gave no automatic economic point to noblemen over merchants. It had an established protestant church, but by the end of the 1600’s and the beginnings of the 1700’s, that Church was no longer in the business of persecuting other religions. Even the bishops of the Church prided themselves over their broad-mindedness.

With the lapsing of the censorship laws in England in the 1690’s, Englishmen had the most unrestricted and free willing press and book culture in the world. The dawn of the 1700’s became the dawn of an age of literature: of Alexander Pope, of Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson. It also became the dawn of an era or political radicalism and religious ease.

The Expansion of the Enlightenment to other Colleges

When at the end of the 1600’s the British government concluded that it would be a good idea to harness the American horse more securely to the British carriage; it began to do so by imposing new taxes, by sending out new administrators and by building in the colonies more and more English institutions. When King William and Queen Mary sent Francis Nicholson to Virginia as the new Royal Governor in 1691, he not only imposed a new political regime in Virginia, but he presented the colonial assembly with a bill to organize a college, a college to be appropriately named for the English monarchs themselves: William and Mary.

It was intended to be a perpetual college of divinity, philosophy, languages and other good arts and sciences; which sounds very much like a good replay of the Harvard curriculum from the 1640’s. But William and Mary’s first president, James Blair, was a great admirer of John Locke, and by the 1720’s the library of William and Mary was full of the unusual array of books by Bacon, Locke and Newton. By the time the young Thomas Jefferson arrived to William and Mary in 1760 to begin his education, its tutors were already renowned as men of the Enlightenment.

Something similar happened in Pennsylvania. The charter which the King gave to William Penn to organize a settlement North of Maryland in 1682 contained no references to religious eccentricity. But Penn had in 1663 turned Quaker. He envisioned his new colony as a refuge for his fellow Quakers. Over time his colony emerged as one of the most commercially thriving in British North America. Its chief city, Philadelphia, became British America’s de facto capital. Despite Penn’s efforts, Pennsylvania joined the rush to anglicize. Even Penn’s own sons eventually abandoned Quakerism and joined the Church of England.

The residual hostility of Pennsylvania Quakers to formal education prevented Pennsylvania from developing a Harvard or a William and Mary until 1740, and the founding in that year of the Academy of Philadelphia, which then became the college of Philadelphia and then the University of Pennsylvania. But the college of Philadelphia quickly established itself as a center of Enlightenment reading. Philadelphia became home, by the time of the Revolution, to a group of Enlightenment intellectuals: Benjamin Rush, William and John Bartram, Benjamin Franklin, Francis Addison and Samuel Stanhope Smith. All of whom accomplished America’s best reconciliation of the demands of Newtonian science with natural religion. The Enlightenment, remarked Thomas Jefferson, was never so advantageously taught anywhere else in America than in Philadelphia.

In the end, not even the conservatives who founded Yale college in 1701 were immune to the “threat” of the English-speaking Enlightenment. Although the Yale curriculum was built around the authors that Harvard had once prescribed, it also allowed the use of William Brattle’s logic textbook. By 1718, one of the Yale tutors, Samuel Johnson, was introducing Yale undergraduate students to the reading of John Locke. If to prove how corrosive the attraction of anglization and the new philosophy might be, in 1722, the rector of the college, Timothy Cutler, and four of the tutors, publicly renounced Congregationalism and took ship to England to be ordained as priests of the Church of England.

The Enlightenment apparently had won over the colonies. And the colonies had shown themselves over too happy to be won over. If that is the conclusion that we draw from these reviews of facts, we are committing a big mistake, because the dissatisfied energies of religious revival were about to erupt.

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What was the Enlightenment

Unlike wars, treatises, elections or epidemics; the Enlightenment is an intellectual event. That’s a warning sign that explanations, timelines and conflicts are going to be a lot more messy and confusing than when we are dealing with the usual stock and trade of history people: battles, kings, plagues, etc. The Enlightenment is often thought of as an 18th century event. That is only partly true. We can place at least its remote beginnings as early as 1543, when Nicholas Copernicus published his “Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies”. And the endings of the Enlightenment can be placed as late as 1850, with the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the French Revolution.

What was the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is often thought of as being an antireligious event, overturning the credibility of Christian explanations of the universe based on the Bible with scientific ones based on careful observation and experimentation. This too is only partly true. What Enlightenment science challenged was the principle of automatic authority: whether was the authority of the Bible, of Aristotle or of logic itself. A good deal of the Enlightenment was composed of clergymen and other religious thinkers who had no trouble finding that the Bible was more or less right after all, and that Christianity was a good thing.

Maybe the most fundamental misperception of the Enlightenment is that it was a movement about skepticism and criticism. It certainly liked to maintain a fashionable flippancy toward conventional ways of thinking, but the Enlightenment was also a very optimistic movement. Its fundamental aim was not to entertain skepticism, but to banish it, and to find in science and in scientific methods a better basis for certainty and for balanced living than in Aristotle or Cicero.

We could boil the Enlightenment down to two basic attitudes. The first would be the primacy of reason: the mind is not content with simply being told that something is true. It is not even content with admitting that someone else can be exactly be proved wrong. The mind has to be shown that something is true by standards of consistency and physical evidence which satisfy one’s own reason. The alternatives to this is either:

a) a submission to dogmatic authority, which never really uncovers anything useful, it just invites someone to be clever with the words and the arrangement of terms, or:

b) skepticism, nothing can ever be known for sure.

The first of these alternatives had been the chief operating notion of European thinkers since the Middle ages. It was this notion which Copernicus began to undermine in 1543, by suggesting that the conventional Aristotelian understanding of the Solar System, which puts the Earth at the center and has the Sun and the planets revolving in circles around it, lies in error; and that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System. However, the turmoil of the great religious wars of the 1500’s and the 1600’s, as well as some severe problems within Copernicus’ own theory, kept all of this in the realm of hypothesis until the invention of the telescope and its use in 1610 by Galileo Galilei, who’s direct observation of the Moon and the planets wrecked the authority of Aristotle for good.

Ten years later, Sir Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum, which called upon his contemporaries to toss aside Aristotle and the teachers of scholastic logic, and form an acquaintance with things. The best demonstration, said Bacon, by far, is experience. It is time for people to use their reason to put together the lessons of experience into a new scheme of knowledge which describes nature, rather than putting their reason to the service of the cobweb world of scholastics, said Bacon.

The second great aspect of the Enlightenment was its reverence for the testimony of nature. Because it was nature, newly measurable through scientific instruments as the telescope and the microscope, which afforded the raw materials upon which reason would operate. In nature, diligent experimenters would discover the real order of things, not the artificial one invented by Aristotle and the logic textbooks.

Isaac Newton, one of the most gifted mathematicians of his age and probably of subsequent ages, relentlessly reduced the motions of physical bodies to the laws of attraction at a distance, or gravity. John Locke, with equal relentlessness, reduced the human mind to a passive receiver of sensations from the body. And Charles de Montesquieu, turning to politics and society, found government shaped not according to a single model handed down from heaven on a platter; but by the individual histories, events, accidents, preferences and religions of each nation. Nature came first, then analysis.

This is often why people so often concludes that the enemy of the Enlightenment was religion. In Italy, the Catholic Church tried to silence Galileo; while in England Newton had to keep his own very unorthodox religious opinions very much to himself. Locke was even indicted for heresy. But the Enlightenment thought that its real enemy was skepticism, by which I mean the attitude that nothing can be known for sure about anything.

Skepticism was no small threat in the 1600’s. Beginning in 1521, protestant Europe and catholic Europe commenced a bloodbath of religious warfare, which lasted until 1648. Despite each side’s claim to be representing the truth of God, both catholics and protestants had to settle at the treaty of Westphalia, for no better result than an exhausted agreement to leave each other alone. Not surprisingly, more than a few Europeans decided that if you couldn’t be sure whether God was a catholic or a protestant, then there was no reason to be sure of anything.

Men do not recognize the natural informity of the mind, complained the French skeptic Michel de Montaigne, it does nothing but search, contriving and entangling in its own work. This skepticism, much more than any malevolent church court, threatened all hope of reaching a real understanding of why catholics and protestants behaved the way they did; and why the universe followed the pattern it did.

Scholastic logic had worked for so many centuries because it assumed the validity of its own foundations, starting with certain accepted truths and arranging them in patterns that supported its conclusions. But both science and religious wars made that foundation unstable. So, the greatest work of the Enlightenment had to be done at the very beginning by showing that something could be known at all. That was the work that fell to Rene Descartes.

A New Foundation for Knowledge

The contribution of Descartes was to show how something could be known with certainty. The method he devised for this was unlike the scholastics’: to begin with doubt. One could, said Descartes, doubt everything; or almost everything, since the one thing that you could not doubt was the fact that you were doubting. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. From that single certainty Descartes worked back to certainty about God, about existence and so forth. What we have to bear in mind is that the way Descartes walked from doubt to certainty still indisputably led back to God and Christianity. That was what made Descartes and the Cartesian method so appealing to Harvard, which by the 1680’s did not enjoy much stability or certainty.

In 1654, President Dunster announced that he had gone full length into separatism and adopted the views of Baptists, who were a group within English Puritanism who repudiated the baptism of children altogether. Dunster resigned the presidency of Harvard under pressure from the Massachusetts General Court.

The finances of the college were just as unstable. Even with the income of John Harvard’s legacy and the contributions from the Massachusetts’ treasury, the entire budget of Harvard amounted to no more than 250 pounds per year. From there, matters got only worse. Dunster was followed in the presidency by a clergyman, Charles Chauncy; Leonard Hoar, and another clergyman, Urian Oakes. A succession of weak presidents that were so unprepared to run the college that the “ungoverned youths” of Harvard drove one of them nearly to suicide.

Finally, 1684 Harvard got its first real star President: Increase Mather, the pastor of the old church in Boston and the most famous minister of Boston in New England’s second generation. It was Mather who successfully solved the problem of royal threat to assert direct control of Harvard. He also obtained the right of the Massachusetts General Court to set the college up as an independent corporation. It was Mather who brought to Harvard two of the most influential teachers: John Leverett and William Brattle.

Brattle is the embodiment of the cautious Enlightenment. The logic textbook Brattle wrote in 1687: “A Compendium of Logic According to the Modern Philosophy”, is the first Cartesian logic work produced in America. It adopts the Cartesian tactic of starting from doubt. Again, starting not from authority as with the traditional scholastic philosophy; rather, Bratlle began with doubt and from doubt working to attain certainty. But plainly, the purpose Brattle had in view was to undercut skepticism, not to call into question truth itself. What he wanted to do was to dig a new epistemological foundation for Calvinist orthodoxy.

To doubt of things and suppose them to be all false, only for the obtaining of more full and direct knowledge, is a laudable method. That was the view of Brattle. Because doubt, he said, was what showed the way to prove a truth and demonstrate it to others.

He was careful to limit the application of the Cartesian method to philosophical questions, not theological ones, in a manner similar to that of William Ames. And like Ames, he considered that unbelief was not a fault of theology, but grew instead out of the perverted will of the skeptic. This is very much a cautious approach and embracement of Enlightenment thinking.

The New Philosophy in Harvard

John Leverett, on the other hand, seemed not to have use for caution at all. Born to the habits of the New England’ merchant aristocracy, the grand son of an early governor, a layman and eventually representative in the Massachusetts General Court; Leverett assumed the presidency of Harvard in 1708. Leverett was not a particularly great thinker, but he was a great admirer of Descartes and the new philosophy. Even more significantly, he discouraged Calvinist dogmatism in favor of what he called “more generous principles”. Leverett would, in other words, talk more about virtue than about redemption. He put his entire support behind the organization of a new church in Boston, who’s manifesto in 1699 proclaimed the church congregational, not by reason of scripture, but by the light of nature.

Too late, old Increase Mather tried to block Leverett’s ascension to Harvard’s presidency. Even when the game was lost, Mather’s precocious son, Cotton Mather, mounted his own campaign against Leverett. He was wasting his time. Eventually, with some bitterness, the Mathers realized that Harvard had become an outpost of these “generous principles” rather than Calvinistic ones.

When the unhappy Calvinist congregation and ministers decided that Leverett had gone too far into Cartesian method and the new philosophy, organized a new college of their own in New Haven, with the generosity of another wealthy patron of learning: Elihu Yale.

Continues in: The Enlightenment in America

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