June 26—The following is part II of an article originally published in full in EIR, Vol. 22, No. 48, Dec. 1, 1995. Part I may be accessed here.

Logan Battles the Newtonians

As the Newtonian dark age settled over the Empire, resistance became more determined in the American colonies, leading directly to the American Revolution 60 years later. The true history of this process unfolds in the pages of H. Graham Lowry’s How the Nation Was Won—America’s Untold Story, 1630-1754.

The letters and unpublished manuscripts of James Logan provide further proof of the explicitly anti-Locke, anti-Newton commitments of the greatest American leaders, and of the direct influence of the ideas and person of Leibniz on the movement towards American independence.

Logan was born in Ulster in 1674, the son of a Scots Quaker schoolmaster. By the time he was selected by William Penn to be his secretary and accompany him to Pennsylvania in 1699, Logan had taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish (he undertook to learn Arabic, Syriac, and Persian at age 70), and had begun his lifelong studies of mathematics, astronomy, and the physical sciences. Before meeting Penn, he had sold his first library of 800 volumes for capital to start a business.

Penn returned to England in 1701, to join Harley and Swift in defense of colonial rights against Locke and his Board of Trade. Logan visited England in the significant years of 1709-1711, and again in 1723-1724, where he attended a meeting of the Royal Society, presided over by the decrepit Newton. Penn died in England in 1718, but not before naming Harley in his will as a protector of his province, an arrangement nullified with the succession of George I.

Thereafter, until his death in 1751, Logan remained a leading political and intellectual figure in the colony, holding at various times every important public office, including mayor of Philadelphia, president of the Assembly, Chief Justice, and Lieutenant-Governor. He supported every measure for colonial unity and defense, even denouncing the hypocrisy of Quaker pacifism.

When Logan’s library was catalogued in the early 1970s, researchers counted 2,185 titles in 2,651 volumes. Benjamin Franklin’s obituary of Logan was impassioned on this point:

But the most noble Monument of his Wisdom, Publick Spirit, Benevolence, and affectionate Regard to the People of Pennsylvania, is his LIBRARY; which he has been collecting these 50 Years past, with the greatest Care and Judgment, intending it a Benefaction to the Publick for the Increase of Knowledge, and for the common Use and Benefit of all Lovers of Learning. It contains the best Editions of the best Books in various Languages, Arts and Sciences, and is without Doubt the largest, and by far the most valuable Collection of the Kind in this part of the World, and will convey the Name of Logan thro’ Ages, with Honour, to the latest Posterity.

Logan read most, if not all, of his books, and his extensive marginal annotations in a variety of languages are still quite legible. His handwriting is present, for example, in the margins of some pages of the 1717 edition of the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondences, a book which later appears in the 1741 catalogue of Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia, possibly donated by Logan.

Logan’s letterbooks also show him particularly anxious to assemble a complete set of the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig, the learned journal which published the works of Leibniz and his allies, including Papin and the Bernoullis, and which was the center of continental European resistance to the Newtonian onslaught. Logan informed a correspondent in 1749, “I have all the Acta Eruditorum from 1688 to 1727 except for three intermediate years between 1700 & 1710 & some Supplementa.”[fn_26]

A frequent correspondent of Logan was Robert Hunter, then-Governor of New York and New Jersey, and an important political ally of Harley and Swift. Hunter collaborated with Virginia Gov. Alexander Spotswood’s plans for westward development of the American colonies, and arranged that his own successor in 1720, William Burnet, would continue the project.[fn_27] Burnet also maintained the correspondences with Logan.

Logan’s letters to Hunter and Burnet prove that these American leaders were quite conscious of the political implications of the Newtonian tyranny, including especially the witchhunt against Leibniz.

An outraged Logan wrote to Hunter, Sept. 22, 1715, protesting the politically-motivated editing of the second edition of Newton’s Principia. The name of Royal Astronomer John Flamsteed had been censored, Logan declared, because

Poor Flamsteed has appeared a violent Whig … and the better (I Suppose) to express their abhorence of his Principles, they have now almost everywhere left out his name….

This will be owned I Suppose to be Carrying the matter very far, and, indeed, upon the whole, they seem, on all sides, to be ripening for their own destruction. Our unhappy divisions in the last Years of the Queen appear’d terrible. And now, after so favorable a Conjuncture thrown in by Providence that one might have expected would set all to rights, they are rendered more dreadful than ever…. The unhappines of having a Nation generally distempered seems to me to be inexpressible.[fn_28]

Logan’s shock and indignation against the Newtonians reached a breaking point in 1727, when he received the Principia’s infamous third edition, wherein even the cursory mention of Leibniz’s name as an independent discoverer of the calculus had been totally erased.

In a letter dated Feb. 7, 1727, Logan told Burnet in no uncertain terms:

’Tis certain the world was obliged only to Leibnitz for the publication of that method, who was so fair as to communicate it in a great measure to Oldenburg in 1677, when Sir Isaac was so careful of concealing his, that he involved it in his Letter [of] 1676 in strange knotts of Letters, that all the art & skill of the universe could never Decipher….

And yet foreigners have generally been so Just as to pay all possible deference to Sir Isaac as an Inventor, tho’ till his Publication of the Principia in 1687, they never had anything of it from him. I have often indeed wished that Sir Isaac himself had never entered into the Dispute, but would, if it must be disputed, have left it to others, for then the world would have been inclined to do him more Justice than now perhaps they will, when he is considered as a party, which he has so warmly made himself.[fn_29] [Emphasis added.]

Logan goes on to express his disgust at the absurd deification of Newton in England, as seen in the ridiculous portrait of him featured in the same edition of the Principia:

But there is not less Humour shewn in his Picture in the front, much more like W. Leybourn in his own hair at the age of 40 or 50 than Sir Isaac Newton at 83. And by all those who have seen him of late, as I did, bending so much under the Load of years that, with some difficulty, he mounted the stairs of the Society’s Room, that Youthful Representation will, I fear, be considered rather as an object of Ridicule than Respect, & much sooner raise Pity than Esteem.[fn_30]

Logan dashed off another letter on the same date directly to a member of the Royal Society, venting his outrage about both the ludicrous picture of Newton and the suppression of Leibniz. Logan added a thinly-veiled warning concerning the political implications of these developments for the future of colonial relations:

Should the management of the more momentous Councils about a Mile further up the Thames [in Parliament] be like these, in the present unaccountable Commotions of Europe, that seem to point out fate to us pregnant with vast events, we might have reason to tremble, and those should think themselves happiest who are farthest out of their reach. But it may be hoped our State Politicks far exceed those in the way of Learning. How it may prove, time only must show.[fn_31] [Emphasis added.]

In his next letter to Burnet, May 10, 1727, Logan questions Newton’s sanity, and further dissects the political motives for the frame-up of Leibniz, expressing his wish that the succession had been accomplished by 1710 (which would have made Sophia Queen of England):

He [Newton] is, however great, but a man, & when I last saw him in 1724 walking up Crane Court & the stairs leading to the Society’s Room, he bent under his Load of years exceeding unlike what they have Represented him two years after as in body. ‘Tis but reasonable to expect a declension elsewhere, so that for his own honour as well as the Nation’s, to which he has been a very great one, had he & Queen Anne both been gathered to their Ancestors by the year 1710, before that fierce, unnatural Dispute broke out between him and Leibniz, which I always believed, was blown up by the forces of the society in opposition to the house that had so long employ’d Leibniz.[fn_32] [Emphasis added.]

After Newton’s death in 1727, Logan could not resist a final irreverency, in a letter to Burnet (Jan. 10, 1728):

I hope also G. Strahan has by this time furnish’d thee with the new Edit. of Newton, for whose age & strength, death has not, it seems, consulted his new picture.[fn_33] [Emphasis added.]

The more that Logan investigated the facts and circumstances of the Leibniz-Newton controversy, the more he became convinced of the fraudulent nature of Newton’s claims. In fact, Logan and Hunter had already passed judgment on Leibniz’s accuser John Keill, who had visited New York in about 1710. As Logan later wrote to an English correspondent:

I am sensible John Keyl was a great Mathematician, but when at N York with Genl. Hunter, he shewed himself an intolerable Debauchee, whimsical, irregular in all his Conduct…. This was the character I had of him from G. Hunter, an Excellent Judge of men.[fn_34]

Although Newton’s preoccupation with alchemy and witchcraft was not exposed until the Twentieth Century, Logan pitilessly attacked the irrational ravings of two of Newton’s rarely-mentioned published works of that period: “The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended” (1728), and “Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel” (1733). In letters to Burnet and others, Logan derided Newton’s arguments in blunt terms, such as, “nothing can be more imaginary or groundless,” “a piece of finesse only,” and “a sally of fancy and Imagination.” “I am exceedingly grieved at this Performance of his,” Logan wrote Burnet, “which cannot but expose his memory to the Censure of all rational Judges.”[fn_35]

Logan and Franklin

In 1727, the 21-year-old Benjamin Franklin, recently deployed to Philadelphia by his Boston mentor Cotton Mather, organized a “club of mutual improvement” called the Junto, composed of the city’s most “ingenious” young men. Franklin’s autobiographical outline for this period includes the note: “Logan fond of me. His library.”

Along with opening his home and library to Franklin and his young associates, Logan is credited with arranging the first large job for Franklin’s new printing business in 1731. Franklin also printed Logan’s translations of Cato’s “Moral Distichs” in 1735, and Cicero’s “Cato Major” in 1744, Franklin’s preface to the latter expressing the wish that “this first Translation of a Classic in this Western World may be followed with many others … and be a happy Omen that Philadelphia shall become the Seat of the American Muses.”

Logan’s enthusiastic support for these young American intellectuals, quickly brought him into direct conflict with the corruption and treachery of the Newtonian establishment. Franklin’s roommate and Junto member Thomas Godfrey, a glazier by trade and a self-taught mathematician, began frequenting Logan’s library about 1730. When Godfrey told Logan about his invention of an improved mariner’s quadrant, Logan forwarded the details to the Royal Society in London, expecting to receive its backing.

Instead, Logan got the “Leibniz treatment.” The Royal Society, now led by Edmund Halley, attempted to plagiarize Godfrey’s device, claiming that Royal Fellow John Hadley had invented it first. Logan mobilized the entire province to gather affidavits swearing to Godfrey’s priority, but the Society would only recognize Hadley and Godfrey as “coinventors,” granting both an equal financial reward. The Society further expressed its contempt for the upstart Americans, by accusing Godfrey of being a “heavy drinker,” and awarding him a clock instead of cash.

Decades later, Franklin pointedly introduced Godfrey in his autobiography as “a self-taught mathematician, great in his way, and afterwards inventor of what is now called Hadley’s quadrant.” [Emphasis added.]

Logan Refutes the British Ideologues

About this time, Logan resolved to write his own philosophical tract, designed as a polemic against British ideology, starting with what he called the “detestable notion” and “pernicious thesis” of Hobbes, “taking this for my foundation against Hobbes that Man was primarily in his Nature formed for Society.”[fn_36]

Logan titled his book “The Duties of Man as They May Be Deduced from Nature,” and circulated copies of each chapter among the circles of Franklin’s Junto, and to his correspondents in England. The manuscript was supposedly “lost” in England, and little was known of its contents until it was rediscovered in 1971. A photocopy of the 400-page work, in Logan’s longhand, is in the possession of this author; otherwise, it still sits unpublished[fn_37] on the shelves of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

A thorough reading of the work reveals it to be a direct attack on the authority of Locke and Newton, as well as Hobbes, precisely in the line of argument of Leibniz and his English allies earlier. Where Locke denied the existence of “innate ideas,” reducing morality to the arbitrary rules of the lawgiver, Logan’s thesis is that all morality is naturally “implanted” in human beings. Logan’s point echoes Leibniz’s famous comment, “Natural religion itself seems to decay [in England] very much.”

Logan’s thoughts concerning the true nature of human happiness, so contrary to the bestial British principles of “pleasure/pain” and “property,” are beautifully expressed in the conclusion to his Chapter 1:

Why has Nature, whose general or fundamental Laws can never be eluded, left so much room in those things that are proper for the use of Man, for the improvement of her Productions, in Agriculture, Gard’ning &c. Are not all these with infinite more, plain lessons to Mankind, that in most significant language say to them: Naked you are born, it is true, and I have left you under many wants, but to supply them I have given you hands, and above all other creatures understanding to use them: Behold the utmost provision here made for your Industry. Join together in that Love and Benevolence that I have implanted in you, and by your mutual aid, and united endeavours, render them truly useful. But enjoy them under a due sense of gratitude to your bountiful Donor, your Creator, and Supream Lord of this Universe, the beautiful and exact Order of which, in all its outward parts you here behold, and how wisely and determinately each is made to answer its proper end. This order you are to imitate in what is left to your own Power, your Wills and your Affections. Thus therefore do and be compleatly happy.

Logan is determined to refute Locke directly on the issue of morality. He prepares for this with a discussion of Love, observing that love between a human brother and sister does not extend to conjugal love, as among animals, concluding that

The great End and Design of this most evidently is, that those kind affections which are the true and natural foundation of society should not be confined to the limits of one family … and from hence we may rationally conclude that it was the intention of Nature by these several instances of inclination and affections implanted in us, that Benevolence should be universally diffused, and take in our whole Species tho’ not all in equal degrees….

A like passion with love is also seen in other creatures, yet seldom of any long duration, but in humane beasts it was designed to have the most exalted empire, and were it duly nurtured and not checked by other prevailing passions it would exert itself to a degree that would sweeten every other affection, render life truly a blessing, and raise Mankind to the perfection first intended for him in his formation.

Logan directly collides with Locke in his Chapter 4, “Of the Affections or Passions.” Logan reiterates his Platonic concept of Love as “the inclination of the Heart to Good, with which it seeks to unite…. It is the principle which animates us to seek our perfection.” He argues that emotion naturally accompanies thought, “like the Bass in concerts of music, cooperating with it,” and attacks those who treat “these Passions as if they were all at our immediate command, and merely subservient to our persuits of Pleasure and declining of Pain, on which hand even the very ingenious J. Lock appears to have made a slip.”

For having in his Essay justly enough observed that “Pleasure and Pain, and that which causes them, Good and Evil, are the hinges on which our Passions turn,” he unhappily proceeds to make them turn on the Reflections only that we make on the Good or Evil, Pleasure or Pain that objects will produce. For this he says in Ch. 5 “Hatred or Love to Beings capable of Happiness or Misery, is often the Uneasiness or Delight which we find in ourselves arising from a consideration of their very Being or Happiness. Thus the Being and Welfare of a man’s Children or Friend producing constant delight in him, he is said to constantly love them.”

In which words we see the nature of things inverted, and the effect offered for the cause, for would any man living, if he were in his senses, on being asked why he loves his children, give for an answer that it was because he delighted in seeing them do well? It is probable indeed that he might think the querent unworthy of any answer at all, but if he gave any, and a serious one, it might be to this effect, that he loved them because they were his children, it was natural for him and he could not avoid it. [Emphasis added throughout.]

In his Chapter 5, “Of Moral Good or Virtue,” Logan reviews the arguments of several preceding English writers who had opposed Hobbes, and expresses his support for the arguments of Leibniz’s friend Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, in favor of a natural “moral sense.” Logan maintains that virtue itself provides the greatest pleasure, such as the “intellectual pleasure” arising from harmony in music or the study of natural science.

Among Logan’s manuscripts are three drafts of the concluding section of this chapter, which he titles “Answer to Locke after the moral sense and ground of virtue is stated,” along with a separate extensive list of references to Locke’s Essay.

Logan writes:

But before we leave this subject it may be necessary to take notice of some things advanced by J. Lock in … his excellent Essay on Human Understanding which seem to contradict what is here laid down, and his reputation and authority is so firmly established in the minds of great numbers of the most rational thinkers, that whatever carries an appearance of inconsistency with his Doctrine will scarce fail of meeting with strong prejudices against its reception.

Logan boldly asserts that Locke “has not applied his usual care and the same exact judgement on the subject of Morality.” He attacks Locke’s rejection of “innate practical principles,” such as “Parents preserve and protect your children,” and, like Shaftesbury, ridicules Locke’s dependence on “a heap of instances of the detestable, irregular practices of the peoples of diverse far countries, as taken from those Oracles of Truth, the Accounts of Travellers.”

Logan writes:

His indefinite use of the word Principle renders his method of arguing in that Chapter confused and exceeding unlike his course of reasoning in most other parts of the Book: he allows the desire of Happiness an innate practical Principle from inclination, but he here denies that the love and care of Parents to and for their Children is such an innate Principle…. But if the Desire of Happiness be an innate Principle from appetite, are not the appetite for food, the horror of death, the conjunctionis appetitus equally so … and is it any proof of the contrary that divers people have refused eating and starved themselves, that others have by several other ways made away with themselves, and that whole orders of Men and Women vow chastity or virginity? He surely forgot in this place that man, with these principles, is also born to freewill. [Emphasis added.]

Logan attacks Locke’s assertion that moral duties are based on positive law and reward and punishment. “This indeed is a home stroke upon us,” Logan writes, “and if it can be applied to what has been advanced in this Chapter will fairly overset the whole of what has been principally labored in it.”

Logan cites the work of Homer to show that human morality existed before any written laws, and points out “that the most barbarous Nations, as the American Indians, and African Negroes, who more closely pursue Nature, rather exceed in parental affection, than come short of the more civilized matrons.” [Emphasis added.] Logan concludes his Chapter 5 with the comment, “And this much I judged necessary to observe on this unhappy mistake in the subject of Morals in that great Man whose exactness in his proper subject has ever appeared to me to be beyond exception.”

However, Logan’s incomplete Chapter 6, “Of the Will,” is intended entirely as a further polemic against Locke. In the few paragraphs that are extant, Logan quotes Locke’s notion that “uneasiness,” and not the “greater Good,” determines the Will, and continues:

But in this we have a most clear instance of how dangerous consequence it may prove for an author of great abilities and an established reputation to decide universally on any important point without being first well assured that his induction from whence he draws his conclusion has likewise been equally universal.

Logan goes on to warn against the uncritical worship of established opinion, showing “how pernicious this has proved to knowledge and how injurious to truth,” by citing the example of Aristotle. Logan’s argument against Locke in this section might be inferred from Logan’s earlier discussion, in his Chapter 4, of the guilty conscience of the criminal mind, which, he says, must always seek diversion from “self examination”:

Those are they, who from their own feeling experience (but preposterously) lay it down for a Principle, that Pain or Uneasiness is the Spring of all our Actions, of whom more is to be said a few pages forward.

Challenge to Newtonian Orthodoxy

Logan’s challenge to Newtonian orthodoxy, expressed in a lengthy footnote to his Chapter 2, “Of the Exterior Senses,” is of particular significance for its discussion of electricity.

Franklin began his electrical experiments after attending a lecture in Boston in 1743, only a few years after Logan wrote and circulated these ideas. Franklin’s subsequent scientific work is usually misportrayed as mere tinkering based on “trial and error” (or even more ludicrously, as “Newtonianism!”), and as concerned with practical results, not “theory.” However, Logan’s “heretical” conjecture that electricity might somehow constitute a “subtle fluid” filling space, of the type discussed by Leibniz and other opponents of the Newtonian “vacuum,” suggests that Franklin was indeed inspired by “metaphysical” considerations.

Logan explains that, “Electricity was formerly regarded but as a trifling appearance in Nature, and therefor in the last curious age was very little considered; for that quality was supposed to be excited, only by putting into motion the finer parts of the body it was found in.” He refers to certain “surprising phenomena arising from electricity” in recent experiments, in which

[W]e may see a field open for Speculations, that if duly persued, may probably lead us into more just and extensive notions of our bodies, and the world we live in, than have hitherto been generally thought of.

And if there be no heresy in mentioning it in the present age, why may we not venture to question the reasonableness of asserting a vacuum as indispensably necessary to the continuance of motion?: The argument may indeed hold in relation to all such bodies, the matter of light excepted, as our senses are formed to take cognicance of, but shall we from thence presume to judge of all the kinds of subtile matter that space may be filled with? Can we be sure that there is no electric or elastic medium that instead of obstructing or retarding motion may be the very means of continuing it?

Can we say an exhausted receiver is a vacuum because the air is drawn out of it, while at the same time we see it filled with light, the matter of which in the true nature of things and on a just estimate of them, tho’ not according to our apprehensions, may possibly be a more essential substance than the earth or stones we tread on.

But if a vacuum be not absolutely necessary, as that alloted by some to the atherial spaces cannot be, then undoubtedly to have all space in the universe possessed by some kind of matter is much more consistent with the dignity, beauty, and order of the whole than to imagine those vast voids which carry even a kind of horror in the thought. [Emphasis added.]

Franklin’s Crucial Experiments in Electricity

Franklin performed his famous kite experiment in Philadelphia in June of 1752, proving the identity of lightning and electricity. Franklin says his paper on that topic had been “laughed at by the connoisseurs” of the British Royal Society, but had achieved great notoriety in France, where his “capital experiment” was successfully duplicated before King Louis XV and his court, and therefore could no longer be suppressed.

In fact, what Franklin had accomplished, as his own correspondences of that period prove, was a crucial experiment, designed by him to overthrow the Newtonian system—he had proven that electricity was no “trifling appearance in Nature,” but that it, in some fashion, permeated space.

Franklin’s exchange of letters with New Yorker Cadwallader Colden in the period leading up to his experiment, also demonstrates the extent to which the Leibniz-Newton conflict defined the intellectual battle lines in pre-revolutionary America.

Franklin met Colden in 1743, the same year in which he began his electrical studies. The two collaborated for a while on scientific and philosophical matters, and Colden backed Franklin’s plan for colonial unity at the 1754 Albany Convention, but eventually broke with him on the issue of American independence.

Colden brought the wrath of the Newtonian tyranny directly down upon his head, writing a paper in 1745 which he titled, “Explication of the First Causes of Motion in Matter, and of the Cause of Gravitation.” Colden had rejected “action-at-a-distance,” and presumed to suggest that the effect of gravity might have a rational explanation.

Franklin offered to print the work “at my own expense and risk,” and circulated copies in Philadelphia, where it aroused a storm of intellectual ferment. Logan’s opinion, according to Franklin, was “that the Doctrine of Gravity’s being the effect of Elasticity was originally Bernoulli’s, but he believed you had not seen Bernoulli.”[fn_38]

Colden wrote to Franklin on May 20, 1752, reporting on the progress of his ideas in Europe:

I have received a copy of the Translation of my first piece into High Dutch with animadversions on it at the end of it printed at Hamburg and Leipsic in 1748, but I do not understand one word of them. I find my name often in company with those great ones, Newtone, Leibnitz, and Wolfius, and Leibnitz’s Monades often mentioned: a new doctrine which, perhaps, you have seen, and is of great repute in Germany. [Emphasis and punctuation added.]

Colden’s work had been printed in Germany, because the opposition to him in England was too violent. As a sympathetic Royal Fellow later explained to him: “The state of the case seems to be this—that every one is so satisfied with Sir Isaac’s [system] that they have no curiosity to examine yours. Was it in Latin—in Germany or France it would not want for perusal.”[fn_39]

Another colonial correspondent of Colden’s, Alexander Garden of South Carolina, bluntly denounced the Royal Society as “either too lazy and too indolent or too conceited to receive any new thoughts from any one but an F.R.S. [Fellow of the Royal Society]…. They would stumble at them promulgated by one in America tho supported by the clearest reasoning and demonstration.”[fn_40]

We learn from other correspondences from Garden, that Colden wrote his own study of the Leibniz-Newton controversy, which was forwarded to the Royal Society of Edinburgh:

Nov. 22, 1755: “… What you lastly observe about Mr. Leibnitz gives me great pleasure, for tho I believe your principles are sufficiently supported by your consequent natural account for the Phenomena, yet so great an authority is very agreeable.”

Jan. 10, 1757: “I have just now copied over your very ingenious reflexions in the Newtonian and Leibnizian Controversy to send to the Edinburgh Society.”

April, 15, 1757: “He [Dr. Whytt of Edinburgh] received your former Letter to me with great joy and satisfaction, but says he is afraid that some of the Socii will (they are all rigid and literal Newtonians) have their objections. He was to read it before them at first meeting. I have sent him your observations on the Leibnitzian Controversy.”

The attitude of colonial thinkers to Newton is also neatly expressed in a letter to Colden from his friend at Albany, Capt. John Rutherford, who evidently was concerned about Colden’s tendency to propitiate the Newtonians:

To humble you a little further about Sir Isaac … remember he differs 500 years in his Cronology from the rest of Mankind, in which he has not yet been followed by one Author at home or abroad, nor can I ever envy a man or call him truly great who never enjoyed any pleasure in society, died a virgin, and wrote upon the Revelations. [Emphasis added.]

Rutherford also acknowledged himself an adherent of Leibniz’s most famous doctrine, “the best of all possible worlds”: “I am firmly persuaded The Great Author of Nature at the Creation, of all possible Worlds chused the best or most perfect & allways maintains it so.”[fn_41]

The threat of an American revolt against Newton was evidently considered such a serious matter, that the worst traitor to Leibniz to be found on the continent of Europe, Leonard Euler of the Berlin Academy, was deployed directly into the fray. Euler’s remarks on Colden’s work, dated Nov. 21, 1752, were forwarded to him via London.

Euler rudely dismissed Colden’s idea as “destitute of all Foundation,” and criticized his “attempts to attack the best Establish’d propositions of the late Sr. Isaac Newton.” Colden reported this to Franklin, saying of Euler, “He writes much like a Pedant highly conceited of himself.”[fn_42]

Franklin was quite aware of the scientific and technological revolution he was about to unleash with his electrical discoveries, telling Colden, “There are no Bounds (but what Expence and Labour give) to the Force Man may raise and use in the Electric Way.”[fn_43] Proving that the static electricity collected in his bottles, was of the same nature as an awesome bolt of lightning, would establish this fact in the most dramatic fashion.

The dialogue between Franklin and Colden, just prior to the 1752 kite experiment, also establishes, beyond any doubt, Franklin’s equally revolutionary intentions against the Newtonians.

Colden wrote to Franklin on March 16:

In my opinion no set of experiments which I have read lead so directly towards discovering the cause of Electricity as yours do. However I find it difficult to form any conception of this cause which in any degree satisfies my mind. I conceive it to be a most subtile elastic fluid like our air, but incomparably more subtile and more elastic.

Franklin replied on April 23, explicitly rejecting the Newtonian “particles and the void” dogma, and proposing that electricity may very well be that “subtle elastic fluid” which fills the “regions above our atmosphere”:

Your conception of the Electric Fluid, that it is incomparably more subtil than Air, is undoubtedly just. It pervades dense matter with the greatest Ease: But it does not seem to mix or incorporate willingly with mere Air, as it does with other matter…. Who knows then, but there may be, as the Antients thought, a Region of this Fire, above our Atmosphere, prevented by our Air and its own too great Distance for Attraction, from joining our Earth? … yet some of it be low enough to attach itself to our highest Clouds, and thence they becoming electrified may be attracted by and descend towards the Earth, and discharge their Watry Contents together with that Etherial Fire. Perhaps the Aurorae Boreales are Currents of this Fluid in its own Region above our Atmosphere, becoming from their own Motion visible….

But I must own that I am much in the Dark about Light. I am not satisfied with the doctrine that supposes particles of matter call’d light continually driven off from the Sun’s Surface, with a Swiftness so prodigious!…

May not all the Phaenomena of Light be more conveniently solved, by supposing universal space filled with a subtle elastic fluid, which when at rest is not visible, but whose Vibrations affect that fine Sense the Eye? [Emphasis added.]

Franklin was quite conscious that he was thus plotting the downfall of the Newtonian establishment, as he concludes his letter with the following:

’Tis well we are not, as poor Galileo was, subject to the Inquisition for philosophical heresy. My whispers against the orthodox doctrine in private letters, would be dangerous; your writing and printing would be highly criminal. As it is, you must expect some Censure, but one heretic will surely excuse another.[fn_44] (emphasis added).

Franklin first announced the success of his experiment in a letter to his English scientific correspondent Peter Collinson, explaining how to construct a kite made of a silk handkerchief—“fitter to bear the Wet and Wind of a Thundergust without tearing”—with a sharp wire protruding above its wood frame, and a key tied to a silk ribbon on the twine near the experimenter’s hand.

In a thunderstorm, “when the Rain has wet the Kite and Twine, so that it can conduct the Electric Fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the Key on the Approach of your Knuckle. At this key the Phial may be charged; and from Electric Fire thus obtained, Spirits may be kindled, and all the other Electric Experiments be performed, which are usually done by the Help of a rubbed Glass Globe or Tube, and thereby the sameness of the electric matter with that of lightning completely demonstrated.”[fn_45] [Emphasis added.]

Franklin remained consistent to his anti-Newtonian principles until the end of his life, a philosophical commitment morally identical to his determination to overthrow the “absolute Tyranny” of the British Crown. In 1784, at Passy, France, with the first phase of the Revolution accomplished, Franklin wrote his “Loose Thoughts on a Universal Fluid,” still founded on the premise that, “Universal Space, as far as we know of it, seems to be filled with a subtle fluid, whose motion, or vibration, is called light.”

About the same time, in a letter addressed to the “Financier of the Revolution” Robert Morris, the anti-populist Franklin also militantly disposed of Locke’s sacred right of “Property”:

The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People’s Money out of their Pockets….

All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seem to me to be the creature of public convention. Hence the public has the right of regulating descents, and all other conveyances of property, and even of limiting the quantity and uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who, by their laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.[fn_46]

Thus does the most famous aphorism concerning Franklin—“He stole lightning from the Heavens, and the sceptre from Tyrants”—assume its true significance, since the one achievement was a lawful prelude to the other. Thus also should we learn, as Lyndon LaRouche insists, that no lasting victory over the oligarchy is possible, without defeating the legacy of Locke and Newton in our intellectual life today.

Endnotes

[fn_26] Edwin Wolf, 2nd. ed., Catalogue of the Library of James Logan (Philadelphia: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1974), p. 4. [back to text from fn_26]

[fn_27] Lowry, op. cit., chapters 8, 9. [back to text from fn_27]

[fn_28] Wolf, op. cit., p. 347. Logan’s observations concerning the persecution of Royal Astronomer Flamsteed were quite apt. Flamsteed was the first to propose that a comet curved around the Sun, in which he was at first bitterly opposed by Newton and Newton’s protégé, Edmund Halley. Newton seized control of Flamsteed’s work in 1710, and Halley was later appointed Royal Astronomer at Flamsteed’s death in 1720. [back to text from fn_28]

[fn_29] Wolf, op. cit., p. 149. [back to text from fn_29]

[fn_30] Wolf, op. cit., p. 349. [back to text from fn_30]

[fn_31] Wolf, op. cit., pp. 349-350. [back to text from fn_31]

[fn_32] Wolf, op. cit., p. 350. [back to text from fn_32]

[fn_33] Wolf, op. cit., p. 350. [back to text from fn_33]

[fn_34] James Logan to Peter Collinson, Aug. 2, 1737, Wolf, op. cit., p. 263. Logan researched Leibniz’s works for himself, writing a four-page English explanation of “The first Account of fluxions delivered by Leibniz in the Acta Eruditorum of Leipsic Octob. 1684 pa. 467.” He examined the case presented against Leibniz in the Commercium Epistolicum in detail, particularly Newton’s 1676 letter to Royal Society Secretary Oldenburg, which was presented as proof that Newton had the calculus first, and that Leibniz had stolen it from him. He expressed his early judgment in the May 10, 1727 letter to Burnet: “I verily believe Leibnitz had the first hints from Newton’s Letter & others concerning his Inventions & that from thence, that Great Genius, which we find in no man else, did build his great Superstructures. But from all I can find in the Commercium, I no where perceive that Sir Isaac intended any mortal should discover his method of working, or what we call the algorithm of his fluxions; & his having afterwards given us nothing new beyond what Leibniz had published of that kind in the Acta Eruditorum in 1682 [1684], is not altogether so much to his advantage as might be wished in his favour.” (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 62, part 6; The Scientific Papers of James Logan, Roy N. Lokken, ed.) However, it was only some years later that Logan attempted to apply one of Newton’s equations, presented as an example of a converging series in his 1676 letter, to an actual mathematical problem. His shock at the results is expressed in a 1737 correspondence, where Newton’s “method of fluxions” is judged to be no calculus at all:

“Behold! I was just as far off my point as ever; the series after a very few steps actually diverged and ran still wider. I then threw away my whole work with indignation; and with no small amazement to find it possible for Sir Isaac Newton to commit such a blunder…. [H]e appears to have expressly concealed, under pretense of avoiding tediousness, his method of applying fluxions to series…. But I must add, that though the knowledge of these methods is a pretty amusement, yet without a genius and extensive capacity, and particularly some knack at invention, they appear to me of but little use to be learned or studied.” (Lokken, op. cit., p. 66). [back to text from fn_34]

[fn_35] Wolf, op. cit., p. 340. [back to text from fn_35]

[fn_36] Letter to Thomas Story, Nov. 15, 1737, Wolf, op. cit. p. 231. [back to text from fn_36]

[fn_37] Valenti transcribed and published this work in paperback in 2013. Copies may be ordered from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. [back to text from fn_37]

[fn_38] Ben Franklin to Colden, Oct. 16, 1746, Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York: MacMillan Co., 1907). [back to text from fn_38]

[fn_39] Peter Collinson to Colden, March 13, 1755, The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden (New York: New York Historical Society, 1923), Vol. V. [back to text from fn_39]

[fn_40] Garden to Colden, March 14, 1758, op. cit., The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden. [back to text from fn_40]

[fn_41] Rutherford to Colden, April 19, 1743, op. cit., The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden. [back to text from fn_41]

[fn_42] Colden to Franklin, Nov. 19, 1753, Smyth, op. cit. [back to text from fn_42]

[fn_43] Ben Franklin to Colden, Oct. 31, 1751, Smyth, op. cit. [back to text from fn_43]

[fn_44] Franklin to Colden, April 23, 1752, Smyth, op. cit. For a recent scientific discussion relevant to Franklin’s conjectures, see also “Red Sprites and Blue Jets: Unusual Lightning Flashes in the Upper Atmosphere,” Mark Wilsey, 21st Century Science and Technology, Fall 1995. [back to text from fn_44]

[fn_45] Franklin to Peter Collinson, Smyth, op. cit. [back to text from fn_45]

[fn_46] Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris, Dec. 25, 1783. J.A. Leo Lemay, ed., Benjamin Franklin Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1987) pp. 1,081-82. [back to text from fn_46]