HINSEY: What was the reaction of the population to the return of the Soviets?

VENCLOVA: Up until the spring of 1944, the Soviets’ return did not seem imminent. The intelligentsia, as well as the general population, felt that Germany was losing the war, but hoped that the Allies would convince the Soviets to stop at the borders of the former Baltic states. This time, the Soviets were much more feared than in 1940. The deportations and general tenor of life under the Bolshevik regime had been more than enough to disillusion even those who had once held pro-Soviet views during the interwar period. But the population had also suffered under the Nazis. Even many of the former Baltaraiščiai had been profoundly disillusioned by the fact that their German allies had not had the slightest intention of restoring Lithuania's independence and did not treat them as full-fledged Aryans.

HINSEY: How did the Soviet advance affect the German command?

VENCLOVA: When it became clear that Hitler might be defeated, the attitude of the German command toward the Lithuanians changed. Germany needed as large a fighting force as possible, thus it attempted to form a Lithuanian Waffen SS legion. Even if there were young people who were eager to defend the country against the Soviets, the attempt failed miserably (it succeeded in Latvia and Estonia). In retribution, the Germans closed Vilnius University and sent dozens of intellectuals to the Stutthof concentration camp. They were suspected—not without cause—of anti-Nazi propaganda. Among them was Balys Sruoga, the famous poet and playwright whom my parents knew well. There was then a second attempt; the Germans proposed the creation of Lithuanian units that would defend the country's borders (and that might be construed, with a stretch of the imagination, as the nucleus of a future army— in a sense, a counterpart to the Soviet Lithuanian division). This proposal was accepted, but when the Nazis decided to use Lithuanian units against the Allies (D-Day was imminent), most of the enlisted men deserted, and, fearing unrest, the Nazis forcibly dispersed some units.

HINSEY: Khrushchev's famous “Secret Speech” in 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin sent shock waves across the whole of Eastern Europe. However, the first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Antanas Sniečkus, was relatively cautious about de-Stalinization, and waited a month to officially announce in the party newspaper Tiesa that the nowvilified “cult of personality” referred to Stalin. How was de-Stalinization first received in Vilnius?

VENCLOVA: Here, we have to go back a bit in time. The Twentieth Party Congress was held in February 1956, in the second year of my studies. That was before I learned to take advantage of the samizdat network. I was still a member of the Young Communist League, rather knowledgeable about the dubious nature of the regime and skeptical toward its practices, but still a member of the league. Like many Soviet people, I tended to believe that Lavrenty Beria, now executed, had been responsible for the deformities of the system to a considerable, perhaps even predominant, degree (in Lithuania, such beliefs were uncommon). Therefore, the Secret Speech came as a profound shock to me.

Antanas Sniečkus, a professional—and fanatical—revolutionary during the independence period, owed his career to Stalin. He understood perfectly that Stalin could destroy him at any moment, which only contributed to his zealousness. He fought the partisans with an unusual degree of hatred, was quite active during the deportations, and sent some of his own relatives to Siberia. At the same time, he was not devoid of political acuity, which helped him to survive and remain at the top not only under Stalin, but under Khrushchev and Brezhnev as well—a veritable exception among party leaders in the Soviet republics. Many, though not all, historians believe that he became a sort of closet separatist in his later years and attempted to work for the benefit of Lithuania (as he understood it), shirking the demands of the Kremlin. In 1956, as on many other occasions, he displayed as much cautiousness as possible. It was far from certain who would prevail in the final account. Besides, I believe that Sniečkus held Stalin in a certain esteem (though the traits of a cunning, if narrow-minded, Lithuanian peasant finally prevailed over his Stalinist beliefs).

HINSEY: I would like to now turn to a significant encounter from this period. When did you first meet Anna Akhmatova?

VENCLOVA: I believe it was in 1963. Our landlady, Elena Vasilyeva, knew Akhmatova personally, although she did not belong to the poet's inner circle. Once, Akhmatova asked Elena to type the manuscript copy of her essay “Pushkin and the Banks of the Neva.” For several decades, Akhmatova had been seriously researching Pushkin's life and work. After Soviet censorship had blocked any publication of Akhmatova's poetry in the 1930s, she became a professional Pushkin scholar (Brodsky considered her among the best, and the only specialist on the same intellectual and artistic level as Pushkin himself ).

HINSEY: What was the impetus behind her Pushkin scholarship?

VENCLOVA: To a certain degree, it helped her prove that she was engaged in “socially meaningful” work. But she also admired Pushkin more than any other Russian (or foreign) poet, and had a good eye for parallels between their two eras. She scolded me when I took the liberty of saying that Pushkin was not necessarily relevant to my generation.

HINSEY: And the essay—

VENCLOVA: “Pushkin and the Banks of the Neva” was not, strictly speaking, a samizdat affair (it was published shortly thereafter), but it had something Akhmatova liked to call a “triple bottom,” like hidden compartments in a smuggler's suitcase. Its topic was Pushkin's lonely wanderings in the Vasileostrovsky district of St. Petersburg—unpopulated islands in the Neva where the poet looked for the unmarked graves of his executed friends, leaders of the failed Decembrist uprising. Exactly one hundred years after Pushkin, Akhmatova used to wander in the same part of the city, since her husband Nikolai Gumilev, a great poet executed by the Bolsheviks, was also presumably buried there. Only a few people close to Akhmatova understood the analogy, which escaped the censors.

Elena Vasilyeva asked me to bring the typescript to Akhmatova, which I did happily, if timidly.

HINSEY: Where was Akhmatova residing at this time?

VENCLOVA: In Leningrad she lived mainly with the family of her ex-husband Nikolai Punin, to whom she had been married in the 1920s and 1930s.

Psychiatrist Xavier de Oliveira's elision of spiritism with insanity is emblematic of early twentieth-century Brazilian psychiatry's alarmist preoccupation with spiritism as a public health threat. Between 1917 and 1928 he observed, in a sweeping hyperbole, that while alcohol and syphilis were the most common causes of psychosis among patients at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Rio de Janeiro, all the rest suffered from spiritism. This condition as a form and cause of psychopathology dominated the Brazilian psychiatric imagination during the early twentieth century as psychiatrists wrote medical and pseudo-medical treatises about it, dedicated entire medical journals to it, and made it a key topic of conversation at asylums and sanatoriums. As an organized profession confronted in Brazil with a popular, modern competitor—one with a radically different view of the self and of rationality—psychiatry was in a state of panic. Xavier de Oliveira and others placed both the doctrines of Kardecist spiritism and candomble, in their diversities of form and practice, under the conceptual umbrella of “spiritism” to refer to religious-philosophical systems of thought that postulated life after death through the viability of the spirit and the living's communication with spirits through human mediums. In the course of this chapter, I will use “spiritism” or “the spiritisms” to refer to the entire field of possession religions, including Kardecist spiritism and candomble as the two major branches within spiritism, while recognizing that there was, and remains, a diversity of belief structures between the two and within each.

Born out of a political negotiation between religious officials from the Santa Casa de Misericórdia Catholic lay brotherhood, the imperial government, and the medical community in Rio de Janeiro, the Hospício Pedro II embodied the groups’ often-conflicting hopes and plans. Each side envisioned a hybridization of medical and religious knowledge that might restore insane minds to reason and represent a new mode of therapeutics for insanity and a new sociopolitical experiment in collaborative governance; however, each envisioned it differently. Politically shaken by the crisis of legitimacy during the Regency period, the imperial government saw the asylum as an opportunity to project a magnanimous image of state power. Experiencing multiple erosions of traditional religiosity, the Catholic lay brotherhood hoped to stake a new public claim to relevance by underscoring their roles as caregivers in a public partnership with doctors in which they intended to hold control. Doctors, in turn, viewed the very creation of the asylum, and its rhetorical commitment to the moral treatment, as a medical victory and hoped to use it to incubate and eventually launch the psychiatric profession and an array of attendant social reforms.

Compromise and power sharing between religious officials and asylum doctors inside the asylum inevitably failed, with each party diverting its energies to fighting the other and defending their respective domains rather than addressing the problems of the insane. Instead of serving as constructive checks and balances, rivals served as scapegoats for problems, and the asylum became a political battleground rather than a rational center for compassionate bureaucratic management. This chapter chronicles the complex contest over the governance of the Hospicio Pedro II, which ultimately involved the French nun order, the Daughters of Charity, as well as the Brazilian Santa Casa Catholic lay brotherhood, emergent psychiatrists, and the state. It investigates how psychiatrists, as apostles of professional rationality, developed their ideas about reason and bureaucratic power in this contested site of religious charity between 1852 and 1890.

Franklin did not overcome his inclination to disputation easily. But his turn to usefulness and a new classification of knowledge constituted a change in his state of mind. While prone to argument throughout his twenties, he had become aware of this inclination and resolved to redirect it toward the habit of philosophical inquiry. Rejecting the doctrine of his Dissertation, which denied any distinction between virtue and vice, he turned to an investigation of the virtuous life. Franklin's conversion from atheism to belief is the theme of the “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion” (1728), a carefully worded creed stating his “First Principles” of faith and morals, which he recommends to his readers in the Autobiography.

Whereas Christian theologians, in order to teach man's duties to God, combined a priori propositions of an infinite, supernatural Creator with the categorical definition of human beings as born with original sin and free will, Franklin confessed that he could not comprehend the God of Christian theology. Rejecting the a priori arguments of the theologians, he concluded that the first cause of the universe (infinite God) pays no attention to man, and he posited an array of divinities on a scale of being. He taught general providence (the order of the natural world) and the particular providence of lesser gods who participate in its governance. Deciding it might be useful, he worshipped and prayed, guided by poetic laudations, to these lesser gods who governed the world in the hope that he would be rewarded.

But Franklin, man of the Enlightenment, did not really pray to a pantheon of gods. Rather, as Walters and Anderson argue, Franklin's gods are ideals, or character models. In the “Articles,” Franklin rejected revealed religion and replaced it with a polytheistic teaching of ethical forms, which served as a natural guide for human happiness. Man participates in nature by his instincts and reason. The gods are competing images of the human good, born of human desires, subject to rational analysis, and accompanied by religious duties. Franklin performs his duty to the gods, his “Acts of Religion,” by a sentiment of gratitude and virtuous behavior, or using his reason in the consideration of the good.

Six new attributions or clarifications to the Franklin canon are made in this book; however, for reasons of space, the last four are made without including the necessary and lengthy arguments to substantiate their authorship. While my arguments are forthcoming, I have listed them below for the reader's own judgment and criticism.

“On Simplicity.” In PG, April 13, 1732 (see Conclusion, n. 18, of this volume). Attribution first made by Lemay, Canon, 60–62. Franklin borrows this essay from Bishop Benjamin Hoadly, “Letter XC,” London Journal, July 25, 1724, in The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., 3 vols. (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1773), 3:327–31. Hoadly was often listed with Locke as a chief Enlightenment figure and represented the pinnacle of “old Whig” religious thought. Conclusion—not by Franklin.

“Of the Usefulness of Mathematics.” In PG, October 30, 1735 (see chap. 2, n. 102, of this volume). For a history of this attribution, first made by William Duane, see PBF, 2:126, whose editors rejected it for insufficient evidence of Franklin's authorship; it has since been affirmed by Lemay, A Life, 1:450, 463. It appears that Franklin did write most of this essay, ¶¶2– 12, 13B, 17; still, Franklin borrows ¶1 from the entry “Mathematicks,” in Lexicon Technicum; or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: Explaining not only the Terms of Art, but the Arts themselves, 4th ed. (London: Printed for D. Browne … B. Motte, 1725); Franklin borrows ¶¶14–16 from the preface of J. Ralphson, A Mathematical Dictionary (London: Printed for J. Nicholson, 1702); he borrows ¶¶13A, 18–19, from the preface to vol. 2 of Edmund Stone's Euclid's Elements: Containing the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Books, 2 vols. (London: Printed for T. Woodward, 1731). Conclusion—mostly by Franklin.

“A.B.” to “Dear Ned.” In PG, May 4, July 6, October 12, 1738, March 29, April 5, 1739 (see chap. 10, n. 42, of this volume). For a history of this attribution, see Lemay, Canon, 93–94. Scholars have hitherto mistaken the “A.B.” letters as a satire of Pennsylvania's government.

This book began with the thesis that Benjamin Franklin espoused natural right, both as a philosophy in the Western tradition and as a modern political teaching. I have attempted to explain how these two ideas went together. Biographers have often sought to understand Franklin as a whole—in the words of Aldridge, to “synthesize all that is known about Franklin's life and character.” The question of how Franklin's philosophy and politics went together is in part a question of psychology, and within the field of political philosophy, it evokes anachronistic references to bygone philosophers that sometimes perplex scholars in other fields. But more generally, scholars in history and literature have questioned the degree of equanimity that Franklin achieved, and Franklin expressed his own frustration at the lack of leisure he experienced because of his political duties. What political philosophy brings to the table is a thesis that helps to explain the tension between the political mind, animated by the longing for justice that underlies indignation, and the tranquility provided by the love of wisdom, which concludes that it is illogical to be angry at ignorance. If Franklin were more like Socrates, so the argument goes, he could not have cared about Philadelphia, or anything removed from his own selfish interests. Political life, with its sacrifices, perturbations, and most of all, its appeal to glory, is antithetical to philosophy.

Within the field of political philosophy there is disagreement as to how the above thesis applies to Franklin. On the one hand, Pangle has argued that Franklin failed to achieve the level of truly philosophical reflection; hence his life of public service led to slight anger and even bitterness. On the other hand, Weinberger, rejecting the reference to Socrates, argues that Franklin did achieve this level of reflection; hence all of his public activities were self-centered. Historically, the figure of Socrates and his dialectical method is relevant to Franklin, but its above characterization seems anachronistic. Socrates was presented, in Franklin's copy of Xenophon, as public spirited: as “unit[ing] in his Person the two Qualities of good Philosopher and good Citizen.”

Franklin applied Whig principles of natural right, social compact theory, and the proper ends of government to colonial politics. From his earliest years, he argued for American equality, not just between the “meaner Sort” and the “better Sort” in Pennsylvania, but with the British. The theory of the state of nature was all too applicable to the actual state of affairs during the breakdown of government in Pennsylvania Province, during the periods of chaos on the frontier, as well as the time after the American colonial revolt from Britain (“a whole people … without any laws or government at all”). And it was precisely the gap between Franklin's liberalism and the elitist views—Mulford calls this “the problem of liberalism”—that guided his policies during the 1750s and 1760s. As a prudential statesman, Franklin understood that principles must be applied in ways that often contradicted one another. This included exempting the proprietors from taxes in order to defend the colony, abandoning precedent to procure the necessary materials for the Braddock campaign, shifting party allegiances, and changing strategies to achieve colonial union. But Franklin's ends, throughout, were informed by “early modern liberal” principles. Franklin's prudence may best be summed up in his greatest political lesson: “Those who govern … do not generally like … considering and carrying into Execution new Projects. The best public Measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous Wisdom, but forc’d by the Occasion.” Or in our modern parlance: Never waste a political crisis.

Origins

Franklin's earliest political ideas came from the Whig theories of the Old Charter Party in Boston. James Franklin surrounded himself with aspiring wits that opposed the New Charter Party and its concessions to the Crown. According to Lemay, Franklin learned burlesque in part from “the Massachusetts hero of his boyhood, the Reverend John Wise,” who famously refused to carry out Edmund Andros's order to levy taxes without the people's consent. Wise was jailed and denied the writ of habeas corpus.6 His Vindication of New England Churches (1717) used the Whig theory of natural rights both to resist the efforts of Increase Mather to consolidate New England churches and to preserve the original freedoms of representation and speech in the New Charter.

To procure the often-conflicting goods in Franklin's four-part definition of happiness, rigorous self-examination is necessary. In the 1729 “Busy-Body” essays, Franklin first outlines the contours of his project of self-examination,and the theme frequently reemerges throughout the 1730s. Selfexamination may lead to the life of reason, which is itself a habit, or second nature evaluating these goods, achieved in the virtue of wisdom. This is Franklin's greatest and most difficult teaching because it requires educating human pride, which he conceives as simultaneously the foundation of and the greatest impediment to happiness. Franklin resolves this contradiction in his own teaching of the philosophical temper, which is a balance of mind achieved in the virtue of humility.

“A Letter from Father Abraham to His Beloved Son”

While Franklin's thoughts on self-examination were complete by 1735, the 1758 “Letter from Father Abraham” is his best essay on the depth of the human soul—the culmination of his thoughts on self-reflection—and in it he provides advice on how to obtain self-knowledge. The “Letter” demonstrates two things. First, that Franklin's view of the human soul is complex; it is a multiplicity of selves, existing in tension. Self-examination illuminates this tension. Second, because of the danger of selfdeception, self-examination must be conducted both in private and in public. Further, one can properly examine himself only after seeking out the right kinds of friends.

Isaac writes to his father for advice on an important question: How should he live his life? Abraham replies that such a question can only be answered by self-inquiry, which is essential for evaluating errors and discovering their source: “Men do not generally err in their Conduct so much through Ignorance of their Duty, as through Inattention to their own Faults, or through strong Passions and bad Habits; and, therefore, till that Inattention is cured, or those Passions reduced under the Government of Reason, Advice is rather resented as a Reproach, than gratefully acknowledged and followed.” Proper attention, self-examination, will prevent resentment, and enable Isaac to reduce (not extinguish) his passions and eliminate bad habits. In the Autobiography, Franklin reconsiders his own conduct upon his return from London, writing, “As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.”

Following his 1728 “Articles,” and his October 1729 acquisition of the Gazette, Franklin wrote and selected numerous articles on religion that challenged the veracity of claims to revelatory knowledge. This interpretation may be contrasted with the view that Franklin never resolved the question of providence in his own mind, and that his public life reveals either an unreflective moralism or a vocation grounded not in reason but in a pious leap of faith. It also demonstrates that Franklin took revelation's challenge to reason seriously: he did not accept the answer as self-evident, nor did he embrace an agnostic view with regard to revealed religion.

Materialist arguments against the possibility of spirits—similar to the ones Franklin had made in the Dissertation—appeared in the April 16, 1730, Mercury. Franklin replied with two essays, the April 23 “Letter of the Drum” and in a May 7 letter by “Philoclerus.” In the first, the author claimed to refute “Spinosists, Hobbists, and most impious Free-Thinkers, who despise Revelation,” deny “the Existence of the Devil, and of Spirits in general,” as well as the authority of Scripture that affirms them, with a burlesque of an actual story of a spirit that made drumming noises. The author's evidence is similar to that found in the miracles of the Bible: a secondhand account from a minister, who inferred the existence of a spirit on hearing the sound of a drum. The author's spoof suggests that a better explanation is fear, which works mass delusions and blinds ministers to evidence from their own experience. Even the future bishop who, believing his fellow ministers were fibbing or drunk, pranked his colleagues by making noises on the second night worked himself into such a frenzy that he became too afraid to return to his own bed. The atheist suggests that knowledge of the physical world disproves the spirit world: practical jokes and dreams are the sole origins of the gods. He concludes with a story of a drunken prelate in Jamaica who read from Scripture, “I heard a Voice from Heaven,” at which his drinking companion replies, “that's a d[am]’d Lye, for … if you had heard the Voice, I should have heard it too, for my Ears are as good as yours.”

Benjamin Franklin the philosopher and lawgiver is the subject of this study. The 1759 Wilson portrait, featured on the cover of this book, shows a stern, confident, and resolute Franklin, who was by that time a courageous soldier, defiant Whig, terror to proprietary privilege, and philosopher of nature and man. He wrote brilliant, terse responses to the great minds of the time—Clarke, Locke, Collins, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson— for his own edification. He was certainly one for disputation; but it became enough for him just to know. And he would come to learn that he could only know himself by observing his interactions with others. Franklin's rational investigations of moral philosophy were tethered by his affections, not just engaging in ale-infused philosophical conversations with friends at the Junto, but standing shoulder to shoulder against the blast of house fires, taking his turn at the wall as a common soldier, and volunteering his pen to fight for the liberties of Pennsylvanians against the proprietors, and eventually the Crown. “Pensilvania is my Darling,” he wrote in 1755, not long after he instructed his readers, “Still be your darling [the] Study [of] Nature's Laws; / And to its Fountain trace up every Cause.” But how did politics and philosophy fit together in the mind of Franklin? What makes his autobiographical conversion so interesting is that the two did not always go together. As a youth in Boston, Franklin was persuaded that public-spiritedness was for suckers, and yet we find him three years later returning from cosmopolitan London society to the provinces.

To solve this riddle one must first locate Franklin's dispersed writings, often anonymous, seldom systematic in the usual sense, and an ongoing subject of scholarly investigation. It means, second, one must grapple with his writing style. Franklin was an Enlightenment philosopher, and he wrote like one, which is to say, with irony. As a youth, like John Wise, Shaftesbury, and Addison, he jabbed at the religious and political authorities with insinuation, innuendo, and burlesque, and he would surpass his favorite writers in his fame. But ideas are fruitless if not shared—thus Franklin always left behind a trace of his meaning, or a clause that undermines a lengthy argument.

In his own time, Franklin was recognized as a pioneer of political theory. Reading Franklin's 1751 Observations, John Adams first realized the inevitability of American independence. James Madison wrote that Franklin's final 1754 letter to William Shirley “comprises the germ” of the political theory of the American founding. Franklin supported principles he believed led to the best political order, within the limits of prudence. The statesman must have an idea of the best society in order to make laws for the best practicable society. The public, Franklin commented, always acts with an end in view, though often the wrong one. Mulford argues that Franklin developed his mature view of liberalism, the principles that defined “what ought to be the ends of empire,” in the 1750s; his politics may be understood in light of those ends. These long-term goals of colonial growth presupposed eventual independence from Britain.

Franklin also understood himself as a lawgiver in the classical sense, one who by his laws shapes the character of a people. In 1751 he celebrated the prince, legislator, and inventor as the “Fathers of their Nation,” who make growth possible. In Poor Richard, 1752, he wrote, “Myriads made happy, Publick Spirit bless, / Parent of Trade, Wealth, Liberty and Peace.” Just as physical nature was ordered according to certain laws, human beings could make laws to regulate their own natural inclinations. Franklin, for example, attributed Pennsylvania's early growth to “wholesome Laws with good Government” and to “liberty.” Using the science of politics, one could use knowledge of man's behavior to produce a desired end. He writes in his 1729 essay on political economy: “There is no Science, the Study of which is more useful and commendable than the Knowledge of the true Interest of one's Country; and perhaps there is no Kind of Learning more abstruse and intricate, more difficult to acquire in any Degree of Perfection.” Franklin observed certain principles on which government should be based to achieve the right kind of citizen. He would advise the “Prince” on the principles of good government in his 1751 Observations.

While Franklin adored the providence, or order, of nature, his frequent reflection on evil in the world was the starting point for his inquiry into the life of virtue. It was not his natural curiosity or genius alone that propelled him to inquire into sentiments of justice. He was enflamed by a melancholy awareness of injustice, in the world and in himself. His examination of nature's providence revealed a contradiction: that nature's majestic order exists side by side with its cruel injustice and indifference. His thoughts on death in his Journal were the beginning of a protracted dialectic with himself about the way he should live his life. From this came his 1726 “Plan of Conduct,” written so that he might act like a “rational creature” by ordering his life. In 1727 both Franklin and Denham, whom Franklin “respected and lov’d,” contracted illnesses; Denham died, his estate picked over by executors, with nothing left for the young apprentice. Franklin writes, “My Distemper was a Pleurisy, which very nearly carried me off. I suffered a good deal, gave up the Point in my own mind, and was rather disappointed when I found my Self recovering.” After languishing in sickness, he recovered to hear of the death of his uncle, and to tend to his dying friend Joseph Watson, who “died in [Franklin’s] Arms.” Three years after his optimistic departure for England, and without any seeming improvement in wealth or status, Franklin had to return to Keimer for work. Sometime in the next year, in melancholy reflection, he wrote his printer's Epitaph, reflecting on how he might be remembered after his death.

In a 1731 letter to his sister Jane Mecom, Franklin reflects on the great uncertainty of human affairs. He begins with “the melancholy news of the death of [our] sister [Sarah Franklin] Deavenport, a loss, without doubt, regretted by all that knew her, for she was a good woman.” To this he adds, “I had before heard of the death of your first child, and am pleased that the loss is in some measure made up to you by the birth of a second.”

Contrary to Mandeville's praise of private vice, Franklin “grew convinc’d” that certain virtues were necessary “in Dealings between Man and Man.” Hence Franklin, at the same time he began his own project for private virtue, simultaneously posited there was a public “Doctrine to be Preached.” While Franklin's list of virtues is in part a description of his own personal faults, he did not expect the average reader to acquire self-knowledge. He had, as scholars have suggested, a more political motive in mind—constructing a list of virtues founded in natural law to advance a new republican society. The one who could discover a method for a lasting virtuous reform, Franklin wrote Whitefield, would “deserve more, ten thousand times, than the inventor of the longitude.”

The great problem with constructing an art of virtue is the variety of human incentives, and their lack of direction. The naturally courageous man who desires recognition may become either a soldier or a butcher. A Christian's pride, when thwarted, may reemerge in injurious gossip. The political art requires that by skillful management these passions be turned to public advantage. In consideration of “the Strict Rules of Justice and Equity,” Franklin writes as early as 1723 that there are two sources of authority, the “Light of Nature and Laws of Justice.” “The end of Humane Law,” he adds, “is to fix the boundaries within which Men ought to keep themselves.” In his opposition to religious orthodoxy in the 1735 Hemphill affair, Franklin appealed to the “Laws of our Nature,” which could be accessed by human intelligence to formulate the “great Laws of Morality and Virtue.” While the moral laws were founded on the conclusions of reason, Franklin frequently appealed to an infinite God as the revelatory source of authority for these laws.

Yet, as Franklin wrote to Kames, there must also be a teaching for those who “cannot have Faith in Christ; and many have it in so weak a Degree, that it does not produce the Effect.” It is not enough that one who would be virtuous be convinced by arguments of virtue's advantages and then resolve to be virtuous.