Page 119 - American Stories, A History of the United States

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BENJamiN FraNkliN Franklin exemplified the scientific curiosity and search for practical knowledge
characteristic of enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century. His experiments on electricity became world
famous and inspired others to study the effects of the strange force.

Truths are reduced to Practice, when Theories grounded upon Experiments . . . and
the Arts of Living made more easy and comfortable . . . Knowledge then becomes really
useful.”
The Enlightenment spawned scores of earnest scientific tinkerers, people who
Quick Check dutifully recorded changes in temperature, strange plants and animals, and astronomi-
What were the basic intellectual cal phenomena. While these eighteenth-century Americans made few earth-shattering
assumptions of the American discoveries, they did encourage their countrymen, especially those who attended col-
Enlightenment?
lege, to apply reason to the solution of social and political problems.

benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) absorbed the new cosmopolitan culture. European
thinkers regarded him as a fellow philosophe, a person of reason and science, a role
that he self-consciously cultivated when he visited England and France in later life.
Franklin had little formal education, but as a young man working in his brother’s print
shop, he kept up with the latest intellectual trends. In his Autobiography, Franklin
described the excitement of discovering a new British journal. It was like a breath of

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