Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

each individual could best discover the truth about God through reason and studying nature, rather than through blind faith in received doctrines and divine revelation.

Which isn't really about religion...

Franklin wrote out a “Plan for Future Conduct” during his eleven-week voyage back to Philadelphia. It would be the first of many personal credos that laid out pragmatic rules for success and made him the patron saint of self-improvement guides. He

Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.”

Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

“Fish and visitors stink in three days.”

Franklin was the epitome of this admixture of self-reliance and civic involvement, and what he exemplified became part of the American character.1

“If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.”

The ingenious lad who did not get to go to Harvard,

“Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding,” Franklin said, but they should remember that “human felicity is produced . . . by little advantages that occur every day.”

Franklin noted with pleasure that the observance of religion there was not as strict as in America, especially when it came to observing Sundays as the Sabbath. “In the afternoon, both high and low went to the play or the opera, where there was plenty of singing, fiddling and dancing,” he reported to a Connecticut friend. “I looked around for God’s judgments but saw no signs of them.”

The maps he published and the temperature measurements he made are included on the NASA Web site, which notes how remarkably similar they are to the infrared data gathered by modern satellites.

It is universally well known that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures a great quantity of wind. That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere is usually offensive to the company from the fetid smell that accompanies it. That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offense, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind. That so retained contrary to nature, it not only gives frequently great present pain, but occasions future diseases . . . Were it not for the odiously offensive smell accompanying such escapes, polite people would probably be under no more restraint in discharging such wind in company than they are in spitting or in blowing their noses. My Prize Question therefore should be, To discover some drug wholesome and not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common food or sauces, that shall render the natural discharges of wind from our bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreeable as perfumes.

Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding or relating; but when they consider that though dust blown into the eyes of a single person, or into a single shop on a windy day, is but of small importance, yet the great number of the instances in a populous city, and its frequent repetitions give it weight and consequence, perhaps they will not censure very severely those who bestow some attention to affairs of this seemingly low nature. Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.28