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But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.
Franklin later concluded that the loss of money he was owed was balanced by the loss of the burden of having Ralph as a friend.
“The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess.”
Franklin then went on (under the guise of J.T.) to praise Franklin’s own paper, point out a similar typo made by his rival Bradford, criticize Bradford for being generally sloppier, and (with delicious irony) praise Franklin for not criticizing Bradford:
“a good and merciful Creator should produce myriads of such exquisite machines to no other end or purpose but to be deposited in the dark chambers of the grave” before they were old enough to know good from evil or to serve their fellow man and their God? The answer, he admitted, was “beyond our mortal ken”
“the most acceptable service of God was doing good to man.”
As Diderot once quipped, a deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist.
There is in all humans, however, a desire and a deeply felt duty to worship a more intimate God, Franklin surmised. Therefore, he wrote, the Supreme Being causes there to be lesser and more personal gods for mortal men to worship.
Franklin’s focus was on traits that could help him succeed in this world, instead of ones that would exalt his soul for the hereafter.
The first week he focused on temperance, trying to keep that line clear while not worrying about the other lines. With that virtue strengthened, he could turn his attention to the next one, silence, hoping that the temperance line would stay clear as well. In the course of the year, he would complete the thirteen-week cycle four times.
This is largely because he felt it was futile to wrestle with theological questions about which he had no empirical evidence and thus no rational basis for forming an opinion.
In doing so, he learned one of his pragmatic lessons about jealousy and modesty: he found that people were reluctant to support a “proposer of any useful
