Philosophy from Puritanism to Enlightenment    
by Rick Kennedy

Published in  Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter Williams, editors (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001),  I. 87-96.  

            If  philosophy is defined as the love of wisdom, the desire to understand one’s place in the symphony of the cosmos, then colonial America probably had more than its share of philosophers and creative philosophies.  The colonial period of United States history is defined by multiple contests of politics, religions, cultures, and ideas.  Hopes were often artificially jacked up and the rate of failure was high.  In such an unsettled situation, many people were encouraged to think deeply and pursue wisdom.     

Using this definition, possibly the most creative and widespread philosophical movement in colonial America had nothing to do with either Puritanism or the Enlightenment.  Beginning probably in the 1730s and spreading South, North, and East from the Ohio Valley was an inter-tribal discussion on what encroachment by Europeans meant for Indians.  The most influential philosophers of this movement were prophets of a new world order.  The most famous of these was Neolin, the Delaware Prophet, who preached that the Indians had collectively sinned by adopting “White people’s ways and nature.”  He told a Descartes-style story of sitting alone by the fire, “musing and greatly concerned about the evil ways he saw prevailing among the Indians” when a man appeared who taught him a pure religion that would restore all Indians to a right relationship with the cosmos.  Thousands of Indians, seeking wisdom and ready to act, followed Neolin and other prophets in ritual vomiting, witch-hunts, and rejection of European tools and alcohol.  Some followers, such as the Ottawa warrior Pontiac, resorted to war in order to jump-start the new Indian renewal. 

Lovers of wisdom like Neolin and his fellow prophets abound in colonial America. So do Jesuits, Franciscans, Puritans, Quakers, German Pietists, humanitarians, and political reformers.  No doubt every colonial minister, like Neolin, mused by the fire about the sin of humanity and relied on the divine revelation of scriptures for a program of renewal.  There were a number of highly educated missionaries, such as Jean de Brébeuf in New France, who developed ways to communicate Christianity to the Huron and the Iroquois.  We know of many personal crises that led to deep introspection, for example when William Byrd II in Virginia disinterred and opened the coffin of his father in an attempt to understand his own place in the world. The love of wisdom was often made manifest in ephemeral ways, as when Judge Samuel Sewall and Cotton Mather discussed the nature of humanity when they happened to meet in a Boston alley with the same purpose of relieving their bladders.  Since the love of wisdom was not tied to formal education, women could participate fully, as when Ann Bradstreet wrote a poem “upon the burning of our house”:  

I, started up, the light did spye,  
           And to my God my heart did cry  
           To strengthen me in my Distresse  
           And not to leave me succourlesse.  
           Then coming out beheld a space  
           The flame consume my dwelling place.  

And, when I could no longer look,  
            I blest his Name that gave and took,  
            That layd my goods now in the dust:  
            Yea so it was, and so ‘twas just.  
            It was his own: it was not mine;  
            Far be it that I should repine.  

If philosophy is the love of wisdom, the desire to find one’s place in the symphony of the cosmos, then colonial America had more than its share of philosophers and a multitude of creative philosophies.  If philosophy, however, is defined as a focused project to understand a specific problem of reality using the tools of systematic reasoning, then only a small number of people in colonial America can be defined as philosophers and there is a limited amount of philosophical activity—all of it derived from European precedents.  Defined this way, philosophy is a technical field within the tradition of Western education, distinct from but overlapping theology and natural science.  This latter definition is the traditional definition of philosophy and will be the definition used here.  The goal is not to be exclusive; rather, using this limited definition will help clarify the intellectual relationship of British colonials within their European intellectual tradition.

Significant participation in technical philosophy usually requires a particular environment. There needs to be a access to great books and ideas.  There needs to be means of communication—regular meetings, institutions, and probably a printing press.  There also needs to be a community of people who share an educational heritage where they learned the same vocabulary and techniques of inquiry.  In the seventeenth century north of Mexico, only the Puritans of the Boston area offered such a situation. The Puritans’ most intellectually technical debates were in theology and their most influential practical thinking was political; however, they were also much interested logic and moral philosophy.  In 1636 they founded Harvard College and nurtured her for the next hundred years by imitating the highest standards of English and Dutch universities along with the innovative dissenting academies of England.  Printing presses were available in the Boston throughout the century along with booksellers, private libraries, and a community of philosophically-minded men and women.   

Philosophy Practiced by the Puritans  

Puritanism was not a philosophy.  The term was created to describe the extremist tendencies of people who thought the Elizabethan Settlement fostered an impure, compromised Protestantism.  Puritan leaders were often highly educated and believed strongly in rational religion.  Puritanism was initially nurtured in the 1560s and 70s at several colleges at Cambridge University in England. The founders of Harvard College were by-in-large Cambridge graduates who desired to recreate their alma mater in America—hence renaming the college town Cambridge.  The curriculum included first one, then two years of logic, much math and natural philosophy, metaphysics, and divinity.  M.A. requirements included the option of writing a synopsis of a logic system.  Yearly commencements were also well-attended intellectual fiestas where Latin speeches attempted to answer knotty philosophical questions such as:  

-Is form derived from the power of matter?  
            -Does the will always follow the last dictate of the intellect?  
            -Is the spirit of man distinct from his soul?  
            -Is metaphysical infinity to be distinguished from mathematical infinity?  

As much as Cambridge in America fostered a lively intellectual atmosphere, the Puritans tended to encourage students to follow the lead of accepted authors, usually fellow Puritans who manifested a dynamic mix of piety and intellect.  The two most influential of these accepted authors were Alexander Richardson (c.1565-1613 or1621) and William Ames (1576-1633).  The philosophic influence of Richardson and Ames on Harvard’s first fifty years would be hard to overestimate, especially their support for the logic system of Petrus Ramus (1515?-1572).  Increase Mather described “the profoundly learned and godly” Richardson as an intellectual Gideon with Ames as a later champion who “hath improved Richardson’s method and Principles to great advantage.”

The role of Richardson and Ames as model textbook authors was what made each so influential in America.  Colonial American philosophy thrived because of textbooks.  The problem, of course, with philosophy practiced upon a foundation of textbooks, is that teachers and students rarely read the actual works of the people they talked about.  The names of Plato, Aristotle, or Descartes,  and even Ramus, were tossed about by people who had only read textbook authors discussing these thinkers.  Also, textbooks are almost always simplifications rather than amplifications.  Complexities and intricate technical matters were often lost in the transition into textbook form.

   Aside from mere student synopses, the first philosophy books written in America were John Eliot’s The Logick Primer (1672) and Increase Mather’s Catechismus Logicus ex Petri Rami, Alexandri Richardsoni, et Guilielmi Amesii (1675).   Eliot’s The Logick Primer was a highly reductionist missionary venture, written in English and Natick, to teach logic to local Indians.  Mather’s Catechismus Logicus reduced Ramist logic to a short catechism.  The most influential textbooks written at Harvard were by William Brattle who, aftter hired as a tutor by Increase Mather in 1685, wrote two Cartesian logic textbooks that were long used at Harvard.  Charles Morton’s A Logick System embodied Renaissance Aristotelianism and was the most pedagogically creative of all the logic textbooks used at Harvard, but it was probably written in England before he came to America in 1686.  All of these logic textbooks, except Eliot’s, appear only in student notebooks as manuscript transcriptions.  Harvard’s first formally published logic textbook was Compendium Logicae in 1735, a work misattributed to William Brattle.

The various types of logic taught by Puritans at Harvard were followed Renaissance patterns of emphasis first on analysis of knowledge itself, then synthesizing axioms and demonstrations.  Logic was not narrowly abstract, but rather, was at the core of a well-lived Puritan life. In the Ramist system the student dug deep to discover the fundamental bits of what is known.  These bits were called arguments.  Arguments must then be assembled together into axioms, then into syllogisms and geometry-style demonstrations.  Alexander Richardson’s The Logicians School-Master proclaimed that  

to see a thing in the cause, that is, the argument…that is our intelligentia, to make axioms is our scientia, to discourse is our sapientia [wisdom], to apply everything in time and place is our prudentia, to work the like our Art [of logic], these are the things that make a man a scholler, a wise man, ergo a man that shall take this course in his studies shall be an exquisite man in every way.     

Puritans were optimistic. They believed that the pursuer of truth would find it. Entwined with this, they believed that the pursuer of the good would be set on the right path.  William Brattle wrote in 1686:  

Man’s mind being obnoxious to much error both in its searches for truth, and pursuits after that which is good, two arts have been sought out; the one to aid the understanding, the other to direct the will; this being called Ethicks; that Logick.  

Logic and ethics were the two great concerns of Puritan philosophy.  Even though tutor Brattle might categorize them separately, they overlapped extensively.  Ethics, or moral philosophy, encompassed the study of the soul and its faculties, especially the intellect and the will.  Right reasoning and right living were rooted in a well functioning soul.  Charles Morton (1626-1698) was Puritan New England’s most systematic student of moral philosophy.  Norman Fiering calls him “America’s first professional philosopher.”   Morton was born in Cornwall in England, educated at Cambridge and Oxford, and operated for many years a private academy run out of his house on the south edge of London.  During this time he wrote thoughtful and intertwined textbooks on logic, physics, ethics, and pneumatology.  Writing multiple textbooks was normal for a dynamic educator in the seventeenth century; however, Morton, after immigrating in 1686, went further by publishing in Boston America’s first purely philosophical work not designed as a textbook: The Spirit of Man (1692). 

Before Jonathan Edwards, Morton was America’s best student of souls—the souls of animals, humans, and angels.  Morton’s Pneumaticks is a textbook-style overview of souls in general while The Spirit of Man is a monograph on various characteristics and temperaments (spirits) within the human soul.  Although Morton offered much descriptive psychology; the goal of the book was to help readers “know thyself” and pursue habits and temperaments consistent with divine grace.  

  Charles Morton Box:

              The existence of Harvard College, multiple locally-written manuscript textbooks in logic, and the formal publication of  Eliot’s The Logick Primer and Morton’s The Spirit of Man in seventeenth-century Massachusetts is extraordinary in the context of what can be expected from a provincial colony in its first century.  New England’s dominant claim on the intellectual history of the United States was staked early on by an amazingly vigorous people who honored rationality and the Western tradition of liberal arts education far beyond any other American colony. 

            Philosophy was always the handmaid of theology for the Puritans, but logic was to be applied in theology.  This dynamic relationship kept Puritans from complacent dogmatism.  Their emphasis on rational religion also encouraged the study of natural philosophy. 

The most significant work in natural philosophy done by the Puritans was in alchemy and astronomy.  George Starkey graduated from Harvard in 1648 and was part of an alchemical circle in New England.  After immigrating to England in his twenties, he took the pen name Eirenaeus Philalethes and became one of England most influential alchemists.  John Foster and Thomas Brattle were the most influential students of astronomy when their measurements of the Comet of 1680 were eventually used by Isaac Newton to support his work on universal gravitation. 

            In natural philosophy, as in logic, the Puritans of New England were very provincial, depending much on whatever books or ideas might accidentally come their way in a book-sellers box or might appear in one of the intellectual periodicals that made it to America.  Although quoted in Newton’s Principia of 1687, Thomas Brattle wrote in 1705? That he had still never seen a copy.  In 1723, the Harvard library still owned no copy of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).  The library only owned the short, preview form, contained within The Young Students Library (1692), a book that probably didn’t make it to the colonies until the turn of the century.  Cotton Mather’s The Christian Philosopher (1721) is mostly a collection of English descriptions of “the best discoveries in Nature” written a quarter to a half-century earlier.

            Possibly the most innovative area of moral philosophy practiced by the Puritans was political.  The creation of a republican system mixing church membership and voting, the many sermons and published treatises on civil polity, and the body of judicial arguments and decisions constitute a large mass of practical philosophy.  Civil polity for the Puritans; however, was rarely discussed in terms of technical philosophy. One exception being John Wise’s Vindication of the Governemnt of New England Churches (1713) that argued from the foundation of the “natural” and “civil being of man.”   Wise argues the cause of democracy and for the state’s responsibility to protect each citizen’s rights and happiness.  In rising above practical Puritan politics into political philosophy, however, Wise leaves behind what is most creative in Puritan politics and falls into simply importing British political philosophy to the colony. 

Maybe Wise’s tract should not be considered Puritan at all since it was published in New York at one of the new presses in America outside Puritan control and its publication date crosses over into the period of the American Enlightenment.                    

Philosophy Practiced in the Enlightenment            

The American Enlightenment began in the 1690s and was fully alive by the 1730s when philosophy began to be practiced outside of the bounds of Puritan New England when Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and New York established communities of imported books, indigenous printing, and philosophical training.  Like the term Puritanism, the term Enlightenment does not signify a school of philosophy.  For the study of technical philosophy in colonial America the phrase “from Puritanism to the Enlightenment” must be understood as the cultural context that expanded from the Boston-area and Puritan-supported works of the seventeenth century to more economically and religiously diverse urban-oriented pockets throughout the colonies in the eighteenth century.  This transition is best seen in the wild expansion of what we would call small religious colleges in the eighteenth century.  Harvard was founded in 1636, but at the turn of the century two new colleges in Connecticut and Williamsburg were founded.  By the Revolution there were nine colonial colleges, one in the South, four in the middle colonies, and four in New England.  Philosophy, no longer only practiced by the Puritans, was being practiced widely in the colonies by diverse communities.

In general “The Enlightenment” is a dangerous term.  So many definitions and characteristics have been attached to the term that it has almost become meaningless.  Careful scholars usually speak of types and regions of enlightenments rather than “The Enlightenment.”  In American history, the term is useful as an umbrella over the general intellectual culture of British America from the 1690s through the Age of Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.  Optimism was a key feature of this enlightenment—optimism about the powers of the human mind and the place of modern thought in relation to that which had come before it.  “In the beginning,” John Locke wrote, “all the world was America.”  Colonial Americans during the enlightenment seem to have taken for granted Francis Bacon’s argument that ancient thinkers were the young while modern thinkers were the mature.

            Americans in every colony and eventually in the Revolution embraced the chance of creating innovative governments. Long before Thomas Paine declared that Americans have it in their power to create the world anew, cities on a hill were being created throughout America.  John Locke, himself, apparently played a major role in writing the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, and Anglican clergy such as Thomas Bray joined with soldier/politicians such as Francis Nicholson and James Oglethorpe to transform Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia into innovative, rationally constructed, colonies.

            Granting the increasing ethnic and social diversity of eighteenth-century America, it is amazing to find that the college curricula, philosophical activity, and the general intellectual life of those interested in an intellectual life in the North, South, and Middle colonies was amazingly unified.  The books read, the ideas most popular, and even terms and phrases seem to have been standardized throughout the colonies.  When the Second Continental Congress gathered to edit Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence there was no discussion of the preamble’s assumptions and language about natural law, nature’s God, and the unalienable rights of man.  Upon later reflection, John Adams noted that Thomas Jefferson was simply saying what everyone in the room already believed.  Such unanimity of thought is the result of an American enlightenment.  The fact that the Second Continental Congress cited no biblical authorities in support of their action is also a measure of the difference between seventeenth-century Puritanism and the eighteenth-century colonial enlightenment.   

            The American enlightenment expanded beyond seventeenth-century Puritanism the range of accepted authorities and the allowable boundaries of philosophical discussion.  The culture remained generally Christian, but Christianity no longer dominated the intellectual culture in the way it had for Puritans.  Divine revelation came to be treated in widely diverse ways and sometimes even denied.  The laws of Carolina made merely the cursory demand that every property owner must “acknowledge a God.”  The American Philosophical Society, following the lead of the Royal Society of London, had a rule disallowing religion as a topic of discussion.  Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin could both believe deeply in the sovereignty and goodness of God, one working within the constraints of orthodox Christianity and the other freely unconcerned with orthodoxy.          

            Logic, moral philosophy, and divinity remained at the core of every college curriculum, but it is characteristic of the American enlightenment that there was an increasing emphasis on natural philosophy.  John Locke and Isaac Newton were the names every student had to be able to discuss, but textbook reductions of major European systems of thought were still the dominant means of spreading the new learning. 

The most popular logic textbook of the age was the hymnwriter Isaac Watts’ Logic: or the Right Use of Reason (1724) which praised and simplified Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding  (1690).  Watts’s textbook emphasized the orthodoxy Christian aspects of Locke: it assumes the existence of God, clarifies the highest certainty of divine revelation in holy scripture, and advocates procedures of analysis and synthesis not much different than Brattle’s Compendium of Logick..  It is hard to judge, but the logic and other philosophical works of Isaac Watts may have been the most widely read philosophy books of the century. There was a popular story of the Revolution that when the British were attacking Princeton, an American commander declared that if the ammunition ran out, they would stuff the cannons with Watts’ books and continue firing.

Another source for much of the American philosophy taught in colonial colleges were the Scottish universities which were in the midst of a golden age that produced Francis Hutchinson, Thomas Reid, David Hume, and Adam Smith.  The term “common sense” that Thomas Paine used to spur the Revolution was the theme of the Scottish philosophers.  Scottish common sense philosophy decreed the ability of all people to immediately grasp important aspects of reality.  Politically, the philosophy tended to support democratic individualism.  Religiously, it focused on individual experience and intuition.  In logic and ethics it supported the ability of people to reason and live rightly if they followed their common sense.   Thomas Jefferson was greatly influenced philosophically at William and Mary by a Scot professor named William Small, and the Scot John Witherspoon, as president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), was a powerful philosophical influence in the middle colonies.  

            Witherspoon (1722/23-1794) came to America in 1768 and his posthumously published Lectures on Moral Philosophy and Eloquence (1800) were gathered from the course on moral philosophy taught every year to the seniors.  For Witherspoon ethics did not need to be derived from divine revelation and could instead be constructed out of simple observation with a bit of common sense.  In his classes sat many of the leaders of the American Revolution, especially James Madison, and his greatest influence may have been to shield his students from the deeply abstract and religious influence of his predecessor Jonathan Edwards, encouraging instead a simpler, more straight-forward pursuit of virtue. 

In general, the American enlightenment was led by conscientious teachers such as Witherspoon.  Teaching duties encouraged people to think systematically, integrating epistemology, logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, metaphysics, divinity, and ethics.  Genteel dilettantes might spend short spurts of time on particular topics, especially observational natural science, but systematic philosophic inquiry and publication was largely in the hands of teachers.

            Samuel Johnson (1696-1772) Puritan convert to Anglicanism, tutor at Yale, minister, and eventual president of King’s College in New York, exemplifies the connection between America’s most systematic philosophical work and its educational institutions.  As an eighteen year old grammar school tutor in Connecticut, he compiled a Ramist logic.  Diligent study out of a box of books that had been sent over for what would eventually become Yale College caused the young tutor to be repudiate Ramus for Locke and the “New Learning.”  In  1729 he was drawn to the immaterialism of George Berkeley who happened to settle in Rhode Island for two years.  Berkeley argued that, since the primary distinction of the cosmos was between the perceived and the perceiver, we should think of reality as mental rather than physical.  For Berkeley, this recognition allowed him to merge the essentials of Christianity, Locke, and Newton into a rational synthesis.

Johnson appreciated this synthesis and was in close contact with Berkeley for two years.  When Berkeley returned to Britain he left a legacy of nearly 900 books in the Yale library and a deep impression on Johnson.  In 1746 he published a textbook called Ethices Elementa, then in 1752 another large textbook system of epistemology, logic, and moral philosophy called  Elementa Philosophica.   The Elementa Philosophica was dedicated to Berkeley and designed to serve young students in colonial colleges.  Like the work of Charles Morton, Johnson’s Elementa Philosophica exemplifies the creative efforts of a diligent and open-minded provincial teacher.  As with Morton, and again with Edwards, the reward for a life of diligent philosophy was the offer of a college presidency.

            Although America’s colonial colleges were the focal points for integrated and serious thinking about philosophy during the American Enlightenment, colonial America’s two most significant philosophers, the only two to have transatlantic influence, were not teachers and would not call themselves philosophers.  Benjamin Franklin always referred to himself as a printer, and Jonathan Edwards was a minister.   

            Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), like most colonial Americans, was highly interested in natural philosophy and ethics—and the role of a sovereign God in each.  Not formally educated, Franklin liked to participate in self-help philosophic groups such as the Junto and the American Philosophical Society.  His brilliance on the subject of electricity and light-hearted writing often clouds recognition of his years of disciplined study and intimate correspondence and conversation with men more recognized for deeper thinking. 

B.    Franklin Box

  Jonathan Edwards Box

  Bibliography:  

Primary Sources: 

Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at Harvard: Charles Morton’s “A Logick System” and William Brattle’s “Compendium of Logick.  Edited by Rick Kennedy.  Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol 67 (1995). 

Edwards, Jonathan   The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 13 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press,  1957-1994.  

Franklin, Benjamin Writings. New York: Library of America, 1987.  

Johnson, Samuel The Philosopher, vol. 2.  Samuel Johnson: His Career and Writings. Edited by Herbert and Carol Schneider. New York: Columbia University Press, 1929.  

Kennedy, Rick and Thomas Knowles “Increase Mather’s ‘Catechismus Logicus’: A Translation and Analysis of the Role of a Ramist Catechism at Harvard.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society  ???? (1998).  

Mather, Cotton The Christian Philosopher. Edited by Winton U. Solberg.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.  

Secondary Sources:

Anderson, Douglas The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.  

Bridenbaugh, Carl and Jessica Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.  

Butterfield, L. H. John Witherspoon Comes to America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.  

Daniel, Stephen H. The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.  

Ellis, Joseph J. The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696-1772. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.  

Fiering, Norman Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought in its British Context.  Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, and Williamsburg: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1981.  

Fiering, Norman Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard.  Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, and Williamsburg: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1981.  

Fiering, Norman “The Transatlantic Republic of Letters: A Note on the Circulation of Learned Periodicals to Early Eighteenth-Century America.”  The William and Mary Quarterly 3^rd ser, 33, no. 4 (1976), 642-660.  

Flower, Elizabeth, and Murray G. Murphey A History of Philosophy in America 2 vols. New York: Capricorn Books, 1977.  

Gaustad, Edwin S. George Berkeley in America.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Howell, Wilbur S. Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

  Howell, Wilbur S. Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956.  

May, Henry The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

  Miller, Perry  The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939.  

Morison, Samuel Eliot Harvard in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936.  

Morris, William Sparkes. The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1991.

Sher, Richard and Jeffrey R. Smitten, eds.  Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1990.  

Shuffelton, Frank, ed. The American Enlightenment.  Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1993.