Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin differs in two very important ways from the Puritan authors, such as Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather, we have read before: his faith in his own potential as a man, and his affirmation of the perfectability of man. His autobiography reflects a self-reliance and sort of "master of my own destiny" attitude of which the Puritans would never have conceived. According to Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," the whole of a human beings existence is as precarious and fragile as a spider's web, and completely contingent on the will of God. Franklin mentions the providence of the Lord in a sort of offhand, purely rhetorical way, but his account of his life clearly points to his own hard work and capabilities as the means of his existence. He recounts numerous times how his own sense of responsibility and virtue saved him from danger or rewarded him with particular good fortune.

Unlike the Puritans, Franklin had no belief in the "complete depravity" of man. In fact, he saw perfectability as a very concrete goal of human life. Furthermore, his thirteen virtues, the means by which he sought to attain that perfect life, are entirely socially derived. For example, he counts temperance as a virtue not because gluttony is a sin, but rather because too much of anything hinders productivity and muddles one's thinking. In many ways, his autobiography reads as an eighteenth-century version of the sort of Success for Dummies found in self-help shelves of modern-day bookstores.

Here's an interesting article about Benjamin Franklin's poor math skills. I think it demonstrates how much faith he had in himself, to experiment with scientific matters like electricity without any mathematical proficiency.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18045610