Benjamin Franklin: One Of The Greatest Thinkers, Inventors And Leaders In American History

Benjamin Franklin is considered one of the greatest thinkers, inventors and leaders throughout American history. This Founding Father of the United States was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 17, 1706 and spent his childhood there until finally moving to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as a teenager. Franklin was a leader in politics and science. Franklin lived for 84 years and passed away in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1790. Although conspiracy theorists may disagree, Franklin was not clearly for or against organized religion during his lifetime. We see this in his autobiography that he wrote at the age of 79. The autobiography starts out by saying that Franklin was educated as a Presbyterian. This was not uncommon during this time

He recognized that he had faults just like every other human-being. He started to keep track of certain virtues in order to attain moral perfection. Some of the virtues he paid attention to were temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Franklin found that it would be more efficient to focus on one virtue at a time rather than all of them at once. Therefore, Franklin made a book to keep track of the virtues. After each day he would mark down the faults he committed in respect to that virtue. Franklin decided to go through each virtue and dedicate a week to each one with strict obedience. Franklin saw this moral perfection progress as satisfying and knew that it would take a while. He was patient and knew that looking back he could see within the books how he improved each week. After a while a book may be clean of any faults. On the other hand, Franklin was surprised by how easily he violated some of the virtues. He claimed that order, which meant “let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time,” gave him the most trouble of all of the virtues. Franklin said that because order caused him so many problems, he started to pay very close attention to it. He relapsed many times and just could not seem to get rid of that fault. He explains that although he

There was some religion involved, but it had no particular sect. Franklin said that as he marked his books, he would also write notes. The notes he wrote were still used by him years and years later. The list of the thirteen virtues was originally only twelve, but a friend of his told him to add humility to the chart. Franklin was a very intelligent and established young man. He was very successful in many different areas. It was not easy for him to stay humble when he had done so many amazing things, but Franklin started to pay attention to his ego. He said that instead of saying “certainly” and “undoubtedly” he would say “conceive” and “apprehend.” He swallowed his pride when someone would say something that he did not agree with and would just listen instead of answering and contradicting the person abruptly. Franklin says that by following the virtue of humility it instantly made conversation better among his