intermediate steps in reasoning are called “proofs.” Each conclusion is reliable because it is ultimately traceable, step by demonstrable step, back to a self-evident foundation in the natural world. It is this mathematical reasoning that would distinguish knowledge as reliable and separate from opinion.
Locke called the third kind of knowledge “sensitive knowledge,” meaning that we get it directly from our senses. For example, we may become aware of a rose by its scent, then look for its presence.
But, in a nod to Descartes, he acknowledged that our senses are often wrong. Sometimes it’s not a rose we smell, but perfume; sometimes we see not a pond, but a mirage. Locke argued that sensitive knowledge is thus much less certain than intuitive or demonstrative knowledge.
Finally, he said,
Whatever comes short of one of these, with what assurance soever embraced, is but faith, or opinion, but not knowledge, at least in all general truths.
Seventeen Days in June
This approach was critical to Jefferson because it laid the foundational argument for democracy, which was implicit in a different form in Coke’s argument for the primacy of English common law: If we can discover the truth by using reason and observation—i.e. by using science—then anyone can discover the truth, and therefore no one is naturally better able or more entitled to discover the truth than anyone else. Because of this, political leaders and others in positions of authority do not have the right to impose their beliefs on other people. By natural law, the people themselves retain this inalienable right. Based on Locke’s ideas of knowledge, and Coke’s ideas of law, the antiauthoritarian equality of all men in their ability to use reason to discern the truth for themselves is logically self-evident. It is intuitive knowledge. And that’s the heart of—and the most powerful argument for—democracy.
Jefferson worked for seventeen days to craft a document that was grand and yet achieved the unassailable quality of a logical proof. The axiomatic beauty of the argument he was reaching for would indelibly tie science, knowledge, law, freedom, and democracy together in a single common cause of human advancement, and it would proclaim the inalienable right of the people to reject authoritarian tyranny as illegitimate.
But despite his best intentions, in his rough draft, Jefferson foundered on the shoals of authoritarian religious assumptions left over from Hobbes’s bleak and brutal era—a fact that illustrates how deeply rooted these assumptions are, even for a scientist like Jefferson, and how slow and careful a process is required to tease out what is knowledge from what, to quote Locke, is “but faith, or opinion.” The misstep occurred in the opening of the second paragraph, when Jefferson wrote:
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal.
The Edit That Changed the World
When Jefferson showed his draft to Franklin, Franklin made several firm, bold deletions, striking the words “sacred and undeniable.” Drawing on Locke, whom he too admired, he replaced Jefferson’s reference to divine authority with the antiauthoritarian words “self-evident,” which Locke had used in his Essay:
The idea of a supreme being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are, and on whom we depend; and the idea of ourselves, as understanding rational beings, being such as are clear in us, would, I suppose, if duly considered and pursued, afford such foundations of our duty and rules of action, as might place morality amongst the sciences capable of demonstration: wherein I doubt not but from self-evident propositions, by necessary consequences, as incontestable as those in mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out to any one that will apply himself with the same indifferency [sic] and attention to the one, as he does to the other of these sciences.
Franklin’s edit, it may be argued, helped to make the United States into the scientific and technological powerhouse it became, and helped to define democracy as a secular form of government instead of a theocratic one. At the time America’s most renowned scientist, Franklin was also an admirer of Newton’s Principia and a friend of the Scottish economist David Hume. Hume had written extensively on natural law and liberty, which Jefferson had drawn on in the sentence, and he defined liberty as freedom of choice:
By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; this is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may.
And even though Newton did not see a conflict between science and religion, neither did he insist upon applying religious thinking to the realm of science, which is the realm of “understanding,” as he put it. “A man may imagine things that are false,” Newton said, “but he can only understand things that are true.”
Newton and Hume both instead rested their arguments on empiricism, “bottoming them out” in the natural world with evidence, and so it had to be with Jefferson’s argument for liberty. Hume argued,
Whatever definition we may give of liberty, we should be careful to observe two requisite circumstances; first, that it be consistent with plain matter of fact; secondly, that it be consistent with itself. If we observe these circumstances, and render our definition intelligible, I am persuaded that all mankind will be found of one opinion with regard to it.
This is the persuasive power that Jefferson was reaching for by tying his arguments back to the plain matter of fact laid bare by his venerated “trinity” of three great men, together with the aggregated authority of grave and learned men in English common law as established by Coke, so that “all mankind [would] be found of one opinion with regard to” the right of the United States to declare its independence.
Franklin understood that Jefferson’s words had inadvertently confused the realms of knowledge and faith, resting the principle being argued—that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights—on an authoritarian, religious assertion, which, as Locke himself had shown, could be argued indefinitely. It was therefore weak as a political argument, a matter of mere belief, and anyone with a slightly different interpretation of faith could simply disregard it.
Franklin knew Jefferson was reaching for something more powerful, and he knew how to take it there. He instead rested the principle on reason and Locke’s intuitive knowledge, moving the founding argument for the United States firmly out of the realm of religious authority (as in “sacred and undeniable,” i.e., “God is on our side,” or “God save the monarchy,” always arguable assertions) and into the realm of man, reason, and the laws of nature that flowed from empiricism, antiauthoritarianism, and nature itself.
It was self-evident.
In the process they created something entirely new: a nation that respected and tolerated religion in every sense, but did not base its authority on religion. A nation whose authority was instead based on the underlying principles of liberty, reason, and science.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
—US Declaration of Independence
The Biology of Democracy
The implications of empiricism for government were profound. Suddenly, kings and popes logically—empirically—had no greater claim to authority than anyone else. This was a self-evident truth that proceeded from careful observation