Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson were two of many early Americans who believed that a new philosophy was needed to provide a strong foundation for the generations of people who were to come after them. These men worked their entire lives striving to reach their idea of perfection. Franklin was a self made man who worked throughout his life on a philosophy by which any person could follow in order to better themselves economically as well as morally. He used a process of trial and error in his daily life in order to test these ideas and theories on human morality and perfection. Emerson was a man who believed strongly that the life long duty of a “Man Thinking” was to search within oneself for the truth of the universe. Emerson rejected knowledge that was not obtained through this process unless it was required to better understand. Through analysis of the work of these two men we can come to the conclusion that they believed that in order to understand virtue, vise, oneself, or the universe, one must dedicate their minds to study, application of theories, as well as dedication.
Franklin came from a relatively poor family and was the youngest son, putting him at a disadvantage from a young age, however as we got older he committed himself to his work and his practice of bettering
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Throughout his life he adopts different principles in order to test his personal theories of the virtue of man, in an attempt to overcome his faults and flaws and achieve perfection. The process by which he finds he leads the most virtuous life is by living to a very strict schedule of study and work, combined with a system by which he is criticizing his actions and marking all unseemly behavior in his notebook. For one week he would try to reduce the number of times he performed one of these invirtueous activities before moving onto the next one with the largest number of