Our culture today is based on a bestial concept of human beings. The movies focus on plots of violent revenge against those who have wronged the putative heroes. The relations of nations are portrayed as an unending battle of allegedly superior societies warring against the alleged evil will of others, who, it is claimed, maniacally wish to dominate and rule the world.  Even music is used to glorify society’s “victims” and their claims to righteous rage against their oppressors.

This is the Thomas Hobbes view of society as a “dog-eat-dog” world. According to Hobbes, men and women are only capable of acting in their own self-interest. Therefore, authoritarian government is the only way to restore order, through a “social contract” to stop civilization from complete self-destruction. That was the justification for the newly forming British Empire in the 1680’s, and is the same justification used by the “One World Order” globalists today.

But the success of our own American Revolution was based on a completely contrary philosophical force.  A core of our Founding Fathers were steeped in the centuries-long Renaissance concept that scientifically and philosophically distinguished human beings from the animals. They were committed to the concept of Man as Imago Viva Dei; that every human being was made in the image of the Creator and possessed a unique creative mind capable of discovering new principles in the Universe, and transmitting them to future generations to secure the progress of humanity and the higher organization of the Universe itself.

The continual discovery of new principles allowed humans to develop whole new philosophical concepts of the unseen Laws of the Universe. These concepts translated into manufacturing and cultural transformations of society as a whole. Our founding documents were based on the higher Leibnizian philosophical concept of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, which superseded the Lockean notion of Life, Liberty, and Property.

These two irreconcilable concepts of mankind, the Hobbesian view of Man as an unreasoning Beast vs. the Leibnizian view of Man as Imago Viva Dei, have defined the fight for our Republic from its inception to the present. Although the British Empire apologists, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Isaac Newton were rejected by the intellectual giants who formed our nation, their imperial, bestial ideas have been infiltrated again into society and shape the thinking of a majority of society today.  Accordingly, Hobbes, Locke, and Newton are now held to be the philosophical founders of our nation, when, in fact, nothing is further from the truth.

The high-level philosophical, scientific, and cultural warfare between these two concepts of man, which ultimately brought into being the first successful Republic, has almost been obliterated from the common knowledge of our citizens today.

To defeat the current threat to our nation and humanity, represented by the heirs of that British Oligarchical/Globalist system today, we must restore the knowledge of the actual basis of our Republic to today’s patriots of our country.

James Logan

Pennsylvania-based leader James Logan is one of the most critical figures in American history. Between 1735 and 1737, he penned one of the most important philosophical documents in our pre-revolutionary history, entitled Of the Duties of Man as they may be Deduced from Nature. 

Thi book is a thorough, well-reasoned refutation of the oligarchical theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Isaac Newton.

It demonstrates, most emphatically, that an “intellectual independence” from the British Empire, flowing from the ideas of the Renaissance as cast by Gottfried Leibniz, existed in the developing American intelligentsia decades before the formal Declaration of Independence. That is not to say that the leading philosophers of the British Empire were not influential or even dominant in the world at large.  Indeed, Logan’s protégé Benjamin Franklin noted that his ideas were “heretical” and “dangerous” because of extant British philosophical hegemony.

Logan’s 400-page manuscript was considered lost for more than 200 years, until a copy was discovered in the early 1970’s under some cartons stored in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.  Even after its publication in book form in 2013 by Phil Valenti, then an associate of Lyndon LaRouche, it has been relegated to near oblivion once again. This travesty must be reversed now, if we are to save this country from the current threat to its existence.  In the discussion which follows, I have borrowed heavily from Valenti’s groundbreaking original discoveries concerning Logan and his philosophical progeny.  You can read more about this here and here. I urge you to do so.

Logan vs. Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes promoted the idea that Man is by nature evil. James Logan, on the other hand, in the second paragraph of his book, states the Renaissance principle that Man is ... “a mind endowed with the powers of reason”... which establishes …"his supremacy above all the irrational, and every other part of the known Creation.”  He goes on to assert the anti-Hobbesian viewpoint “...that Man was formed for Society and Benevolence,” pointing out that human beings were given language to communicate among themselves because they are social beings. He rejects the concept that humans act only in their self-interest by demonstrating that not only do people sacrifice themselves for their children and even for complete strangers, but that they will put their lives on the line for principles that they believe are necessary for the preservation of present society or future generations.

Logan takes on Locke

Logan immediately locates Locke’s philosophy as following in the footsteps of Aristotle, criticizing the view “that there is nothing in the understanding but what was first in the sense, or … we understand or know nothing but what is derived to us through our senses. And this seems to be taken for granted not only by John Locke, so far that his whole process appears to be built on it….”

While Logan acknowledges that Man’s initial introduction to the world is accomplished through sense-perception of the objects around us, he goes on to state:  . . . “the powers of the mind are plainly forced by experience to expand themselves afterwards to so vast an extant, in forming within itself such infinite numbers of ideas and so very different from those first sensations, that it has appeared to the writer as if it was furnished with a capacity in itself,…”

He continues: “Thus we have opened to us and are enabled to enter into, as it were, a new kind of world of ideas, as of virtues, vices, modes, habits, relations, obligations, duties, merit, with diverse others that cannot be directly produced by any species of simple idea of the senses.

This is a truly Platonic concept which rejects the theory promoted by John Locke in his 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that the mind is a blank slate or Tabula Rasa on which the senses solely dictate the realm of experience.

Logan, Leibniz and Newton 

In his library, which was the largest in the colonies, Logan possessed all but three years of the monthly scientific publication Acta Eruditorum, which had been founded in 1682 and published many of Gottfried Leibniz’s most important scientific works. In 1697, it was the forum for the dispute between Leibniz and Newton over who discovered the Differential Calculus. 

Logan firmly supported Leibniz’s claim to have discovered the calculus.  In a letter to New York Governor Burnett, he states:  “It is certain the world was obliged only to Leibniz for the publication of that method, who was so fair to communicate it in a great measure to Oldenburg in 1677.” Logan notes that Newton’s claim dates from 1687.

In 1684, Logan wrote a detailed analysis of “The first Account of fluxions [calculus] delivered by Leibniz in the Acta Eruditorum of Leipsic October 1684.”

Logan also went beyond that to systematically attack Newton’s fundamental theories of science.

To refute Newton’s assertion that the universe is composed of hard particles existing in a vacuum, Logan uses the example of a vacuum tube, an example that Franklin later uses in his own refutation of Newton. Logan says that although the air is emptied out, light obviously penetrates it. In the same vein, Logan asks, “Can  we be sure that there is no electric or elastic medium that instead of obstructing or retarding motion, may be the very means of conveying it,…” He goes on to argue that a universe based on reason and beauty, such as ours, is inconsistent with Newton’s idea of space: “…undoubtedly, to have a Universe possessed by some kind of matter is much more consistent with the dignity, beauty and order of the whole, than to imagine those vast voids which carry a kind of horror in the thought.”

He even recognized a decade before Franklin started his experiments, the revolutionary potential that an understanding of electricity could have in overturning Newton’s vacuous, static theories of the Universe.  Electricity, he said, was …“a field open for speculations that, if duly pursued, may probably lead us into more just and extensive notions of our bodies and the world we live in, than have hitherto been generally thought of.” 

The Impact of James Logan on the Creation of an American Intelligentsia

James Logan was involved in every aspect of the development of the colonies. He helped negotiate a treaty with the Indians of New York and Pennsylvania to secure their alliance against the French-deployed tribes which threatened the colonial frontiers. He was in communication with Carl Linnaeus and used his new system to catalogue plants. Both Logan and a future co-founder of the American Philosophical Society, John Bartram, had North American plants they discovered named after them.

But most important, Logan was the mentor to and inspiration for the developing young minds of the colonies.

For example, Thomas Godfrey, a glazier who worked for Logan, showed an aptitude for mathematics and science. Logan personally taught Godfrey Latin, and gave him access to all the mathematical and other books in his library. Godfrey then discovered a method to measure latitude, useful for seafarers, and built an octant capable of doing that. Logan submitted the original design to the British Royal Society, and when the British scientist Hadley claimed the discovery as his own, Logan fought for Godfrey’s just recognition as the original discoverer.

Logan’s Unique Role with Ben Franklin

Logan’s book was written explicitly to develop a truth-seeking independent American Intelligentsia, and particularly to inspire and educate the young genius Ben Franklin. Franklin was encouraged by Logan to review and critique the manuscript as it was being written, and Logan, in Chapter 6, even singles out and refutes the young, misdirected Franklin’s 1725 pamphlet defending Locke’s evil British doctrine that pleasure and pain were the sole motivations of humans.

Logan was crucial in developing Philadelphia into a city that valued cultural, scientific, and philosophical inquiry, and which fostered the development of genius. To aid that commitment, Logan willed his library of over three thousand volumes to the Philadelphia Company Library, the first lending library in America, established by Ben Franklin. While the works of John Locke were among the earliest books purchased, the library also contained the Leibniz/Clarke Correspondence where Leibniz thoroughly refuted Newton’s concept of the universe.

With the passing of James Logan on October 31, 1751, the mantle of the Leibniz/Logan influence in America was passed on to Ben Franklin.

Franklin’s Mission

After the death of Leibniz in 1716, Queen Anne, in collaboration with Franklin’s friend, the Halle-trained Baron von Munchausen, set up Göttingen University. One key figure at Göttingen was Professor Abraham Kästner, who coordinated a project to copy and print the then-banned works of Leibniz, the most important of which was his famous rebuttal of Locke,  Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding.

As early as the 1740’s, Franklin was in correspondence with Halle and Göttingen trained individuals on shaping a curriculum for his newly-founded Philadelphia Academy. Franklin had already been in written dialogue with Kästner since the mid 1740’s. In 1748, Kästner published a German edition of the scientific theories of Franklin’s scientific collaborator, Cadwallader Colden. He praised Colder’s theories as very similar to the anti-Newtonian theories of Leibniz. In 1752, Kästner made a failed attempt to send a personal emissary to America to meet with Franklin and present him with a copy of Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi.

In 1765, Kästner’s  collaborator Rudolph Raspe published Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding. One year after that, Franklin spent two weeks in  Göttingen meeting with Kästner, Raspe, and others.  A copy of the 1765 edition is listed in the catalog of the Library Company of Philadelphia with a preface by Kästner.  Ben Franklin also purchased six scientific treatises by Kästner for his own library.

Logan, Franklin, and the Emergence of Intellectual Independence

Logan and Franklin were very aware of the “heretical” character of their ideas. In directly challenging Newton’s assertion of a vacuum, Logan stated- “If there be no heresy mentioning it in the present age, why may we not venture to question the reasonableness of asserting a vacuum as indispensably necessary to the continuance of motion.” Franklin was even more direct, stating in a 1752 letter to Cadwallader Colden- “Tis well we are not, as poor Galileo was, subject to the Inquisition for Philosophical Heresy. My Whispers against the orthodox Doctrine in private letters, would be dangerous; your Writing and Printing would be highly criminal. As it is, you must expect some Censure, but one Heretic will surely excuse another.”

Leibniz recognized that humans had the unique ability to make creative insights into the principles acting within the universe, and thus to develop new technologies which increased human mastery over that universe. Through this recognition, he redefined the concept of economics.  Only a society that recognized and fostered creativity within its citizenry, and actively promoted the sciences, manufacturing, and infrastructure, could assure human existence in both the present and the future. This was the philosophical and cultural environment that nurtured the minds of the American geniuses like Logan, Franklin, Colden, and Hamilton, and inspired them to create a unique American System of Economics to secure and establish the only successful Republic in history.

Lyndon LaRouche, by the age of 13, had fully immersed himself in the works of Leibniz, declaring himself a Leibnizian.

In his book, The Power of Reason, written in 1987, LaRouche states:

“…economic science was founded by Gottfried Leibniz during the period 1672-1716. Leibniz designed the principles of what was later called the ‘industrial revolution,’ known then as the principles of heat powered machinery, and more broadly as the ‘physical economy’ curriculum which Leibniz introduced to the branch of university instruction in statecraft known as cameralism. In this connection, Leibniz discovered the conception of ‘technology,’ and was the first to supply a rigorous mathematical-physics definition for technology.

Leibniz’s economic science was adopted by the founders of the United States and incorporated in what Alexander Hamilton was first to name ‘the American System of political-economy.’ This economic science was adopted in explicit opposition to the doctrine of the British East India Company’s Adam Smith, and was the economic policy on which our constitutional republic was founded.”

As stated at the outset, the greatest crime committed by the Globalists today has been the almost total obliteration of our true history and philosophical foundations.

When American’s realize that they are tasked with the joyful responsibility of restoring, protecting, and advancing that Renaissance foundation that made our nation unique in world history, the true American spirit will be rekindled on a scale that will finally and completely defeat the British/Wall Street Globalists of today. Our founders bequeathed us this as our Mission--let us not fail them and future generations!