Reflection- Franklin and tuckerman

Ben Franklin had many virtues that he wrote in his life. Ben Franklin wrote a list of virtues that he thought people could use in their everyday life to help them get things done in a rational way. the first thing Ben Franklin did when he wrote or made the list of virtues was to incorporate them into his everyday life and make sure that they were virtues that were correct and practical. He wanted to make sure they worked for himself before he shared them with other people and they were not good. I think ben Franklin was a very intelligent man and the virtues he came up with were smart and people could really use them. Franklin made a good observation and a ratinal one at that by realizing that you could not change your whole life all at once. You needed to master the virtues one at a time. He knew it would take time to get them all mastered. H started to conform his virtues to a new list he had came up with. By reading the literary criticism by Tuckerman I felt that Tuckerman liked Ben Franklin. In his criticism he was pretty nice to Franklin. I noticed that Tuckerman said that Ben Franklin was both "practical and he has prominent characteristics" (Tuckerman). That sounds like a pretty good compliment to me. Tuckerman's criticism is a good one because ther was support from Franklin's autobiography that supports the opinions that Tuckerman stated and I agree with most of those opinions. In Franklin's autobiography he seemed to never be hypocritical. I think that Ben Franklin was both very smart like I said before, and I also think that he was a good guy. He did not just preach his virtues out at everyone because he felt like it and felt like telling people what to do. He followed those virtues himself and i think really wanted to change people for the better so that they could be successfull too. He would incorporate these virtues into his life at the rate of one virtue per week (Franklin 150). I think that is pretty cool that Franklin organized his virtues and kept track of them. That showed that he cared about following his virtues in order to be able to rationalize to people and have data and proof that they worked. That shows that he is a rationalist. It showed that he had thought about how he should approach this and he had a method to all of these virtues that could be seen as random to somebody else. Franklin said, "And, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate thea cquisition of certain others, I arranged them with that view, as they stand above."(Franklin 150). This was him showing that he had some order to all of his ideas and being able to rationalize it to the others. I do not know how he organized his virtues but I think that he organized them in a way of difficulty and importrance. If you had trouble with the prior virtues you would probably really struggle with newer ones.

Franklin, Benjamin, and Leonard Woods Labaree. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964. Print.

Tuckerman, Henry T. "The Character of Franklin." Facts on File. Web. 30 Oct. 2011.