The Declaration of Independence Gave us the Age of Science

We live an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create the Declaration. Our Declaration created them. … If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it.

 Lavoisier's Scientific Method

Lavoisier had written an influential seven-page Preface to his Traité Élémentaire, defining his scientific method. This declaration seized young Davy’s imagination. Writing with great simplicity and clarity, Lavoisier championed the idea of precise experiment, close observation and accurate measurement. Above all, the man of science was humble and observant before nature. ‘When we begin the study of any science, we are in the situation, respecting that science, similar to that of child...

 Opening Text from the Declaration of Independence

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands 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 endo...

 The Founding Fathers were Scientists

Declaration of Independence puts it - 'the laws of nature and of nature's GOD'. Dr Benjamin Franklin was revered in Europe and America as the founder of the new field of electrical physics. At the Constitutional Convention of 1789 John Adams repeatedly appealed to the analogy of mechanical balance in machines; others to William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. Late in life Adams wrote, 'All mankind are chemists from their cradles to their graves . . . The Material Universe ...

 The Train of Thought to Equality

Since then society has evolved a sequence of ci central con¬ cepts each of which was at one time thought to make it work of itself, and each of which has had to be corrected to the next. There was the early eighteenth-century concept of selfinterest, in Mandeville and others; then came enlightened self-interest; then the greatest happiness of the greatest num¬ bet; utility; the labor theory of valueie; and thence its expression either in the welfare state or in the clasassless society. Men ...