This is quite a lengthy book (approximately 500 pages) and a detailed review will take much too long for anyone to read all at once. Instead, I’ll be breaking my comments up into several postings. I’m not yet sure how many postings there will be.
Franklin was a true lover of wisdom and studied many topics over his life, including history, philosophy, science and writing. As far as I can tell from the book, most of his studies were self directed, instead of in a formal academic setting.
The Moral Perfection Project was begun during his stint in Philadelphia from 1726-1732, when he was in his 20’s.
His starting point was a list of 12 virtues that he thought were desirable. Quoting from the book
- Temperance: Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation
- Silence: Speak not what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation
- Order: Let all things have their places; let each part of your business have its time
- Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve
- Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; (i.e. waste nothing)
- Industry: Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions
- Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly
- Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty
- Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve
- Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation
- Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable
- Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation
He later added a 13th
- Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates
“Mastering all of these thirteen virtues at once was “a task of more difficulty than I had imagined,”, Franklin recalled. So he decided to work on one of them at a time.
His approach was to track in his notebook each of the virtues, with a column for each of the 7 days of the week. On a day that he failed at a virtue, he marked the notebook with a black dot. His plan was to focus on Temperance for the first week, and then move to Silence, then to Order, and so on. He found that he was “much fuller of faults” than he had imagined. He wanted to reuse the pages, and he wore holes in his notebook from the many erasures that he made. He eventually moved his tracking charts to an ivory slate that he could easily wipe clean.
I suspect that this project was a lifelong activity of self monitoring, but it’s interesting that he used the tools he had at the time to monitor his progress towards his challenging goal of being a virtuous person.