Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/170

 FKANKLIN

FEEDEEICK II

personal immortality (Sketches from the Life of E. Frankland, 1902, pp. 47-8, an autobiography). D. Aug. 9, 1899.

FRANKLIN, Benjamin, LL.D., F.E.S., American statesman. B. (Boston) 17 Jan., 1706. He was intended for the Church, but was apprenticed to printing, and, educating himself, read Shaftesbury and Collins, and became a Deist. During a stay in England (1725-26) he published a Deistic pamphlet. In 1726 he set up as a printer at Philadelphia, and in 1729 bought the Pennsylvania Gazette. He founded the Philadelphia Library in 1731, and was clerk of the General Assembly in 1736, and Postmaster- General in 1737. In 1744 he established the American Philosophical Society, and during the next twenty years he devoted himself to science and invention. He got the Copley Medal in 1753, degrees from Oxford and Edin burgh in 1762, and membership of the Eoyal Society. In 1753 he became Post master-General for the Colonies, and he represented them in London from 1764 to 1775. He signed the Declaration of Inde pendence, and in 1785 he was President of Pennsylvania. Fiske regards him as &quot;in many respects the greatest of Americans &quot; (Appleton s Cyclopaedia of American Biog.). In his Autobiography he records that he quitted the Presbyterian Church in 1734, retaining only a belief in God and a future life (1909 ed., pp. 185-88). D. Apr. 17, 1790.

FRANSHAM, John, writer. B. 1730. He began to study for the Church, but was compelled to seek work as apprentice to a cooper at the age of fifteen. From strolling player, then weaver, he became a teacher (1750), and won considerable repute as a coach. He published a few tracts, but at his death he left six volumes of manuscript and a work of Chubb s with Deistic annotations. From these MSS. the Diet. Nat. Biog. shows that he was a drastic Eationalist. D. Feb. 1, 1810.

267

FRAUENSTADT, Christian Martin Julius, German philosophical writer. B, Apr. 17, 1813. Ed. Berlin University. At first an Hegelian, he in 1847 became a close friend and one of the chief cham pions of Schopenhauer, whose literary executor he was. He wrote a number of works (especially a Schopenhauer Lexi con, 2 vols., 1871) in defence of his master (whose pessimism he modified) and on the relations of science and philosophy to religion. D. Jan. 13, 1879.

FRAZER, Sir James George, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D., anthropologist. B. 3854. His first work, Totemism, appeared in 1887, and in 1890 he issued the first volume of his monumental Golden Bough, of which the twelfth volume appeared in 1915. He had written other works of history and anthropology, and he has been professor of social anthropology at Liverpool since 1907. He was knighted in 1914, and is a Fellow of the British Academy, Honorary Fellow of the Eoyal Society of Edinburgh, and Corresponding Member of the Eoyal Prussian Academy of Science. His Eation- alism is generally implicit, but in the Preface to the second edition of The Golden Bough (1900, p. xxii) he acknowledges that his work &quot; strikes at the foundations of beliefs in which the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long ages have sought a refuge.&quot; His last volume, Folklore in the Old Testament (1918), dissipates many popular Biblical myths.

FREDERICK II, King of Prussia. B. Jan. 24, 1712. The severe education which his father imposed on him restrained his artistic impulses and led to unpleasant relations between them until he acceded to the throne in 1740. Apart from his wars and the Machiavellian features of his diplomacy, Frederick s long reign was beneficent to his country. He abolished serfdom on the royal domains, founded new industries, granted freedom of speech and religion, codified the laws, improved the finance, and greatly promoted art, 268