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Subject Area: Political Theory
Topic: The American Revolution and Constitution

3 Mar. 1804: TO F. A. VANDERKEMP. - John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 9 (Letters and State Papers 1799-1811) [1854]

Edition used:

The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes. Vol. 9.

Part of: The Works of John Adams, 10 vols.

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TO F. A. VANDERKEMP.

Quincy, 3 March, 1804.

Last night I received your favor of the 15th of February. At the two last meetings of our academy I made inquiry concerning your manuscript, and found that the committee had referred it to a sub-committee, who were not then present, and had not reported. I will endeavor to get this matter settled at the next meeting in May. Buffon, I presume, from all I have heard or read of him, believed in nothing but matter, which he thought was eternal and self-existent. The universe had been from eternity as it is now, with all its good and evil, intelligence and accident, beauty and deformity, harmony and dissonance, order and confusion, virtue and vice, wisdom and folly, equity and inequity, truth and lies; that planets and suns, systems and systems of systems, are born and die, like animals and vegetables, and that this process will go on to all eternity. Something like this was the creed of the King of Prussia and D’Alembert, Diderot, and De la Lande. All this, I think, is neither more nor less than the creed of Epicurus set to music by Lucretius.

“The movements of nature” mean the movements of matter; but can matter move itself? “The renovating power of matter,”—what does this mean? Can matter, if annihilated, recreate itself? Matter, if at rest, can it set itself in motion?

A German ambassador once told me, “he could not bear St. Paul, he was so severe against fornication.” On the same principle these philosophers cannot bear a God, because he is just.

You could not apply more unfortunately than to me for any knowledge of natural history. A little law, a little ethics, and a little history constitute all the circle of my knowledge, and I am too old to acquire any thing new.

Sensible as I am of the honor, and grateful to you as I am for the offer, I beg leave to decline the dedication. I wish to pass off as little talked of and thought of as possible.

I can hear nothing of Ingraham’s journal. It might, for what I know, have gone to the bottom of the sea with him in the Insurgente.

In the wisdom, power, and goodness of our maker is all the security we have against roasting in volcanoes and writhing with the tortures of gout, stone, cholic, and cancers; sinking under the burdens of dray-horses and hackney coach-horses to all eternity. Nature produces all these evils, and if she does it by chance, she may assign them all to us, whether we behave well or ill, and the poor hag will not know what she does.

Almost forty years ago, that is in 1765, I wrote a few thoughts in Edes and Gill’s Gazette. Mr. Hollis of London printed them in a pamphlet, and imputed them to Mr. Gridley. He gave them the title of a Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law. A lamentable bagatelle it is. I have no copy of it, and know not where to get one.

I know nothing of Stuart’s success. I sat to him at the request of the Massachusetts legislature, but have never seen any thing of the picture but the first sketch.

There are no more than two volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy. Count Sarsfield solicited me very earnestly in London to let him import some French mirrors under my privilege. I told him I considered my privilege as sacred. He then answered: “Il ne vaut pas un sou d’être votre ami.” Do not let Hamilton know this. If you do, he will record it in his next pamphlet as an instance of my vanity. Your letters always give pleasure to your old friend.