Our founding fathers wrote countless letters, essays, and diary entries, so we have a pretty good idea what they were thinking 250 years ago. And it was the work of Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke which, step by step, led to the self-evident truths articulated in our Declaration of Independence. With acknowledgment to Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind. A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It, some necessary background.

To begin with, it was Hobbes who was among the first to contemplate how and why governments originated. In doing so he postulated that, in the beginning, humans were born into a primordial wilderness which he referred to as a “state of nature.” As the population increased, the people had to form some kind of social compact in order to prevent the bad from harming the good. Otherwise, as Hobbes famously explained, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But what kind of compact, I.e., government, should be formed, and by what means could such a government be devised?

The answer to the latter question came from a parliamentarian by the name of Francis Bacon. Bacon believed, as did most, that God had created an orderly world. As such, the world could be best understood by using human reason to study nature, and thereby uncover, through the process of induction, the laws that governed it. In short, Bacon formulated the scientific method that........

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