Did Jefferson ever say this... (help identifying a quote about science and reason)

[Reply]

“If anyone can discover the truth by using reason and science, Jefferson reasoned, then no one is naturally closer to the truth than anyone else.” - from an article I’m reading.

I can’t locate a specific quote or passage from him that says this. Does anyone know what this is referencing?

[Thudlow_Boink]

Good question.

From your linked article:

Thomas Jefferson, a lawyer and scientist, built the primary justification for the nation’s independence on the thinking of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and John Locke—the creators of physics, inductive reasoning and empiricism. He called them his “trinity of three greatest men.” If anyone can discover the truth by using reason and science, Jefferson reasoned, then no one is naturally closer to the truth than anyone else. Consequently, those in positions of authority do not have the right to impose their beliefs on other people. The people themselves retain this inalienable right. Based on this foundation of science—of knowledge gained by systematic study and testing instead of by the assertions of ideology—the argument for a new, democratic form of government was self-evident.

The article may be putting words in Jefferson’s mouth, but it seems to be claiming that he actually used the phrase “trinity of three greatest men,” so I tried Googling that phrase. I got quite a few hits, but most or all of them are references to this particular article. Google Books turned up one hit: the book Thomas Jefferson & the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello by Donald Dean Jackson, which also includes this phrase in quotes as though it’s Jefferson’s own words, though there isn’t anything of the sort your OP mentions on that page of the book. (There is, though, the sentence “There was less of the pure scientist in him, now and for a lifetime, than of the mechanic, the tinkerer, the gadgeteer, the amateur engineer,” which confirms my skepticism about the appropriateness of calling Jefferson a scientist, as your linked article does.)

[Reply]

Great idea, thanks! I searched the same thing and managed to find the original letter to a Dr. Benjamin Rush Monticello:

The room being hung around with a collection of the portraits of remarkable men, among them were those of Bacon, Newton and Locke, Hamilton asked me who they were. I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them. He paused for some time: “the greatest man,” said he, “that ever lived, was Julius Caesar.” Mr. Adams was honest as a politician, as well as a man; Hamilton honest as a man, but, as a politician, believing in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men.

Still didn’t find the OP quote, but maybe it’s closer… only skimmed it for now and will read more later.