In the Declaration of Independence, the 250th anniversary of which we are celebrating this year, the Founders put down five significant words that came to define America’s culture — “all men are created equal.” No phrase could have been more radical, more momentous. Even the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, with its statement that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” does not have the same power and significance.
Equality was based on a new understanding of people’s capacity to transform themselves. Educated people in the late 18th century came to believe — it was the basic premise of all enlightened thinking — that people were not born to be what they might become. As John Locke had written in his great epistemological work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the mind originally was “a white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas,” and it was filled up through time by “Experience.” Lockean sensationalism declared that human personalities at birth were unformed, impressionable things that could be molded and manipulated by controlling the sensations people experienced. Experience gained through the senses inscribed itself on the blank slate, the tabula rasa, of people’s minds, thereby transforming their character. Not everyone had the same capacity to reason, but since everyone had senses, this Lockean sensationalism was inherently egalitarian.
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