Samuel Johnson (October 14, 1696 – January 6, 1772) was a clergyman, educator, linguist, encyclopedist, historian, and philosopher in colonial America. He was a major proponent of both Anglicanism and the philosophies of William Wollaston and George Berkeley in the colonies, founded and served as the first president of the Anglican King's College (renamed Columbia University following the American Revolutionary War), and was a key figure of the American Enlightenment.
Early life and education
Johnson was born in Guilford, Connecticut, the son of a fulling miller, Samuel Johnson Sr., and great-grandson of Robert Johnson, a founder of New Haven Colony, Connecticut. But it was his grandfather William Johnson, a state assemblyman, village clerk, grammar school teacher, mapmaker, militia leader, judge, and church deacon who most influenced him. His grandfather taught him English at age four, and Hebrew at five; he would take young Samuel Johnson around the town on visits to his friends, and proudly have the young boy recite great passages of memorized scripture.
After studying Latin with local ministers and schoolmasters in Guilford, Clinton and Middleton, including Jared Eliot, Johnson left Guilford at age 13 to attend the Collegiate School at Saybrook (now Yale University) in 1710. There he studied the Reformation logic of Petrus Ramus and the orthodox Puritan theology of Johannes Wolleb (Wollebius) and William Ames. He graduated in 1714 as class Valedictorian with a bachelor's degree, and in 1717 was awarded a master's degree.
Career
Johnson began teaching grammar school in Guilford in 1713, even while a student a Yale. He would continue to teach children and adults all this life, spending nearly 60 years as a teacher.
Discovery of the Enlightenment
In 1714, he began to write a short work titled Synopsis Philosophiae Naturalis summing up what the Puritan Mind knew of natural philosophy. Leaving this attempt incomplete, he began working instead for his master's thesis by writing in Latin a more ambitious "encyclopedia of all knowledge", titled Technologia Sive Technometria or Ars Encyclopaidia, Manualis Ceu Philosophia; Systema Liber Artis. It was a systematic exploration of all knowledge available to Johnson based on the methods of the Reformation logician Petrus Ramus. His work on this logical exploration of the Puritan New England Mind would eventually result in 1271 hierarchically arranged theses. It has been called by Norman Fiering “the best surviving American example of student application of Ramist method to the whole body of human knowledge”.
His work on the Encyclopaidia was interrupted when a donation of 800 books collected by Colonial Agent Jeremiah Dummer was sent to Yale late in 1714. He discovered Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning, the works of John Locke and Isaac Newton and other Enlightenment era authors not known to the tutors and graduates of Puritan Yale and Harvard. Johnson wrote in his Autobiography, “All this was like a flood of day to his low state of mind”, and that “he found himself like one at once emerging out of the glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open day". Though he finished his Latin Ramist thesis, he now considered what he had learned at Yale “nothing but the scholastic cobwebs of a few little English and Dutch systems that would hardly now be taken up in the street.”
He used what he learned in the next two years to write in English a Revised Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1716). It was prefixed by a hierarchical Table or map of the intellectual world outlining the sum of all knowledge. It would be the first of a series of tables categorizing "the sum of knowledge" into ever more complex tables used for both categorizing knowledge for libraries and to define curriculum in schools. If he had published the work, it would have predated the first comprehensive English-language encyclopedia, Ephraim Chambers's 1728 Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, by twelve years.
The Yale Schism and the Great Apostasy
In 1716, Johnson was appointed the senior tutor at Yale. Founded in 1701, Yale was located on a small neck of land in Saybrook, Connecticut. By 1716, Saybrook Point was considered too small to handle the needs of the growing school. Connecticut Governor Gurdon Saltonstall and seven Yale trustees proposed moving the college to New Haven, Connecticut. They were opposed by three trustees, two of whom split the college, and opened a schismatic branch in Wethersfield, Connecticut, taking half the students and the junior Yale tutor with them.