"we hold these truths to be self-evident..." is the ringing phrase that opens the most famous sentence in the American Declaration of Independence. I have long loved the story behind it; it's the supreme example of good editing, and just a lesson in good writing. This is from Walter Isaacson's biography of Franklin:
on June 21, after he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson had a copy delivered to Franklin...
Franklin made only a few small changes, but one of them was resounding. Using heavy backslashes, he crossed out the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" and changed it to read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
genius. By sweeping away those big, windy adjectives ('sacred and undeniable') and replacing them with the unadorned simplicity of 'self-evident', Franklin makes the phrase, and the sentence, a hundred times more powerful. But there's a deeper point, too, that I hadn't heard before. Isaacson tells us about the philosophical outlook underlying Franklin's modification:
the concept of "self-evident" truths came...from the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. Hume had distinguished between "synthetic" truths that describe matters of fact (such as "London is bigger than Philadelphia" ) and "analytic" truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. ("The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees" or "All bachelors are unmarried." ) When he chose the word "sacred," Jefferson had suggested intentionally or unintentionally that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. By changing it to "self-evident," Franklin made it an assertion of rationality.
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