The Education of Henry Adams

[combinator]

  Adams, too, was Bostonian, and the Bostonian's uncertainty of
attitude was as natural to him as to Lodge. Only Bostonians can
understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the
inconsequences of the Boston mind. His theory and practice were
also at variance. He professed in theory equal distrust of
English thought, and called it a huge rag-bag of bric-a-brac,
sometimes precious but never sure. For him, only the Greek, the
Italian or the French standards had claims to respect, and the
barbarism of Shakespeare was as flagrant as to Voltaire; but his
theory never affected his practice. He knew that his artistic
standard was the illusion of his own mind; that English disorder
approached nearer to truth, if truth existed, than French measure
or Italian line, or German logic; he read his Shakespeare as the
Evangel of conservative Christian anarchy, neither very
conservative nor very Christian, but stupendously anarchistic. He
loved the atrocities of English art and society, as he loved
Charles Dickens and Miss Austen, not because of their example,
but because of their humor. He made no scruple of defying
sequence and denying consistency -- but he was not a Senator.

  Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they
are apt to be fatal to politicians. Adams had no reason to care
whether his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared
more than he; but Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in
which they were always liable to find the shifty sands of
American opinion yield suddenly under their feet. With this game
an elderly friend had long before carried acquaintance as far as
he wished. There was nothing in it for him but the amusement of
the pugilist or acrobat. The larger study was lost in the
division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men; but
foreign affairs dealt only with large units, and made personal
relation possible with Hay which could not be maintained with
Roosevelt or Lodge. As an affair of pure education the point is
worth notice from young men who are drawn into politics. The work
of domestic progress is done by masses of mechanical power --
steam, electric, furnace, or other -- which have to be controlled
by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity to
manage it. The work of internal government has become the task of
controlling these men, who are socially as remote as heathen
gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell
nothing of political value if one skinned them alive. Most of
them have nothing to tell, but are forces as dumb as their
dynamos, absorbed in the development or economy of power. They
are trustees for the public, and whenever society assumes the
property, it must confer on them that title; but the power will
remain as before, whoever manages it, and will then control
society without appeal, as it controls its stokers and pit-men.
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of
forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of
force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no
longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the
men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.

  This is a moral that man strongly objects to admit, especially
in mediaeval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth
while for a teacher to insist upon it. What he insists upon is
only that in domestic politics, every one works for an immediate
object, commonly for some private job, and invariably in a near
horizon, while in foreign affairs the outlook is far ahead, over
a field as wide as the world. There the merest scholar could see
what he was doing. For history, international relations are the
only sure standards of movement; the only foundation for a map.
For this reason, Adams had always insisted that international
relation was the only sure base for a chart of history.

  He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his
view, but as teacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he
found it convenient. The Secretary of State has always stood as
much alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and round
hm, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found
Congress more or less hostile ever since Congress first sat. The
Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a
world which Congress would rather ignore; of obligations which
Congress repudiates whenever it can; of bargains which Congress
distrusts and tries to turn to its advantage or to reject. Since
the first day the Senate existed, it has always intrigued against
the Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has been obliged to
extend his functions beyond the appointment of Consuls in
Senators' service.

  This is a matter of history which any one may approve or
dispute as he will; but as education it gave new resources to an
old scholar, for it made of Hay the best schoolmaster since 1865.
Hay had become the most imposing figure ever known in the office.
He had an influence that no other Secretary of State ever
possessed, as he had a nation behind him such as history had
never imagined. He needed to write no state papers; he wanted no
help, and he stood far above counsel or advice; but he could
instruct an attentive scholar as no other teacher in the world
could do; and Adams sought only instruction -- wanted only to
chart the international channel for fifty years to come; to
triangulate the future; to obtain his dimension, and fix the
acceleration of movement in politics since the year 1200, as he
was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics; in finance and
force.

  Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at
last the stream of events favored him. With infinite effort he
had achieved the astonishing diplomatic feat of inducing the
Senate, with only six negative votes, to permit Great Britain to
renounce, without equivalent, treaty rights which she had for
fifty years defended tooth and nail. This unprecedented triumph
in his negotiations with the Senate enabled him to carry one step
further his measures for general peace. About England the Senate
could make no further effective opposition, for England was won,
and Canada alone could give trouble. The next difficulty was with
France, and there the Senate blocked advance, but England assumed
the task, and, owing to political changes in France, effected the
object -- a combination which, as late as 1901, had been
visionary. The next, and far more difficult step, was to bring
Germany into the combine; while, at the end of the vista, most
unmanageable of all, Russia remained to be satisfied and
disarmed. This was the instinct of what might be named
McKinleyism; the system of combinations, consolidations, trusts,
realized at home, and realizable abroad.

  With the system, a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth
century, had nothing to do, and made not the least presence of
meddling; but nothing forbade him to study, and he noticed to his
astonishment that this capitalistic scheme of combining
governments, like railways or furnaces, was in effect precisely
the socialist scheme of Jaures and Bebel. That John Hay, of all
men, should adopt a socialist policy seemed an idea more absurd
than conservative Christian anarchy, but paradox had become the
only orthodoxy in politics as in science. When one saw the field,
one realized that Hay could not help himself, nor could Bebel.
Either Germany must destroy England and France to create the next
inevitable unification as a system of continent against continent
-- or she must pool interests. Both schemes in turn were
attributed to the Kaiser; one or the other he would have to
choose; opinion was balanced doubtfully on their merits; but,
granting both to be feasible, Hay's and McKinley's statesmanship
turned on the point of persuading the Kaiser to join what might
be called the Coal-power combination, rather than build up the
only possible alternative, a Gun-power combination by merging
Germany in Russia. Thus Bebel and Jaures, McKinley and Hay, were
partners.

  The problem was pretty -- even fascinating -- and, to an old
Civil-War private soldier in diplomacy, as rigorous as a
geometrical demonstration. As the last possible lesson in life,
it had all sorts of ultimate values. Unless education marches on
both feet -- theory and practice -- it risks going astray; and
Hay was probably the most accomplished master of both then
living. He knew not only the forces but also the men, and he had
no other thought than his policy.

  Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a
scholar could ever reach. He had under his eyes the whole
educational staff of the Government at a time when the Government
had just reached the heights of highest activity and influence.
Since 1860, education had done its worst, under the greatest
masters and at enormous expense to the world, to train these two
minds to catch and comprehend every spring of international
action, not to speak of personal influence; and the entire
machinery of politics in several great countries had little to do
but supply the last and best information. Education could be
carried no further.

  With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its
effects on himself were grotesque. Never had the proportions of
his ignorance looked so appalling. He seemed to know nothing --
to be groping in darkness -- to be falling forever in space; and
the worst depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it
seemed, that no one knew more. He had, at least, the mechanical
assurance of certain values to guide him -- like the relative
intensities of his Coal-powers, and relative inertia of his
Gun-powers -- but he conceived that had he known, besides the
mechanics, every relative value of persons, as well as he knew
the inmost thoughts of his own Government -- had the Czar and the
Kaiser and the Mikado turned schoolmasters, like Hay, and taught
him all they knew, he would still have known nothing. They knew
nothing themselves. Only by comparison of their ignorance could
the student measure his own.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXIX

THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902)

  THE years hurried past, and gave hardly time to note their
work. Three or four months, though big with change, come to an
end before the mind can catch up with it. Winter vanished; spring
burst into flower; and again Paris opened its arms, though not
for long. Mr. Cameron came over, and took the castle of
Inverlochy for three months, which he summoned his friends to
garrison. Lochaber seldom laughs, except for its children, such
as Camerons, McDonalds, Campbells and other products of the mist;
but in the summer of 1902 Scotland put on fewer airs of coquetry
than usual. Since the terrible harvest of 1879 which one had
watched sprouting on its stalks on the Shropshire hillsides,
nothing had equalled the gloom. Even when the victims fled to
Switzerland, they found the Lake of Geneva and the Rhine not much
gayer, and Carlsruhe no more restful than Paris; until at last,
in desperation, one drifted back to the Avenue of the Bois de
Boulogne, and, like the Cuckoo, dropped into the nest of a better
citizen. Diplomacy has its uses. Reynolds Hitt, transferred to
Berlin, abandoned his attic to Adams, and there, for long summers
to come, he hid in ignorance and silence.

  Life at last managed of its own accord to settle itself into a
working arrangement. After so many years of effort to find one's
drift, the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward
and back, with a steady progress oceanwards. Such lessons as
summer taught, winter tested, and one had only to watch the
apparent movement of the stars in order to guess one's
declination. The process is possible only for men who have
exhausted auto-motion. Adams never knew why, knowing nothing of
Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday's trick of seeing lines of
force all about him, where he had always seen lines of will.
Perhaps the effect of knowing no mathematics is to leave the mind
to imagine figures -- images -- phantoms; one's mind is a watery
mirror at best; but, once conceived, the image became rapidly
simple, and the lines of force presented themselves as lines of
attraction. Repulsions counted only as battle of attractions. By
this path, the mind stepped into the mechanical theory of the
universe before knowing it, and entered a distinct new phase of
education.

  This was the work of the dynamo and the Virgin of Chartres.
Like his masters, since thought began, he was handicapped by the
eternal mystery of Force -- the sink of all science. For
thousands of years in history, he found that Force had been felt
as occult attraction -- love of God and lust for power in a
future life. After 1500, when this attraction began to decline,
philosophers fell back on some vis a tergo -- instinct of danger
from behind, like Darwin's survival of the fittest; and one of
the greatest minds, between Descartes and Newton -- Pascal -- saw
the master-motor of man in ennui, which was also scientific: "I
have often said that all the troubles of man come from his not
knowing how to sit still." Mere restlessness forces action. "So
passes the whole of life. We combat obstacles in order to get
repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable; for we think
either of the troubles we have, or of those that threaten us; and
even if we felt safe on every side, ennui would of its own accord
spring up from the depths of the heart where it is rooted by
nature, and would fill the mind with its venom."

   "If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
          May toss him to My breast."

  Ennui, like Natural Selection, accounted for change, but failed
to account for direction of change. For that, an attractive force
was essential; a force from outside; a shaping influence. Pascal
and all the old philosophies called this outside force God or
Gods. Caring but little for the name, and fixed only on tracing
the Force, Adams had gone straight to the Virgin at Chartres, and
asked her to show him God, face to face, as she did for St.
Bernard. She replied, kindly as ever, as though she were still
the young mother of to-day, with a sort of patient pity for
masculine dulness: "My dear outcast, what is it you seek? This is
the Church of Christ! If you seek him through me, you are
welcome, sinner or saint; but he and I are one. We are Love! We
have little or nothing to do with God's other energies which are
infinite, and concern us the less because our interest is only in
man, and the infinite is not knowable to man. Yet if you are
troubled by your ignorance, you see how I am surrounded by the
masters of the schools! Ask them!"

  The answer sounded singularly like the usual answer of British
science which had repeated since Bacon that one must not try to
know the unknowable, though one was quite powerless to ignore it;
but the Virgin carried more conviction, for her feminine lack of
interest in all perfections except her own was honester than the
formal phrase of science; since nothing was easier than to follow
her advice, and turn to Thomas Aquinas, who, unlike modern
physicists, answered at once and plainly: "To me," said St.
Thomas, "Christ and the Mother are one Force -- Love -- simple,
single, and sufficient for all human wants; but Love is a human
interest which acts even on man so partially that you and I, as
philosophers, need expect no share in it. Therefore we turn to
Christ and the Schools who represent all other Force. We deal
with Multiplicity and call it God. After the Virgin has redeemed
by her personal Force as Love all that is redeemable in man, the
Schools embrace the rest, and give it Form, Unity, and Motive."

  This chart of Force was more easily studied than any other
possible scheme, for one had but to do what the Church was always
promising to do -- abolish in one flash of lightning not only
man, but also the Church itself, the earth, the other planets,
and the sun, in order to clear the air; without affecting
mediaeval science. The student felt warranted in doing what the
Church threatened -- abolishing his solar system altogether -- in
order to look at God as actual; continuous movement, universal
cause, and interchangeable force. This was pantheism, but the
Schools were pantheist; at least as pantheistic as the Energetik
of the Germans; and their deity was the ultimate energy, whose
thought and act were one.

  Rid of man and his mind, the universe of Thomas Aquinas seemed
rather more scientific than that of Haeckel or Ernst Mach.
Contradiction for contradiction, Attraction for attraction,
Energy for energy, St. Thomas's idea of God had merits. Modern
science offered not a vestige of proof, or a theory of connection
between its forces, or any scheme of reconciliation between
thought and mechanics; while St. Thomas at least linked together
the joints of his machine. As far as a superficial student could
follow, the thirteenth century supposed mind to be a mode of
force directly derived from the intelligent prime motor, and the
cause of all form and sequence in the universe -- therefore the
only proof of unity. Without thought in the unit, there could be
no unity; without unity no orderly sequence or ordered society.
Thought alone was Form. Mind and Unity flourished or perished
together.

  This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty
educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to insist
on a Universe, he seemed driven to the Church. Modern science
guaranteed no unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all
his predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal
drag-net of religion.

  In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways: the
first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the
second is that the Church rejects pantheism as worse than
atheism, and will have nothing to do with the pantheist at any
price. In wandering through the forests of ignorance, one
necessarily fell upon the famous old bear that scared children at
play; but, even had the animal shown more logic than its victim,
one had learned from Socrates to distrust, above all other traps,
the trap of logic -- the mirror of the mind. Yet the search for a
unit of force led into catacombs of thought where hundreds of
thousands of educations had found their end. Generation after
generation of painful and honest-minded scholars had been content
to stay in these labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance in
silence, in company with the most famous teachers of all time.
Not one of them had ever found a logical highroad of escape.

  Adams cared little whether he escaped or not, but he felt clear
that he could not stop there, even to enjoy the society of
Spinoza and Thomas Aquinas. True, the Church alone had asserted
unity with any conviction, and the historian alone knew what
oceans of blood and treasure the assertion had cost; but the only
honest alternative to affirming unity was to deny it; and the
denial would require a new education. At sixty-five years old a
new education promised hardly more than the old.
Possibly the modern legislator or magistrate might no longer know
enough to treat as the Church did the man who denied unity,
unless the denial took the form of a bomb; but no teacher would
know how to explain what he thought he meant by denying unity.
Society would certainly punish the denial if ever any one learned
enough to understand it. Philosophers, as a rule, cared little
what principles society affirmed or denied, since the philosopher
commonly held that though he might sometimes be right by good
luck on some one point, no complex of individual opinions could
possibly be anything but wrong; yet, supposing society to be
ignored, the philosopher was no further forward. Nihilism had no
bottom. For thousands of years every philosopher had stood on the
shore of this sunless sea, diving for pearls and never finding
them. All had seen that, since they could not find bottom, they
must assume it. The Church claimed to have found it, but, since
1450, motives for agreeing on some new assumption of Unity,
broader and deeper than that of the Church, had doubled in force
until even the universities and schools, like the Church and
State, seemed about to be driven into an attempt to educate,
though specially forbidden to do it.

[combinator]

  Like most of his generation, Adams had taken the word of
science that the new unit was as good as found. It would not be
an intelligence -- probably not even a consciousness -- but it
would serve. He passed sixty years waiting for it, and at the end
of that time, on reviewing the ground, he was led to think that
the final synthesis of science and its ultimate triumph was the
kinetic theory of gases; which seemed to cover all motion in
space, and to furnish the measure of time. So far as he
understood it, the theory asserted that any portion of space is
occupied by molecules of gas, flying in right lines at velocities
varying up to a mile in a second, and colliding with each other
at intervals varying up to 17,750,000 times in a second. To this
analysis -- if one understood it right -- all matter whatever was
reducible, and the only difference of opinion in science regarded
the doubt whether a still deeper analysis would reduce the atom
of gas to pure motion.

  Thus, unless one mistook the meaning of motion, which might
well be, the scientific synthesis commonly called Unity was the
scientific analysis commonly called Multiplicity. The two things
were the same, all forms being shifting phases of motion.
Granting this ocean of colliding atoms, the last hope of
humanity, what happened if one dropped the sounder into the abyss
-- let it go -- frankly gave up Unity altogether? What was Unity?
Why was one to be forced to affirm it?

  Here everybody flatly refused help. Science seemed content with
its old phrase of "larger synthesis," which was well enough for
science, but meant chaos for man. One would have been glad to
stop and ask no more, but the anarchist bomb bade one go on, and
the bomb is a powerful persuader. One could not stop, even to
enjoy the charms of a perfect gas colliding seventeen million
times in a second, much like an automobile in Paris. Science
itself had been crowded so close to the edge of the abyss that
its attempts to escape were as metaphysical as the leap, while an
ignorant old man felt no motive for trying to escape, seeing that
the only escape possible lay in the form of vis a tergo commonly
called Death. He got out his Descartes again; dipped into his
Hume and Berkeley; wrestled anew with his Kant; pondered solemnly
over his Hegel and Schopenhauer and Hartmann; strayed gaily away
with his Greeks -- all merely to ask what Unity meant, and what
happened when one denied it.

  Apparently one never denied it. Every philosopher, whether sane
or insane, naturally affirmed it. The utmost flight of anarchy
seemed to have stopped with the assertion of two principles, and
even these fitted into each other, like good and evil, light and
darkness. Pessimism itself, black as it might be painted, had
been content to turn the universe of contradictions into the
human thought as one Will, and treat it as representation.
Metaphysics insisted on treating the universe as one thought or
treating thought as one universe; and philosophers agreed, like a
kinetic gas, that the universe could be known only as motion of
mind, and therefore as unity. One could know it only as one's
self; it was psychology.

  Of all forms of pessimism, the metaphysical form was, for a
historian, the least enticing. Of all studies, the one he would
rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy
so heartrending as introspection, and the more, because -- as
Mephistopheles said of Marguerite -- he was not the first. Nearly
all the highest intelligence known to history had drowned itself
in the reflection of its own thought, and the bovine survivors
had rudely told the truth about it, without affecting the
intelligent. One's own time had not been exempt. Even since 1870
friends by scores had fallen victims to it. Within
five-and-twenty years, a new library had grown out of it. Harvard
College was a focus of the study; France supported hospitals for
it; England published magazines of it. Nothing was easier than to
take one's mind in one's hand, and ask one's psychological
friends what they made of it, and the more because it mattered so
little to either party, since their minds, whatever they were,
had pretty nearly ceased to reflect, and let them do what they
liked with the small remnant, they could scarcely do anything
very new with it. All one asked was to learn what they hoped to
do.

  Unfortunately the pursuit of ignorance in silence had, by this
time, led the weary pilgrim into such mountains of ignorance that
he could no longer see any path whatever, and could not even
understand a signpost. He failed to fathom the depths of the new
psychology, which proved to him that, on that side as on the
mathematical side, his power of thought was atrophied, if,
indeed, it ever existed. Since he could not fathom the science,
he could only ask the simplest of questions: Did the new
psychology hold that the IvXn -- soul or mind -- was or was not a
unit? He gathered from the books that the psychologists had, in a
few cases, distinguished several personalities in the same mind,
each conscious and constant, individual and exclusive. The fact
seemed scarcely surprising, since it had been a habit of mind
from earliest recorded time, and equally familiar to the last
acquaintance who had taken a drug or caught a fever, or eaten a
Welsh rarebit before bed; for surely no one could follow the
action of a vivid dream, and still need to be told that the
actors evoked by his mind were not himself, but quite unknown to
all he had ever recognized as self. The new psychology went
further, and seemed convinced that it had actually split
personality not only into dualism, but also into complex groups,
like telephonic centres and systems, that might be isolated and
called up at will, and whose physical action might be occult in
the sense of strangeness to any known form of force. Dualism
seemed to have become as common as binary stars. Alternating
personalities turned up constantly, even among one's friends. The
facts seemed certain, or at least as certain as other facts; all
they needed was explanation.

  This was not the business of the searcher of ignorance, who
felt himself in no way responsible for causes. To his mind, the
compound IvXn took at once the form of a bicycle-rider,
mechanically balancing himself by inhibiting all his inferior
personalities, and sure to fall into the sub-conscious chaos
below, if one of his inferior personalities got on top. The only
absolute truth was the sub-conscious chaos below. which every one
could feel when he sought it.

  Whether the psychologists admitted it or not, mattered little
to the student who, by the law of his profession, was engaged in
studying his own mind. On him, the effect was surprising. He woke
up with a shudder as though he had himself fallen off his
bicycle. If his mind were really this sort of magnet,
mechanically dispersing its lines of force when it went to sleep,
and mechanically orienting them when it woke up -- which was
normal, the dispersion or orientation? The mind, like the body,
kept its unity unless it happened to lose balance, but the
professor of physics, who slipped on a pavement and hurt himself,
knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down, though he did
know -- what the idiot could hardly do -- that his normal
condition was idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity was
unstable artifice. His normal thought was dispersion, sleep,
dream, inconsequence; the simultaneous action of different
thought-centres without central control. His artificial balance
was acquired habit. He was an acrobat, with a dwarf on his back,
crossing a chasm on a slack-rope, and commonly breaking his neck.

  By that path of newest science, one saw no unity ahead --
nothing but a dissolving mind -- and the historian felt himself
driven back on thought as one continuous Force, without Race,
Sex, School, Country, or Church. This has been always the fate of
rigorous thinkers, and has always succeeded in making them
famous, as it did Gibbon, Buckle, and Auguste Comte. Their method
made what progress the science of history knew, which was little
enough, but they did at last fix the law that, if history ever
meant to correct the errors she made in detail, she must agree on
a scale for the whole. Every local historian might defy this law
till history ended, but its necessity would be the same for man
as for space or time or force, and without it the historian would
always remain a child in science.

  Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by
motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting
a unit -- the point of history when man held the highest idea of
himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of
study had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250,
expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as
the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time,
without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The
movement might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics.
Setting himself to the task, he began a volume which he mentally
knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a Study of
Thirteenth-Century Unity." From that point he proposed to fix a
position for himself, which he could label: "The Education of
Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity." With the
help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his
lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction
from any one who should know better. Thereupon, he sailed for
home.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXX

VIS INERTIAE (1903)

  WASHINGTON was always amusing, but in 1900, as in 1800, its
chief interest lay in its distance from New York. The movement of
New York had become planetary -- beyond control -- while the task
of Washington, in 1900 as in 1800, was to control it. The success
of Washington in the past century promised ill for its success in
the next.

  To a student who had passed the best years of his life in
pondering over the political philosophy of Jefferson, Gallatin,
and Madison, the problem that Roosevelt took in hand seemed alive
with historical interest, but it would need at least another
half-century to show its results. As yet, one could not measure
the forces or their arrangement; the forces had not even aligned
themselves except in foreign affairs; and there one turned to
seek the channel of wisdom as naturally as though Washington did
not exist. The President could do nothing effectual in foreign
affairs, but at least he could see something of the field.

  Hay had reached the summit of his career, and saw himself on
the edge of wreck. Committed to the task of keeping China "open,"
he saw China about to be shut. Almost alone in the world, he
represented the "open door," and could not escape being crushed
by it. Yet luck had been with him in full tide. Though Sir Julian
Pauncefote had died in May, 1902, after carrying out tasks that
filled an ex-private secretary of 1861 with open-mouthed
astonishment, Hay had been helped by the appointment of Michael
Herbert as his successor, who counted for double the value of an
ordinary diplomat. To reduce friction is the chief use of
friendship, and in politics the loss by friction is outrageous.
To Herbert and his wife, the small knot of houses that seemed to
give a vague unity to foreign affairs opened their doors and
their hearts, for the Herberts were already at home there; and
this personal sympathy prolonged Hay's life, for it not only
eased the effort of endurance, but it also led directly to a
revolution in Germany. Down to that moment, the Kaiser, rightly
or wrongly, had counted as the ally of the Czar in all matters
relating to the East. Holleben and Cassini were taken to be a
single force in Eastern affairs, and this supposed alliance gave
Hay no little anxiety and some trouble. Suddenly Holleben, who
seemed to have had no thought but to obey with almost agonized
anxiety the least hint of the Kaiser's will, received a telegram
ordering him to pretext illness and come home, which he obeyed
within four-and-twenty hours. The ways of the German Foreign
Office had been always abrupt, not to say ruthless, towards its
agents, and yet commonly some discontent had been shown as
excuse; but, in this case, no cause was guessed for Holleben's
disgrace except the Kaiser's wish to have a personal
representative at Washington. Breaking down all precedent, he
sent Speck von Sternburg to counterbalance Herbert.

  Welcome as Speck was in the same social intimacy, and valuable
as his presence was to Hay, the personal gain was trifling
compared with the political. Of Hay's official tasks, one knew no
more than any newspaper reporter did, but of one's own diplomatic
education the successive steps had become strides. The scholar
was studying, not on Hay's account, but on his own. He had seen
Hay, in 1898, bring England into his combine; he had seen the
steady movement which was to bring France back into an Atlantic
system; and now he saw suddenly the dramatic swing of Germany
towards the west -- the movement of all others nearest
mathematical certainty. Whether the Kaiser meant it or not, he
gave the effect of meaning to assert his independence of Russia,
and to Hay this change of front had enormous value. The least was
that it seemed to isolate Cassini, and unmask the Russian
movement which became more threatening every month as the
Manchurian scheme had to be revealed.

  Of course the student saw whole continents of study opened to
him by the Kaiser's coup d'etat. Carefully as he had tried to
follow the Kaiser's career, he had never suspected such
refinement of policy, which raised his opinion of the Kaiser's
ability to the highest point, and altogether upset the centre of
statesmanship. That Germany could be so quickly detached from
separate objects and brought into an Atlantic system seemed a
paradox more paradoxical than any that one's education had yet
offered, though it had offered little but paradox. If Germany
could be held there, a century of friction would be saved. No
price would be too great for such an object; although no price
could probably be wrung out of Congress as equivalent for it. The
Kaiser, by one personal act of energy, freed Hay's hands so
completely that he saw his problems simplified to Russia alone.

  Naturally Russia was a problem ten times as difficult. The
history of Europe for two hundred years had accomplished little
but to state one or two sides of the Russian problem. One's year
of Berlin in youth, though it taught no Civil Law, had opened
one's eyes to the Russian enigma, and both German and French
historians had labored over its proportions with a sort of
fascinated horror. Germany, of all countries, was most vitally
concerned in it; but even a cave-dweller in La Fayette Square,
seeking only a measure of motion since the Crusades, saw before
his eyes, in the spring of 1903, a survey of future order or
anarchy that would exhaust the power of his telescopes and defy
the accuracy of his theodolites.

  The drama had become passionately interesting and grew every
day more Byzantine; for the Russian Government itself showed
clear signs of dislocation, and the orders of Lamsdorf and de
Witte were reversed when applied in Manchuria. Historians and
students should have no sympathies or antipathies, but Adams had
private reasons for wishing well to the Czar and his people. At
much length, in several labored chapters of history, he had told
how the personal friendliness of the Czar Alexander I, in 1810,
saved the fortunes of J. Q. Adams. and opened to him the
brilliant diplomatic career that ended in the White House. Even
in his own effaced existence he had reasons, not altogether
trivial, for gratitude to the Czar Alexander II, whose firm
neutrality had saved him some terribly anxious days and nights in
1862; while he had seen enough of Russia to sympathize warmly
with Prince Khilkoff's railways and de Witte's industries. The
last and highest triumph of history would, to his mind, be the
bringing of Russia into the Atlantic combine, and the just and
fair allotment of the whole world among the regulated activities
of the universe. At the rate of unification since 1840, this end
should be possible within another sixty years; and, in foresight
of that point, Adams could already finish -- provisionally -- his
chart of international unity; but, for the moment, the gravest
doubts and ignorance covered the whole field. No one -- Czar or
diplomat, Kaiser or Mikado -- seemed to know anything. Through
individual Russians one could always see with ease, for their
diplomacy never suggested depth; and perhaps Hay protected
Cassini for the very reason that Cassini could not disguise an
emotion, and never failed to betray that, in setting the enormous
bulk of Russian inertia to roll over China, he regretted
infinitely that he should have to roll it over Hay too. He would
almost rather have rolled it over de Witte and Lamsdorf. His
political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed in
the single idea that Russia must fatally roll -- must, by her
irresistible inertia, crush whatever stood in her way.

  For Hay and his pooling policy, inherited from McKinley, the
fatalism of Russian inertia meant the failure of American
intensity. When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she
absorbed their energies in her own movement of custom and race
which neither Czar nor peasant could convert, or wished to
convert, into any Western equivalent. In 1903 Hay saw Russia
knocking away the last blocks that held back the launch of this
huge mass into the China Sea. The vast force of inertia known as
China was to be united with the huge bulk of Russia in a single
mass which no amount of new force could henceforward deflect. Had
the Russian Government, with the sharpest sense of enlightenment,
employed scores of de Wittes and Khilkoffs, and borrowed all the
resources of Europe, it could not have lifted such a weight; and
had no idea of trying.

  These were the positions charted on the map of political unity
by an insect in Washington in the spring of 1903; and they seemed
to him fixed. Russia held Europe and America in her grasp, and
Cassini held Hay in his. The Siberian Railway offered checkmate
to all possible opposition. Japan must make the best terms she
could; England must go on receding; America and Germany would
look on at the avalanche. The wall of Russian inertia that barred
Europe across the Baltic, would bar America across the Pacific;
and Hay's policy of the open door would infallibly fail.

  Thus the game seemed lost, in spite of the Kaiser's brilliant
stroke, and the movement of Russia eastward must drag Germany
after it by its mere mass. To the humble student, the loss of
Hay's game affected only Hay; for himself, the game -- not the
stakes -- was the chief interest; and though want of habit made
him object to read his newspapers blackened -- since he liked to
blacken them himself -- he was in any case condemned to pass but
a short space of time either in Siberia or in Paris, and could
balance his endless columns of calculation equally in either
place. The figures, not the facts, concerned his chart, and he
mused deeply over his next equation. The Atlantic would have to
deal with a vast continental mass of inert motion, like a
glacier, which moved, and consciously moved, by mechanical
gravitation alone. Russia saw herself so, and so must an American
see her; he had no more to do than measure, if he could, the
mass. Was volume or intensity the stronger? What and where was
the vis nova that could hold its own before this prodigious
ice-cap of vis inertiae? What was movement of inertia, and what
its laws?

  Naturally a student knew nothing about mechanical laws, but he
took for granted that he could learn, and went to his books to
ask. He found that the force of inertia had troubled wiser men
than he. The dictionary said that inertia was a property of
matter, by which matter tends, when at rest, to remain so, and,
when in motion, to move on in a straight line. Finding that his
mind refused to imagine itself at rest or in a straight line, he
was forced, as usual, to let it imagine something else; and since
the question concerned the mind, and not matter, he decided from
personal experience that his mind was never at rest, but moved --
when normal -- about something it called a motive, and never
moved without motives to move it. So long as these motives were
habitual, and their attraction regular, the consequent result
might, for convenience, be called movement of inertia, to
distinguish it from movement caused by newer or higher
attraction; but the greater the bulk to move, the greater must be
the force to accelerate or deflect it.

  This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most
deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student
and the professor had gone on complaining that minds were
unequally inert. The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One
class of minds responded only to habit; another only to novelty.
Race classified thought. Class-lists classified mind. No two men
thought alike, and no woman thought like a man.

  Race-inertia seemed to be fairly constant, and made the chief
trouble in the Russian future. History looked doubtful when asked
whether race-inertia had ever been overcome without destroying
the race in order to reconstruct it; but surely sex-inertia had
never been overcome at all. Of all movements of inertia,
maternity and reproduction are the most typical, and women's
property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate,
uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence.
Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did
in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race
only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be sought
anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind. The American
always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history mentioned
hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled them as
timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species; but if
the problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race
question, it involved that of sex far more deeply, and to
Americans vitally. The task of accelerating or deflecting the
movement of the American woman had interest infinitely greater
than that of any race whatever, Russian or Chinese, Asiatic or
African.

[combinator]

  On this subject, as on the Senate and the banks, Adams was
conscious of having been born an eighteenth-century remainder. As
he grew older, he found that Early Institutions lost their
interest, but that Early Women became a passion. Without
understanding movement of sex, history seemed to him mere
pedantry. So insistent had he become on this side of his subject
that with women he talked of little else, and -- because women's
thought is mostly subconscious and particularly sensitive to
suggestion -- he tried tricks and devices to disclose it. The
woman seldom knows her own thought; she is as curious to
understand herself as the man to understand her, and responds far
more quickly than the man to a sudden idea. Sometimes, at dinner,
one might wait till talk flagged, and then, as mildly as
possible, ask one's liveliest neighbor whether she could explain
why the American woman was a failure. Without an instant's
hesitation, she was sure to answer: "Because the American man is
a failure!" She meant it.

  Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American
men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend
his sex who seemed able to take care of themselves; but from the
point of view of sex he felt much curiosity to know how far the
woman was right, and, in pursuing this inquiry, he caught the
trick of affirming that the woman was the superior. Apart from
truth, he owed her at least that compliment. The habit led
sometimes to perilous personalities in the sudden give-and-take
of table-talk. This spring, just before sailing for Europe in
May, 1903, he had a message from his sister-in-law, Mrs. Brooks
Adams, to say that she and her sister. Mrs. Lodge, and the
Senator were coming to dinner by way of farewell; Bay Lodge and
his lovely young wife sent word to the same effect; Mrs.
Roosevelt joined the party; and Michael Herbert shyly slipped
down to escape the solitude of his wife's absence. The party were
too intimate for reserve, and they soon fell on Adams's hobby
with derision which stung him to pungent rejoinder: "The American
man is a failure! You are all failures!" he said. "Has not my
sister here more sense than my brother Brooks? Is not Bessie
worth two of Bay? Wouldn't we all elect Mrs. Lodge Senator
against Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a chance if
Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him? Do you want to stop at the
Embassy, on your way home, and ask which would run it best --
Herbert or his wife?" The men laughed a little -- not much! Each
probably made allowance for his own wife as an unusually superior
woman. Some one afterwards remarked that these half-dozen women
were not a fair average. Adams replied that the half-dozen men
were above all possible average; he could not lay his hands on
another half-dozen their equals.

  Gay or serious, the question never failed to stir feeling. The
cleverer the woman, the less she denied the failure. She was
bitter at heart about it. She had failed even to hold the family
together, and her children ran away like chickens with their
first feathers; the family was extinct like chivalry. She had
failed not only to create a new society that satisfied her, but
even to hold her own in the old society of Church or State; and
was left, for the most part, with no place but the theatre or
streets to decorate. She might glitter with historical diamonds
and sparkle with wit as brilliant as the gems, in rooms as
splendid as any in Rome at its best; but she saw no one except
her own sex who knew enough to be worth dazzling, or was
competent to pay her intelligent homage. She might have her own
way, without restraint or limit, but she knew not what to do with
herself when free. Never had the world known a more capable or
devoted mother, but at forty her task was over, and she was left
with no stage except that of her old duties, or of Washington
society where she had enjoyed for a hundred years every
advantage, but had created only a medley where nine men out of
ten refused her request to be civilized, and the tenth bored her.

  On most subjects, one's opinions must defer to science, but on
this, the opinion of a Senator or a Professor, a chairman of a
State Central Committee or a Railway President, is worth less
than that of any woman on Fifth Avenue. The inferiority of man on
this, the most important of all social subjects, is manifest.
Adams had here no occasion to deprecate scientific opinion, since
no woman in the world would have paid the smallest respect to the
opinions of all professors since the serpent. His own object had
little to do with theirs. He was studying the laws of motion, and
had struck two large questions of vital importance to America --
inertia of race and inertia of sex. He had seen Mr. de Witte and
Prince Khilkoff turn artificial energy to the value of three
thousand million dollars, more or less, upon Russian inertia, in
the last twenty years, and he needed to get some idea of the
effects. He had seen artificial energy to the amount of twenty or
five-and-twenty million steam horse-power created in America
since 1840, and as much more economized, which had been socially
turned over to the American woman, she being the chief object of
social expenditure, and the household the only considerable
object of American extravagance. According to scientific notions
of inertia and force, what ought to be the result?

  In Russia, because of race and bulk, no result had yet shown
itself, but in America the results were evident and undisputed.
The woman had been set free -- volatilized like Clerk Maxwell's
perfect gas; almost brought to the point of explosion, like
steam. One had but to pass a week in Florida, or on any of a
hundred huge ocean steamers, or walk through the Place Vendome,
or join a party of Cook's tourists to Jerusalem, to see that the
woman had been set free; but these swarms were ephemeral like
clouds of butterflies in season, blown away and lost, while the
reproductive sources lay hidden. At Washington, one saw other
swarms as grave gatherings of Dames or Daughters, taking
themselves seriously, or brides fluttering fresh pinions; but all
these shifting visions, unknown before 1840, touched the true
problem slightly and superficially. Behind them, in every city,
town, and farmhouse, were myriads of new types -- or type-writers
-- telephone and telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory-hands,
running into millions of millions, and, as classes, unknown to
themselves as to historians. Even the schoolmistresses were
inarticulate. All these new women had been created since 1840;
all were to show their meaning before 1940.

  Whatever they were, they were not content, as the ephemera
proved; and they were hungry for illusions as ever in the fourth
century of the Church; but this was probably survival, and gave
no hint of the future. The problem remained -- to find out
whether movement of inertia, inherent in function, could take
direction except in lines of inertia. This problem needed to be
solved in one generation of American women, and was the most
vital of all problems of force.

  The American woman at her best -- like most other women --
exerted great charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive
type. She appeared as the result of a long series of discards,
and her chief interest lay in what she had discarded. When
closely watched, she seemed making a violent effort to follow the
man, who had turned his mind and hand to mechanics. The typical
American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in
his road; his living depended on keeping up an average speed of
forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a
hundred, and he could not admit emotions or anxieties or
subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whiskey or
drugs, without breaking his neck. He could not run his machine
and a woman too; he must leave her; even though his wife, to find
her own way, and all the world saw her trying to find her way by
imitating him.

  The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in
feminine history. Tragedy had been woman's lot since Eve. Her
problem had been always one of physical strength and it was as
physical perfection of force that her Venus had governed nature.
The woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her
axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea
that she was weak revolted all history; it was a palaeontological
falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed
at; but it was surely true that, if her force were to be diverted
from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay
for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become sexless like the
bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia to carry on the
race.

  The story was not new. For thousands of years women had
rebelled. They had made a fortress of religion -- had buried
themselves in the cloister, in self-sacrifice, in good works --
or even in bad. One's studies in the twelfth century, like one's
studies in the fourth, as in Homeric and archaic time, showed her
always busy in the illusions of heaven or of hell -- ambition,
intrigue, jealousy, magic -- but the American woman had no
illusions or ambitions or new resources, and nothing to rebel
against, except her own maternity; yet the rebels increased by
millions from year to year till they blocked the path of
rebellion. Even her field of good works was narrower than in the
twelfth century. Socialism, communism, collectivism,
philosophical anarchism, which promised paradise on earth for
every male, cut off the few avenues of escape which capitalism
had opened to the woman, and she saw before her only the future
reserved for machine-made, collectivist females.

  From the male, she could look for no help; his instinct of
power was blind. The Church had known more about women than
science will ever know, and the historian who studied the sources
of Christianity felt sometimes convinced that the Church had been
made by the woman chiefly as her protest against man. At times,
the historian would have been almost willing to maintain that the
man had overthrown the Church chiefly because it was feminine.
After the overthrow of the Church, the woman had no refuge except
such as the man created for himself. She was free; she had no
illusions; she was sexless; she had discarded all that the male
disliked; and although she secretly regretted the discard, she
knew that she could not go backward. She must, like the man,
marry machinery. Already the American man sometimes felt surprise
at finding himself regarded as sexless; the American woman was
oftener surprised at finding herself regarded as sexual.

  No honest historian can take part with -- or against -- the
forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human
race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital
statistics. No doubt every one in society discussed the subject,
impelled by President Roosevelt if by nothing else, and the
surface current of social opinion seemed set as strongly in one
direction as the silent undercurrent of social action ran in the
other; but the truth lay somewhere unconscious in the woman's
breast. An elderly man, trying only to learn the law of social
inertia and the limits of social divergence could not compel the
Superintendent of the Census to ask every young woman whether she
wanted children, and how many; he could not even require of an
octogenarian Senate the passage of a law obliging every woman,
married or not, to bear one baby -- at the expense of the
Treasury -- before she was thirty years old, under penalty of
solitary confinement for life; yet these were vital statistics in
more senses than all that bore the name, and tended more directly
to the foundation of a serious society in the future. He could
draw no conclusions whatever except from the birth-rate. He could
not frankly discuss the matter with the young women themselves,
although they would have gladly discussed it, because Faust was
helpless in the tragedy of woman. He could suggest nothing. The
Marguerite of the future could alone decide whether she were
better off than the Marguerite of the past; whether she would
rather be victim to a man, a church, or a machine.

  Between these various forms of inevitable inertia -- sex and
race -- the student of multiplicity felt inclined to admit that
-- ignorance against ignorance -- the Russian problem seemed to
him somewhat easier of treatment than the American. Inertia of
race and bulk would require an immense force to overcome it, but
in time it might perhaps be partially overcome. Inertia of sex
could not be overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an
immense force, doubling every few years, was working irresistibly
to overcome it. One gazed mute before this ocean of darkest
ignorance that had already engulfed society. Few centres of great
energy lived in illusion more complete or archaic than Washington
with its simple-minded standards of the field and farm, its
Southern and Western habits of life and manners, its assumptions
of ethics and history; but even in Washington, society was uneasy
enough to need no further fretting. One was almost glad to act
the part of horseshoe crab in Quincy Bay, and admit that all was
uniform -- that nothing ever changed -- and that the woman would
swim about the ocean of future time, as she had swum in the past,
with the gar-fish and the shark, unable to change.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXXI

THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)

  OF all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante, this
new exploration along the shores of Multiplicity and Complexity
promised to be the longest, though as yet it had barely touched
two familiar regions -- race and sex. Even within these narrow
seas the navigator lost his bearings and followed the winds as
they blew. By chance it happened that Raphael Pumpelly helped the
winds; for, being in Washington on his way to Central Asia he
fell to talking with Adams about these matters, and said that
Willard Gibbs thought he got most help from a book called the
"Grammar of Science," by Karl Pearson. To Adams's vision, Willard
Gibbs stood on the same plane with the three or four greatest
minds of his century, and the idea that a man so incomparably
superior should find help anywhere filled him with wonder. He
sent for the volume and read it. From the time he sailed for
Europe and reached his den on the Avenue du Bois until he took
his return steamer at Cherbourg on December 26, he did little but
try to kind out what Karl Pearson could have taught Willard
Gibbs.

  Here came in, more than ever, the fatal handicap of ignorance
in mathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed, as the
right to judge the product of the tool. Ignorant as one was of
the finer values of French or German, and often deceived by the
intricacies of thought hidden in the muddiness of the medium, one
could sometimes catch a tendency to intelligible meaning even in
Kant or Hegel; but one had not the right to a suspicion of error
where the tool of thought was algebra. Adams could see in such
parts of the "Grammar" as he could understand, little more than
an enlargement of Stallo's book already twenty years old. He
never found out what it could have taught a master like Willard
Gibbs. Yet the book had a historical value out of all proportion
to its science. No such stride had any Englishman before taken in
the lines of English thought. The progress of science was
measured by the success of the "Grammar," when, for twenty years
past, Stallo had been deliberately ignored under the usual
conspiracy of silence inevitable to all thought which demands new
thought-machinery. Science needs time to reconstruct its
instruments, to follow a revolution in space; a certain lag is
inevitable; the most active mind cannot instantly swerve from its
path; but such revolutions are portentous, and the fall or rise
of half-a-dozen empires interested a student of history less than
the rise of the "Grammar of Science," the more pressingly
because, under the silent influence of Langley, he was prepared
to expect it.

  For a number of years Langley had published in his Smithsonian
Reports the revolutionary papers that foretold the overthrow of
nineteenth-century dogma, and among the first was the famous
address of Sir William Crookes on psychical research, followed by
a series of papers on Roentgen and Curie, which had steadily
driven the scientific lawgivers of Unity into the open; but Karl
Pearson was the first to pen them up for slaughter in the
schools. The phrase is not stronger than that with which the
"Grammar of Science" challenged the fight: "Anything more
hopelessly illogical than the statements with regard to Force and
Matter current in elementary textbooks of science, it is
difficult to imagine," opened Mr. Pearson, and the responsible
author of the "elementary textbook," as he went on to explain,
was Lord Kelvin himself. Pearson shut out of science everything
which the nineteenth century had brought into it. He told his
scholars that they must put up with a fraction of the universe,
and a very small fraction at that -- the circle reached by the
senses, where sequence could be taken for granted -- much as the
deep-sea fish takes for granted the circle of light which he
generates. "Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are
characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated
with the mind of man." The assertion, as a broad truth, left
one's mind in some doubt of its bearing, for order and beauty
seemed to be associated also in the mind of a crystal, if one's
senses were to be admitted as judge; but the historian had no
interest in the universal truth of Pearson's or Kelvin's or
Newton's laws; he sought only their relative drift or direction,
and Pearson went on to say that these conceptions must stop:
"Into the chaos beyond sense-impressions we cannot scientifically
project them." We cannot even infer them: "In the chaos behind
sensations, in the 'beyond' of sense-impressions, we cannot infer
necessity, order or routine, for these are concepts formed by the
mind of man on this side of sense-impressions"; but we must infer
chaos: "Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of
the supersensuous." The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of
ultimate chaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature;
Order was the dream of man.

  No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean,
for words are slippery and thought is viscous; but since Bacon
and Newton, English thought had gone on impatiently protesting
that no one must try to know the unknowable at the same time that
every one went on thinking about it. The result was as chaotic as
kinetic gas; but with the thought a historian had nothing to do.
He sought only its direction. For himself he knew, that, in spite
of all the Englishmen that ever lived, he would be forced to
enter supersensual chaos if he meant to find out what became of
British science -- or indeed of any other science. From
Pythagoras to Herbert Spencer, every one had done it, although
commonly science had explored an ocean which it preferred to
regard as Unity or a Universe, and called Order. Even Hegel, who
taught that every notion included its own negation, used the
negation only to reach a "larger synthesis," till he reached the
universal which thinks itself, contradiction and all. The Church
alone had constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that
Satan was not God, that pantheism was worse than atheism, and
that Unity could not be proved as a contradiction. Karl Pearson
seemed to agree with the Church, but every one else, including
Newton, Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, had sailed gaily into the
supersensual, calling it: --

  "One God, one Law, one Element,
   And one far-off, divine event,
   To which the whole creation moves."

  Suddenly, in 1900, science raised its head and denied.

  Yet, perhaps, after all, the change had not been so sudden as
it seemed. Real and actual, it certainly was, and every newspaper
betrayed it, but sequence could scarcely be denied by one who had
watched its steady approach, thinking the change far more
interesting to history than the thought. When he reflected about
it, he recalled that the flow of tide had shown itself at least
twenty years before; that it had become marked as early as 1893;
and that the man of science must have been sleepy indeed who did
not jump from his chair like a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme.
Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical bomb she called radium.
There remained no hole to hide in. Even metaphysics swept back
over science with the green water of the deep-sea ocean and no
one could longer hope to bar out the unknowable, for the
unknowable was known.

  The fact was admitted that the uniformitarians of one's youth
had wound about their universe a tangle of contradictions meant
only for temporary support to be merged in "larger synthesis,"
and had waited for the larger synthesis in silence and in vain.
They had refused to hear Stallo. They had betrayed little
interest in Crookes. At last their universe had been wrecked by
rays, and Karl Pearson undertook to cut the wreck loose with an
axe, leaving science adrift on a sensual raft in the midst of a
supersensual chaos. The confusion seemed, to a mere passenger,
worse than that of 1600 when the astronomers upset the world; it
resembled rather the convulsion of 310 when the Civitas Dei cut
itself loose from the Civitas Romae, and the Cross took the place
of the legions; but the historian accepted it all alike; he knew
that his opinion was worthless; only, in this case, he found
himself on the raft, personally and economically concerned in its
drift.

  English thought had always been chaos and multiplicity itself,
in which the new step of Karl Pearson marked only a consistent
progress; but German thought had affected system, unity, and
abstract truth, to a point that fretted the most patient
foreigner, and to Germany the voyager in strange seas of thought
alone might resort with confident hope of renewing his youth.
Turning his back on Karl Pearson and England, he plunged into
Germany, and had scarcely crossed the Rhine when he fell into
libraries of new works bearing the names of Ostwald, Ernst Mach,
Ernst Haeckel, and others less familiar, among whom Haeckel was
easiest to approach, not only because of being the oldest and
clearest and steadiest spokesman of nineteenth-century mechanical
convictions, but also because in 1902 he had published a vehement
renewal of his faith. The volume contained only one paragraph
that concerned a historian; it was that in which Haeckel sank his
voice almost to a religious whisper in avowing with evident
effort, that the "proper essence of substance appeared to him
more and more marvellous and enigmatic as he penetrated further
into the knowledge of its attributes -- matter and energy -- and
as he learned to know their innumerable phenomena and their
evolution." Since Haeckel seemed to have begun the voyage into
multiplicity that Pearson had forbidden to Englishmen, he should
have been a safe pilot to the point, at least, of a "proper
essence of substance" in its attributes of matter and energy: but
Ernst Mach seemed to go yet one step further, for he rejected
matter altogether, and admitted but two processes in nature --
change of place and interconversion of forms. Matter was Motion
-- Motion was Matter -- the thing moved.


  A student of history had no need to understand these scientific
ideas of very great men; he sought only the relation with the
ideas of their grandfathers, and their common direction towards
the ideas of their grandsons. He had long ago reached, with
Hegel, the limits of contradiction; and Ernst Mach scarcely added
a shade of variety to the identity of opposites; but both of them
seemed to be in agreement with Karl Pearson on the facts of the
supersensual universe which could be known only as unknowable.

  With a deep sigh of relief, the traveller turned back to
France. There he felt safe. No Frenchman except Rabelais and
Montaigne had ever taught anarchy other than as path to order.
Chaos would be unity in Paris even if child of the guillotine. To
make this assurance mathematically sure, the highest scientific
authority in France was a great mathematician, M. Poincare of the
Institut, who published in 1902 a small volume called "La Science
et l'Hypothese," which purported to be relatively readable.
Trusting to its external appearance, the traveller timidly bought
it, and greedily devoured it, without understanding a single
consecutive page, but catching here and there a period that
startled him to the depths of his ignorance, for they seemed to
show that M. Poincare was troubled by the same historical
landmarks which guided or deluded Adams himself: "[In science] we
are led," said M. Poincare, " to act as though a simple law, when
other things were equal, must be more probable than a complicated
law. Half a century ago one frankly confessed it, and proclaimed
that nature loves simplicity. She has since given us too often
the lie. To-day this tendency is no longer avowed, and only as
much of it is preserved as is indispensable so that science shall
not become impossible."

  Here at last was a fixed point beyond the chance of confusion
with self-suggestion. History and mathematics agreed. Had M.
Poincare shown anarchistic tastes, his evidence would have
weighed less heavily; but he seemed to be the only authority in
science who felt what a historian felt so strongly -- the need of
unity in a universe. "Considering everything we have made some
approach towards unity. We have not gone as fast as we hoped
fifty years ago; we have not always taken the intended road; but
definitely we have gained much ground." This was the most clear
and convincing evidence of progress yet offered to the navigator
of ignorance; but suddenly he fell on another view which seemed
to him quite irreconcilable with the first: "Doubtless if our
means of investigation should become more and more penetrating,
we should discover the simple under the complex; then the complex
under the simple; then anew the simple under the complex; and so
on without ever being able to foresee the last term."

  A mathematical paradise of endless displacement promised
eternal bliss to the mathematician, but turned the historian
green with horror. Made miserable by the thought that he knew no
mathematics, he burned to ask whether M. Poincare knew any
history, since he began by begging the historical question
altogether, and assuming that the past showed alternating phases
of simple and complex -- the precise point that Adams, after
fifty years of effort, found himself forced to surrender; and
then going on to assume alternating phases for the future which,
for the weary Titan of Unity, differed in nothing essential from
the kinetic theory of a perfect gas.

[combinator]

  Since monkeys first began to chatter in trees, neither man nor
beast had ever denied or doubted Multiplicity, Diversity,
Complexity, Anarchy, Chaos. Always and everywhere the Complex had
been true and the Contradiction had been certain. Thought started
by it. Mathematics itself began by counting one -- two -- three;
then imagining their continuity, which M. Poincare was still
exhausting his wits to explain or defend; and this was his
explanation: "In short, the mind has the faculty of creating
symbols, and it is thus that it has constructed mathematical
continuity which is only a particular system of symbols." With
the same light touch, more destructive in its artistic measure
than the heaviest-handed brutality of Englishmen or Germans, he
went on to upset relative truth itself: "How should I answer the
question whether Euclidian Geometry is true? It has no sense! . .
. Euclidian Geometry is, and will remain, the most convenient."

  Chaos was a primary fact even in Paris -- especially in Paris
-- as it was in the Book of Genesis; but every thinking being in
Paris or out of it had exhausted thought in the effort to prove
Unity, Continuity, Purpose, Order, Law, Truth, the Universe, God,
after having begun by taking it for granted, and discovering, to
their profound dismay, that some minds denied it. The direction
of mind, as a single force of nature, had been constant since
history began. Its own unity had created a universe the essence
of which was abstract Truth; the Absolute; God! To Thomas
Aquinas, the universe was still a person; to Spinoza, a
substance; to Kant, Truth was the essence of the "I"; an innate
conviction; a categorical imperative; to Poincare, it was a
convenience; and to Karl Pearson, a medium of exchange.

  The historian never stopped repeating to himself that he knew
nothing about it; that he was a mere instrument of measure, a
barometer, pedometer, radiometer; and that his whole share in the
matter was restricted to the measurement of thought-motion as
marked by the accepted thinkers. He took their facts for granted.
He knew no more than a firefly about rays -- or about race -- or
sex -- or ennui -- or a bar of music -- or a pang of love -- or a
grain of musk -- or of phosphorus -- or conscience -- or duty --
or the force of Euclidian geometry -- or non-Euclidian -- or heat
-- or light -- or osmosis -- or electrolysis -- or the magnet --
or ether -- or vis inertiae -- or gravitation -- or cohesion --
or elasticity -- or surface tension -- or capillary attraction --
or Brownian motion -- or of some scores, or thousands, or
millions of chemical attractions, repulsions or indifferences
which were busy within and without him; or, in brief, of Force
itself, which, he was credibly informed, bore some dozen
definitions in the textbooks, mostly contradictory, and all, as
he was assured, beyond his intelligence; but summed up in the
dictum of the last and highest science, that Motion seems to be
Matter and Matter seems to be Motion, yet "we are probably
incapable of discovering" what either is. History had no need to
ask what either might be; all it needed to know was the admission
of ignorance; the mere fact of multiplicity baffling science.
Even as to the fact, science disputed, but radium happened to
radiate something that seemed to explode the scientific magazine,
bringing thought, for the time, to a standstill; though, in the
line of thought-movement in history, radium was merely the next
position, familiar and inexplicable since Zeno and his arrow:
continuous from the beginning of time, and discontinuous at each
successive point. History set it down on the record -- pricked
its position on the chart -- and waited to be led, or misled,
once more.

  The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values
his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to
falsify his facts. The laws of history only repeat the lines of
force or thought. Yet though his will be iron, he cannot help now
and then resuming his humanity or simianity in face of a fear.
The motion of thought had the same value as the motion of a
cannon-ball seen approaching the observer on a direct line
through the air. One could watch its curve for five thousand
years. Its first violent acceleration in historical times had
ended in the catastrophe of 310. The next swerve of direction
occurred towards 1500. Galileo and Bacon gave a still newer curve
to it, which altered its values; but all these changes had never
altered the continuity. Only in 1900, the continuity snapped.

  Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world sometimes dated
it from 1893, by the Roentgen rays, or from 1898, by the Curie's
radium; but in 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of
British science that the human race without exception had lived
and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the
century. The date was convenient, and convenience was truth.

  The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world
which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine
it, and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a
land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an
accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion
imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the
universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved
itself back into anarchy at last. He could not deny that the law
of the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure,
especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man; the
perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the perpetual
revolt of society against the law it had established; the
perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual
appeal to force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a
higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the
perpetual victory of the principles of freedom, and their
perpetual conversion into principles of power; but the staggering
problem was the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial
order which nature abhorred. The physicists had a phrase for it,
unintelligible to the vulgar: "All that we win is a battle --
lost in advance -- with the irreversible phenomena in the
background of nature."

  All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He saw
his education complete; and was sorry he ever began it. As a
matter of taste, he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century
education when God was a father and nature a mother, and all was
for the best in a scientific universe. He repudiated all share in
the world as it was to be, and yet he could not detect the point
where his responsibility began or ended.

  As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had
behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit
its conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that
embodied all its notions of the perfect. Man knew it was true
because he made it, and he loved it for the same reason. He
sacrificed millions of lives to acquire his unity, but he
achieved it, and justly thought it a work of art. The woman
especially did great things, creating her deities on a higher
level than the male, and, in the end, compelling the man to
accept the Virgin as guardian of the man's God. The man's part in
his Universe was secondary, but the woman was at home there, and
sacrificed herself without limit to make it habitable, when man
permitted it, as sometimes happened for brief intervals of war
and famine; but she could not provide protection against forces
of nature. She did not think of her universe as a raft to which
the limpets stuck for life in the surge of a supersensual chaos;
she conceived herself and her family as the centre and flower of
an ordered universe which she knew to be unity because she had
made it after the image of her own fecundity; and this creation
of hers was surrounded by beauties and perfections which she knew
to be real because she herself had imagined them.

  Even the masculine philosopher admired and loved and celebrated
her triumph, and the greatest of them sang it in the noblest of
his verses: --

  "Alma Venus, coeli subter labentia signa
   Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferenteis
   Concelebras . . . . . . .
   Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas,
   Nec sine te quidquam dias in luminis oras
   Exoritur, neque fit laetum neque amabile quidquam;
   Te sociam studeo!"

  Neither man nor woman ever wanted to quit this Eden of their
own invention, and could no more have done it of their own accord
than the pearl oyster could quit its shell; but although the
oyster might perhaps assimilate or embalm a grain of sand forced
into its aperture, it could only perish in face of the cyclonic
hurricane or the volcanic upheaval of its bed. Her supersensual
chaos killed her.

  Such seemed the theory of history to be imposed by science on
the generation born after 1900. For this theory, Adams felt
himself in no way responsible. Even as historian he had made it
his duty always to speak with respect of everything that had ever
been thought respectable -- except an occasional statesman; but
he had submitted to force all his life, and he meant to accept it
for the future as for the past. All his efforts had been turned
only to the search for its channel. He never invented his facts;
they were furnished him by the only authorities he could find. As
for himself, according to Helmholz, Ernst Mach, and Arthur
Balfour, he was henceforth to be a conscious ball of vibrating
motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of
rotation or vibration, rolling at the feet of the Virgin at
Chartres or of M. Poincare in an attic at Paris, a centre of
supersensual chaos. The discovery did not distress him. A
solitary man of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic
cathedral or a Paris apartment, need fret himself little about a
few illusions more or less. He should have learned his lesson
fifty years earlier; the times had long passed when a student
could stop before chaos or order; he had no choice but to march
with his world.

  Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered
by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human
mind has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the
chaos which caged it; how -- appearing suddenly and inexplicably
out of some unknown and unimaginable void; passing half its known
life in the mental chaos of sleep; victim even when awake, to its
own ill-adjustment, to disease, to age, to external suggestion,
to nature's compulsion; doubting its sensations, and, in the last
resort, trusting only to instruments and averages -- after sixty
or seventy years of growing astonishment, the mind wakes to find
itself looking blankly into the void of death. That it should
profess itself pleased by this performance was all that the
highest rules of good breeding could ask; but that it should
actually be satisfied would prove that it existed only as idiocy.

  Satisfied, the future generation could scarcely think itself,
for even when the mind existed in a universe of its own creation,
it had never been quite at ease. As far as one ventured to
interpret actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself
by an infinite series of infinitely delicate adjustments forced
on it by the infinite motion of an infinite chaos of motion;
dragged at one moment into the unknowable and unthinkable, then
trying to scramble back within its senses and to bar the chaos
out, but always assimilating bits of it, until at last, in 1900,
a new avalanche of unknown forces had fallen on it, which
required new mental powers to control. If this view was correct,
the mind could gain nothing by flight or by fight; it must merge
in its supersensual multiverse, or succumb to it.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXXII

VIS NOVA (1903-1904)

PARIS after midsummer is a place where only the industrious poor
remain, unless they can get away; but Adams knew no spot where
history would be better off, and the calm of the Champs Elysees
was so deep that when Mr. de Witte was promoted to a powerless
dignity, no one whispered that the promotion was disgrace, while
one might have supposed, from the silence, that the Viceroy
Alexeieff had reoccupied Manchuria as a fulfilment of
treaty-obligation. For once, the conspiracy of silence became
crime. Never had so modern and so vital a riddle been put before
Western society, but society shut its eyes. Manchuria knew every
step into war; Japan had completed every preparation; Alexeieff
had collected his army and fleet at Port Arthur, mounting his
siege guns and laying in enormous stores, ready for the expected
attack; from Yokohama to Irkutsk, the whole East was under war
conditions; but Europe knew nothing. The banks would allow no
disturbance; the press said not a word, and even the embassies
were silent. Every anarchist in Europe buzzed excitement and
began to collect in groups, but the Hotel Ritz was calm, and the
Grand Dukes who swarmed there professed to know directly from the
Winter Palace that there would be no war.

  As usual, Adams felt as ignorant as the best-informed
statesman, and though the sense was familiar, for once he could
see that the ignorance was assumed. After nearly fifty years of
experience, he could not understand how the comedy could be so
well acted. Even as late as November, diplomats were gravely
asking every passer-by for his opinion, and avowed none of their
own except what was directly authorized at St. Petersburg. He
could make nothing of it. He found himself in face of his new
problem -- the workings of Russian inertia -- and he could
conceive no way of forming an opinion how much was real and how
much was comedy had he been in the Winter Palace himself. At
times he doubted whether the Grand Dukes or the Czar knew, but
old diplomatic training forbade him to admit such innocence.

  This was the situation at Christmas when he left Paris. On
January 6, 1904, he reached Washington, where the contrast of
atmosphere astonished him, for he had never before seen his
country think as a world-power. No doubt, Japanese diplomacy had
much to do with this alertness, but the immense superiority of
Japanese diplomacy should have been more evident in Europe than
in America, and in any case, could not account for the total
disappearance of Russian diplomacy. A government by inertia
greatly disconcerted study. One was led to suspect that Cassini
never heard from his Government, and that Lamsdorf knew nothing
of his own department; yet no such suspicion could be admitted.
Cassini resorted to transparent blague: "Japan seemed infatuated
even to the point of war! But what can the Japanese do? As usual,
sit on their heels and pray to Buddha!" One of the oldest and
most accomplished diplomatists in the service could never show
his hand so empty as this if he held a card to play; but he never
betrayed stronger resource behind. "If any Japanese succeed in
entering Manchuria, they will never get out of it alive." The
inertia of Cassini, who was naturally the most energetic of
diplomatists, deeply interested a student of race-inertia, whose
mind had lost itself in the attempt to invent scales of force.

  The air of official Russia seemed most dramatic in the air of
the White House, by contrast with the outspoken candor of the
President. Reticence had no place there. Every one in America saw
that, whether Russia or Japan were victim, one of the decisive
struggles in American history was pending, and any presence of
secrecy or indifference was absurd. Interest was acute, and
curiosity intense, for no one knew what the Russian Government
meant or wanted, while war had become a question of days. To an
impartial student who gravely doubted whether the Czar himself
acted as a conscious force or an inert weight, the
straight-forward avowals of Roosevelt had singular value as a
standard of measure. By chance it happened that Adams was obliged
to take the place of his brother Brooks at the Diplomatic
Reception immediately after his return home, and the part of
proxy included his supping at the President's table, with
Secretary Root on one side, the President opposite, and Miss
Chamberlain between them. Naturally the President talked and the
guests listened; which seemed, to one who had just escaped from
the European conspiracy of silence, like drawing a free breath
after stifling. Roosevelt, as every one knew, was always an
amusing talker, and had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond
any other man of great importance in the world, except the Kaiser
Wilhelm and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the father of his guest at
table; and this evening he spared none. With the usual abuse of
the quos ego, common to vigorous statesmen, he said all that he
thought about Russians and Japanese, as well as about Boers and
British, without restraint, in full hearing of twenty people, to
the entire satisfaction of his listener; and concluded by
declaring that war was imminent; that it ought to be stopped;
that it could be stopped: " I could do it myself; I could stop it
to-morrow!" and he went on to explain his reasons for restraint.

  That he was right, and that, within another generation, his
successor would do what he would have liked to do, made no shadow
of doubt in the mind of his hearer, though it would have been
folly when he last supped at the White House in the dynasty of
President Hayes; but the listener cared less for the assertion of
power, than for the vigor of view. The truth was evident enough,
ordinary, even commonplace if one liked, but it was not a truth
of inertia, nor was the method to be mistaken for inert.

  Nor could the force of Japan be mistaken for a moment as a
force of inertia, although its aggressive was taken as
methodically -- as mathematically -- as a demonstration of
Euclid, and Adams thought that as against any but Russians it
would have lost its opening. Each day counted as a measure of
relative energy on the historical scale, and the whole story made
a Grammar of new Science quite as instructive as that of Pearson.

  The forces thus launched were bound to reach some new
equilibrium which would prove the problem in one sense or
another, and the war had no personal value for Adams except that
it gave Hay his last great triumph. He had carried on his long
contest with Cassini so skillfully that no one knew enough to
understand the diplomatic perfection of his work, which contained
no error; but such success is complete only when it is invisible,
and his victory at last was victory of judgment, not of act. He
could do nothing, and the whole country would have sprung on him
had he tried. Japan and England saved his "open door" and fought
his battle. All that remained for him was to make the peace, and
Adams set his heart on getting the peace quickly in hand, for
Hay's sake as well as for that of Russia. He thought then that it
could be done in one campaign, for he knew that, in a military
sense, the fall of Port Arthur must lead to negotiation, and
every one felt that Hay would inevitably direct it; but the race
was close, and while the war grew every day in proportions, Hay's
strength every day declined.

  St. Gaudens came on to model his head, and Sargent painted his
portrait, two steps essential to immortality which he bore with a
certain degree of resignation, but he grumbled when the President
made him go to St. Louis to address some gathering at the
Exposition; and Mrs. Hay bade Adams go with them, for whatever
use he could suppose himself to serve. He professed the religion
of World's Fairs, without which he held education to be a blind
impossibility; and obeyed Mrs. Hay's bidding the more readily
because it united his two educations in one; but theory and
practice were put to equally severe test at St. Louis. Ten years
had passed since he last crossed the Mississippi, and he found
everything new. In this great region from Pittsburgh through Ohio
and Indiana, agriculture had made way for steam; tall chimneys
reeked smoke on every horizon, and dirty suburbs filled with
scrap-iron, scrap-paper and cinders, formed the setting of every
town. Evidently, cleanliness was not to be the birthmark of the
new American, but this matter of discards concerned the measure
of force little, while the chimneys and cinders concerned it so
much that Adams thought the Secretary of State should have rushed
to the platform at every station to ask who were the people; for
the American of the prime seemed to be extinct with the Shawnee
and the buffalo.

  The subject grew quickly delicate. History told little about
these millions of Germans and Slavs, or whatever their
race-names, who had overflowed these regions as though the Rhine
and the Danube had turned their floods into the Ohio. John Hay
was as strange to the Mississippi River as though he had not been
bred on its shores, and the city of St. Louis had turned its back
on the noblest work of nature, leaving it bankrupt between its
own banks. The new American showed his parentage proudly; he was
the child of steam and the brother of the dynamo, and already,
within less than thirty years, this mass of mixed humanities,
brought together by steam, was squeezed and welded into approach
to shape; a product of so much mechanical power, and bearing no
distinctive marks but that of its pressure. The new American,
like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the
European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church,
and the features would follow the parentage.

  The St. Louis Exposition was its first creation in the
twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting. One
saw here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without
history, education, unity, or art, and with little capital --
without even an element of natural interest except the river
which it studiously ignored -- but doing what London, Paris, or
New York would have shrunk from attempting. This new social
conglomerate, with no tie but its steam-power and not much of
that, threw away thirty or forty million dollars on a pageant as
ephemeral as a stage flat. The world had never witnessed so
marvellous a phantasm by night Arabia's crimson sands had never
returned a glow half so astonishing, as one wandered among long
lines of white palaces, exquisitely lighted by thousands on
thousands of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable in
their sensuous depths; all in deep silence, profound solitude,
listening for a voice or a foot-fall or the plash of an oar, as
though the Emir Mirza were displaying the beauties of this City
of Brass, which could show nothing half so beautiful as this
illumination, with its vast, white, monumental solitude, bathed
in the pure light of setting suns. One enjoyed it with iniquitous
rapture, not because of exhibits but rather because of their
want. Here was a paradox like the stellar universe that fitted
one's mental faults. Had there been no exhibits at all, and no
visitors, one would have enjoyed it only the more.

[combinator]

  Here education found new forage. That the power was wasted, the
art indiflerent, the economic failure complete, added just so
much to the interest. The chaos of education approached a dream.
One asked one's self whether this extravagance reflected the past
or imaged the future; whether it was a creation of the old
American or a promise of the new one. No prophet could be
believed, but a pilgrim of power, without constituency to
flatter, might allow himself to hope. The prospect from the
Exposition was pleasant; one seemed to see almost an adequate
motive for power; almost a scheme for progress. In another
half-century, the people of the central valleys should have
hundreds of millions to throw away more easily than in 1900 they
could throw away tens; and by that time they might know what they
wanted. Possibly they might even have learned how to reach it.

  This was an optimist's hope, shared by few except pilgrims of
World's Fairs, and frankly dropped by the multitude, for, east of
the Mississippi, the St. Louis Exposition met a deliberate
conspiracy of silence, discouraging, beyond measure, to an
optimistic dream of future strength in American expression. The
party got back to Washington on May 24, and before sailing for
Europe, Adams went over, one warm evening, to bid good-bye on the
garden-porch of the White House. He found himself the first
person who urged Mrs. Roosevelt to visit the Exposition for its
beauty, and, as far as he ever knew, the last.

  He left St. Louis May 22, 1904, and on Sunday, June 5, found
himself again in the town of Coutances, where the people of
Normandy had built, towards the year 1250, an Exposition which
architects still admired and tourists visited, for it was thought
singularly expressive of force as well as of grace in the Virgin.
On this Sunday, the Norman world was celebrating a pretty
church-feast -- the Fete Dieu -- and the streets were filled with
altars to the Virgin, covered with flowers and foliage; the
pavements strewn with paths of leaves and the spring handiwork of
nature; the cathedral densely thronged at mass. The scene was
graceful. The Virgin did not shut her costly Exposition on
Sunday, or any other day, even to American senators who had shut
the St. Louis Exposition to her -- or for her; and a historical
tramp would gladly have offered a candle, or even a candle-stick
in her honor, if she would have taught him her relation with the
deity of the Senators. The power of the Virgin had been plainly
One, embracing all human activity; while the power of the Senate,
or its deity, seemed -- might one say -- to be more or less
ashamed of man and his work. The matter had no great interest as
far as it concerned the somewhat obscure mental processes of
Senators who could probably have given no clearer idea than
priests of the deity they supposed themselves to honor -- if that
was indeed their purpose; but it interested a student of force,
curious to measure its manifestations. Apparently the Virgin --
or her Son -- had no longer the force to build expositions that
one cared to visit, but had the force to close them. The force
was still real, serious, and, at St. Louis, had been anxiously
measured in actual money-value.

  That it was actual and serious in France as in the Senate
Chamber at Washington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to
buy an automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because this
was the form of force which Adams most abominated. He had set
aside the summer for study of the Virgin, not as a sentiment but
as a motive power, which had left monuments widely scattered and
not easily reached. The automobile alone could unite them in any
reasonable sequence, and although the force of the automobile,
for the purposes of a commercial traveller, seemed to have no
relation whatever to the force that inspired a Gothic cathedral,
the Virgin in the twelfth century would have guided and
controlled both bag-man and architect, as she controlled the
seeker of history. In his mind the problem offered itself as to
Newton; it was a matter of mutual attraction, and he knew it, in
his own case, to be a formula as precise as s = gt^2/2, if he
could but experimentally prove it. Of the attraction he needed no
proof on his own account; the costs of his automobile were more
than sufficient: but as teacher he needed to speak for others
than himself. For him, the Virgin was an adorable mistress, who
led the automobile and its owner where she would, to her
wonderful palaces and chateaux, from Chartres to Rouen, and
thence to Amiens and Laon, and a score of others, kindly
receiving, amusing, charming and dazzling her lover, as though
she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever dreamed.
He never doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre of
his being, and could not more dispute its mastery than he could
dispute the force of gravitation of which he knew nothing but the
formula. He was only too glad to yield himself entirely, not to
her charm or to any sentimentality of religion, but to her mental
and physical energy of creation which had built up these World's
Fairs of thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and St.
Louis pale.

  "Both were faiths and both are gone," said Matthew Arnold of
the Greek and Norse divinities; but the business of a student was
to ask where they had gone. The Virgin had not even altogether
gone; her fading away had been excessively slow. Her adorer had
pursued her too long, too far, and into too many manifestations
of her power, to admit that she had any equivalent either of
quantity or kind, in the actual world, but he could still less
admit her annihilation as energy.

  So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had
found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her
lovers. Her own age had no time-measure. For years past, incited
by John La Farge, Adams had devoted his summer schooling to the
study of her glass at Chartres and elsewhere, and if the
automobile had one vitesse more useful than another, it was that
of a century a minute; that of passing from one century to
another without break. The centuries dropped like autumn leaves
in one's road, and one was not fined for running over them too
fast. When the thirteenth lost breath, the fourteenth caught on,
and the sixteenth ran close ahead. The hunt for the Virgin's
glass opened rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century ran
riot in sensuous worship. Then the ocean of religion, which had
flooded France, broke into Shelley's light dissolved in
star-showers thrown, which had left every remote village strewn
with fragments that flashed like jewels, and were tossed into
hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness. One dared not pass a
parish church in Champagne or Touraine without stopping to look
for its window of fragments, where one's glass discovered the
Christ-child in his manger, nursed by the head of a fragmentary
donkey, with a Cupid playing into its long ears from the
balustrade of a Venetian palace, guarded by a legless Flemish
leibwache, standing on his head with a broken halbert; all
invoked in prayer by remnants of the donors and their children
that might have been drawn by Fouquet or Pinturicchio, in colors
as fresh and living as the day they were burned in, and with
feeling that still consoled the faithful for the paradise they
had paid for and lost. France abounds in sixteenth-century glass.
Paris alone contains acres of it, and the neighborhood within
fifty miles contains scores of churches where the student may
still imagine himself three hundred years old, kneeling before
the Virgin's window in the silent solitude of an empty faith,
crying his culp, beating his breast, confessing his historical
sins, weighed down by the rubbish of sixty-six years' education,
and still desperately hoping to understand.

  He understood a little, though not much. The sixteenth century
had a value of its own, as though the ONE had become several, and
Unity had counted more than Three, though the Multiple still
showed modest numbers. The glass had gone back to the Roman
Empire and forward to the American continent; it betrayed
sympathy with Montaigne and Shakespeare; but the Virgin was still
supreme. At Beauvais in the Church of St. Stephen was a superb
tree of Jesse, famous as the work of Engrand le Prince, about
1570 or 1580, in whose branches, among the fourteen ancestors of
the Virgin, three-fourths bore features of the Kings of France,
among them Francis I and Henry II, who were hardly more edifying
than Kings of Israel, and at least unusual as sources of divine
purity. Compared with the still more famous Tree of Jesse at
Chartres, dating from 1150 or thereabouts, must one declare that
Engrand le Prince proved progress? and in what direction?
Complexity, Multiplicity, even a step towards Anarchy, it might
suggest, but what step towards perfection?

  One late afternoon, at midsummer, the Virgin's pilgrim was
wandering through the streets of Troyes in close and intimate
conversation with Thibaut of Champagne and his highly intelligent
seneschal, the Sieur de Joinville, when he noticed one or two men
looking at a bit of paper stuck in a window. Approaching, he read
that M. de Plehve had been assassinated at St. Petersburg. The
mad mixture of Russia and the Crusades, of the Hippodrome and the
Renaissance, drove him for refuge into the fascinating Church of
St. Pantaleon near by. Martyrs, murderers, Caesars, saints and
assassins -- half in glass and half in telegram; chaos of time,
place, morals, forces and motive -- gave him vertigo. Had one sat
all one's life on the steps of Ara Coeli for this? Was
assassination forever to be the last word of Progress? No one in
the street had shown a sign of protest; he himself felt none; the
charming Church with its delightful windows, in its exquisite
absence of other tourists, took a keener expression of celestial
peace than could have been given it by any contrast short of
explosive murder; the conservative Christian anarchist had come
to his own, but which was he -- the murderer or the murdered ?

  The Virgin herself never looked so winning -- so One -- as in
this scandalous failure of her Grace. To what purpose had she
existed, if, after nineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier
than when she was born? The stupendous failure of Christianity
tortured history. The effort for Unity could not be a partial
success; even alternating Unity resolved itself into meaningless
motion at last. To the tired student, the idea that he must give
it up seemed sheer senility. As long as he could whisper, he
would go on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to meet his creator
with the admission that the creation had taught him nothing
except that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled
triangle might for convenience be taken as equal to something
else. Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if
only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself
somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if
the standard formulas failed. There, whether finished or not,
education stopped. The formula, once made, could be but verified.

  The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old
formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after
all, the object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no
absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the
thread of history without breaking it. Among indefinite possible
orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the
observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly
called Henry Adams. As term of a nineteenth-century education,
one sought a common factor for certain definite historical
fractions. Any schoolboy could work out the problem if he were
given the right to state it in his own terms. 

  Therefore, when the fogs and frosts stopped his slaughter of
the centuries, and shut him up again in his garret, he sat down
as though he were again a boy at school to shape after his own
needs the values of a Dynamic Theory of History.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXXIII

A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)

  A DYNAMIC theory, like most theories, begins by begging the
question: it defines Progress as the development and economy of
Forces. Further, it defines force as anything that does, or helps
to do work. Man is a force; so is the sun; so is a mathematical
point, though without dimensions or known existence.

  Man commonly begs the question again taking for granted that he
captures the forces. A dynamic theory, assigning attractive force
to opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass, takes for
granted that the forces of nature capture man. The sum of force
attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called man is attracted; he
suffers education or growth; he is the sum of the forces that
attract him; his body and his thought are alike their product;
the movement of the forces controls the progress of his mind,
since he can know nothing but the motions which impinge on his
senses, whose sum makes education.

  For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a
spider in its web, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature
dance like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them
when it can; but it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory
of force is sound. The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory,
and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking
apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of
its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or
synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the
honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire
taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running
water probably taught him even more, especially in his first
lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting
themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and
carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and
grains were academies of study. With little or no effort on his
part, all these forces formed his thought, induced his action,
and even shaped his figure.

  Long before history began, his education was complete, for the
record could not have been started until he had been taught to
record. The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind
as a reflection of his own unity, containing all forces except
himself. Either separately, or in groups, or as a whole, these
forces never ceased to act on him, enlarging his mind as they
enlarged the surface foliage of a vegetable, and the mind needed
only to respond, as the forests did, to these attractions.
Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius;
selection between them is the highest science; their mass is the
highest educator. Man always made, and still makes, grotesque
blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from
the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the
whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To
this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though
science can no longer give to force a name.

  Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other
forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He
felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a
bow or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sough fetish
or a planet in the world beyond. He cared little to know its
immediate use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he
could conceive to have possible value in this or any other
existence. He waited for the object to teach him its use, or want
of use, and the process was slow. He may have gone on for
hundreds of thousands of years, waiting for Nature to tell him
her secrets; and, to his rivals among the monkeys, Nature has
taught no more than at their start; but certain lines of force
were capable of acting on individual apes, and mechanically
selecting types of race or sources of variation. The individual
that responded or reacted to lines of new force then was possibly
the same individual that reacts on it now, and his conception of
the unity seems never to have changed in spite of the increasing
diversity of forces; but the theory of variation is an affair of
other science than history, and matters nothing to dynamics. The
individual or the race would be educated on the same lines of
illusion, which, according to Arthur Balfour, had not essentially
varied down to the year 1900.

  To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine,
and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a
word which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force
whether in detail or mass. Unable to define Force as a unity, man
symbolized it and pursued it, both in himself, and in the
infinite, as philosophy and theology; the mind is itself the
subtlest of all known forces, and its self-introspection
necessarily created a science which had the singular value of
lifting his education, at the start, to the finest, subtlest, and
broadest training both in analysis and synthesis, so that, if
language is a test, he must have reached his highest powers early
in his history; while the mere motive remained as simple an
appetite for power as the tribal greed which led him to trap an
elephant. Hunger, whether for food or for the infinite, sets in
motion multiplicity and infinity of thought, and the sure hope of
gaining a share of infinite power in eternal life would lift most
minds to effort.

  He had reached this completeness five thousand years ago, and
added nothing to his stock of known forces for a very long time.
The mass of nature exercised on him so feeble an attraction that
one can scarcely account for his apparent motion. Only a
historian of very exceptional knowledge would venture to say at
what date between 3000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the momentum of Europe
was greatest; but such progress as the world made consisted in
economies of energy rather than in its development; it was proved
in mathematics, measured by names like Archimedes, Aristarchus,
Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law, measured by a number of
names which Adams had begun life by failing to learn; or in
coinage, which was most beautiful near its beginning, and most
barbarous at its close; or it was shown in roads, or the size of
ships, or harbors; or by the use of metals, instruments, and
writing; all of them economies of force, sometimes more forceful
than the forces they helped; but the roads were still travelled
by the horse, the ass, the camel, or the slave; the ships were
still propelled by sails or oars; the lever, the spring, and the
screw bounded the region of applied mechanics. Even the metals
were old.

  Much the same thing could be said of religious or supernatural
forces. Down to the year 300 of the Christian era they were
little changed, and in spite of Plato and the sceptics were more
apparently chaotic than ever. The experience of three thousand
years had educated society to feel the vastness of Nature, and
the infinity of her resources of power, but even this increase of
attraction had not yet caused economies in its methods of
pursuit.

  There the Western world stood till the year A.D. 305, when the
Emperor Diocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke
down on the steps of Ara Coeli, his path blocked by the
scandalous failure of civilization at the moment it had achieved
complete success. In the year 305 the empire had solved the
problems of Europe more completely than they have ever been
solved since. The Pax Romana, the Civil Law, and Free Trade
should, in four hundred years, have put Europe far in advance of
the point reached by modern society in the four hundred years
since 1500, when conditions were less simple.

  The efforts to explain, or explain away, this scandal had been
incessant, but none suited Adams unless it were the economic
theory of adverse exchanges and exhaustion of minerals; but
nations are not ruined beyond a certain point by adverse
exchanges, and Rome had by no means exhausted her resources. On
the contrary, the empire developed resources and energies quite
astounding. No other four hundred years of history before A.D.
1800 knew anything like it; and although some of these
developments, like the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts, and
harbors, were rather economies than force, yet in northwestern
Europe alone the empire had developed three energies -- France,
England, and Germany -- competent to master the world. The
trouble seemed rather to be that the empire developed too much
energy, and too fast.

  A dynamic law requires that two masses -- nature and man --
must go on, reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun
and a comet react on each other, and that any appearance of
stoppage is illusive. The theory seems to exact excess, rather
than deficiency, of action and reaction to account for the
dissolution of the Roman Empire, which should, as a problem of
mechanics, have been torn to pieces by acceleration. If the
student means to try the experiment of framing a dynamic law, he
must assign values to the forces of attraction that caused the
trouble; and in this case he has them in plain evidence. With the
relentless logic that stamped Roman thought, the empire, which
had established unity on earth, could not help establishing unity
in heaven. It was induced by its dynamic necessities to economize
the gods.

  The Church has never ceased to protest against the charge that
Christianity ruined the empire, and, with its usual force, has
pointed out that its reforms alone saved the State. Any dynamic
theory gladly admits it. All it asks is to find and follow the
force that attracts. The Church points out this force in the
Cross, and history needs only to follow it. The empire loudly
asserted its motive. Good taste forbids saying that Constantine
the Great speculated as audaciously as a modern stock-broker on
values of which he knew at the utmost only the volume; or that he
merged all uncertain forces into a single trust, which he
enormously overcapitalized, and forced on the market; but this is
the substance of what Constantine himself said in his Edict of
Milan in the year 313, which admitted Christianity into the Trust
of State Religions. Regarded as an Act of Congress, it runs: "We
have resolved to grant to Christians as well as all others the
liberty to practice the religion they prefer, in order that
whatever exists of divinity or celestial power may help and favor
us and all who are under our government." The empire pursued
power -- not merely spiritual but physical -- in the sense in
which Constantine issued his army order the year before, at the
battle of the Milvian Bridge: In hoc signo vinces! using the
Cross as a train of artillery, which, to his mind, it was.
Society accepted it in the same character. Eighty years
afterwards, Theodosius marched against his rival Eugene with the
Cross for physical champion; and Eugene raised the image of
Hercules to fight for the pagans; while society on both sides
looked on, as though it were a boxing-match, to decide a final
test of force between the divine powers. The Church was powerless
to raise the ideal. What is now known as religion affected the
mind of old society but little. The laity, the people, the
million, almost to a man, bet on the gods as they bet on a horse.

  No doubt the Church did all it could to purify the process, but
society was almost wholly pagan in its point of view, and was
drawn to the Cross because, in its system of physics, the Cross
had absorbed all the old occult or fetish-power. The symbol
represented the sum of nature - the Energy of modern science -
and society believed it to be as real as X-rays; perhaps it was!
The emperors used it like gunpowder in politics; the physicians
used it like rays in medicine; the dying clung to it as the
quintessence of force, to protect them from the forces of evil on
their road to the next life.

  Throughout these four centuries the empire knew that religion
disturbed economy, for even the cost of heathen incense affected
the exchanges; but no one could afford to buy or construct a
costly and complicated machine when he could hire an occult force
at trifling expense. Fetish-power was cheap and satisfactory,
down to a certain point. Turgot and Auguste Comte long ago fixed
this stage of economy as a necessary phase of social education,
and historians seem now to accept it as the only gain yet made
towards scientific history. Great numbers of educated people --
perhaps a majority -- cling to the method still, and practice it
more or less strictly; but, until quite recently, no other was
known. The only occult power at man's disposal was fetish.
Against it, no mechanical force could compete except within
narrow limits.

  Outside of occult or fetish-power, the Roman world was
incredibly poor. It knew but one productive energy resembling a
modern machine -- the slave. No artificial force of serious value
was applied to production or transportation, and when society
developed itself so rapidly in political and social lines, it had
no other means of keeping its economy on the same level than to
extend its slave-system and its fetish-system to the utmost.

The result might have been stated in a mathematical formula as
early as the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome
fell. The economic needs of a violently centralizing society
forced the empire to enlarge its slave-system until the
slave-system consumed itself and the empire too, leaving society
no resource but further enlargement of its religious system in
order to compensate for the losses and horrors of the failure.
For a vicious circle, its mathematical completeness approached
perfection. The dynamic law of attraction and reaction needed
only a Newton to fix it in algebraic form.

[combinator]

  At last, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome, and the slave-ridden,
agricultural, uncommercial Western Empire -- the poorer and less
Christianized half -- went to pieces. Society, though terribly
shocked by the horrors of Alaric's storm, felt still more deeply
the disappointment in its new power, the Cross, which had failed
to protect its Church. The outcry against the Cross became so
loud among Christians that its literary champion, Bishop
Augustine of Hippo -- a town between Algiers and Tunis -- was led
to write a famous treatise in defence of the Cross, familiar
still to every scholar, in which he defended feebly the
mechanical value of the symbol -- arguing only that pagan symbols
equally failed -- but insisted on its spiritual value in the
Civitas Dei which had taken the place of the Civitas Romae in
human interest. "Granted that we have lost all we had! Have we
lost faith? Have we lost piety? Have we lost the wealth of the
inner man who is rich before God? These are the wealth of
Christians!" The Civitas Dei, in its turn, became the sum of
attraction for the Western world, though it also showed the same
weakness in mechanics that had wrecked the Civitas Romae. St.
Augustine and his people perished at Hippo towards 430, leaving
society in appearance dull to new attraction.

  Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of
experimenting on occult force of every kind is such as to absorb
all the free thought of the human race. The gods did their work;
history has no quarrel with them; they led, educated, enlarged
the mind; taught knowledge; betrayed ignorance; stimulated
effort. So little is known about the mind -- whether social,
racial, sexual or heritable; whether material or spiritual;
whether animal, vegetable or mineral -- that history is inclined
to avoid it altogether; but nothing forbids one to admit, for
convenience, that it may assimilate food like the body, storing
new force and growing, like a forest, with the storage. The brain
has not yet revealed its mysterious mechanism of gray matter.
Never has Nature offered it so violent a stimulant as when she
opened to it the possibility of sharing infinite power in eternal
life, and it might well need a thousand years of prolonged and
intense experiment to prove the value of the motive. During these
so-called Middle Ages, the Western mind reacted in many forms, on
many sides, expressing its motives in modes, such as Romanesque
and Gothic architecture, glass windows and mosaic walls,
sculpture and poetry, war and love, which still affect some
people as the noblest work of man, so that, even to-day, great
masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel from far countries to
look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo and Pisa, Assisi, Cordova,
Chartres, with vague notions about the force that created them,
but with a certain surprise that a social mind of such singular
energy and unity should still lurk in their shadows.

  The tourist more rarely visits Constantinople or studies the
architecture of Sancta Sofia, but when he does, he is distinctly
conscious of forces not quite the same. Justinian has not the
simplicity of Charlemagne. The Eastern Empire showed an activity
and variety of forces that classical Europe had never possessed.
The navy of Nicephoras Phocas in the tenth century would have
annihilated in half an hour any navy that Carthage or Athens or
Rome ever set afloat. The dynamic scheme began by asserting
rather recklessly that between the Pyramids (B.C. 3000), and the
Cross (A.D. 300), no new force affected Western progress, and
antiquarians may easily dispute the fact; but in any case the
motive influence, old or new, which raised both Pyramids and
Cross was the same attraction of power in a future life that
raised the dome of Sancta Sofia and the Cathedral at Amiens,
however much it was altered, enlarged, or removed to distance in
space. Therefore, no single event has more puzzled historians
than the sudden, unexplained appearance of at least two new
natural forces of the highest educational value in mechanics, for
the first time within record of history. Literally, these two
forces seemed to drop from the sky at the precise moment when the
Cross on one side and the Crescent on the other, proclaimed the
complete triumph of the Civitas Dei. Had the Manichean doctrine
of Good and Evil as rival deities been orthodox, it would alone
have accounted for this simultaneous victory of hostile powers.

  Of the compass, as a step towards demonstration of the dynamic
law, one may confidently say that it proved, better than any
other force, the widening scope of the mind, since it widened
immensely the range of contact between nature and thought. The
compass educated. This must prove itself as needing no proof.

  Of Greek fire and gunpowder, the same thing cannot certainly be
said, for they have the air of accidents due to the attraction of
religious motives. They belong to the spiritual world; or to the
doubtful ground of Magic which lay between Good and Evil. They
were chemical forces, mostly explosives, which acted and still
act as the most violent educators ever known to man, but they
were justly feared as diabolic, and whatever insolence man may
have risked towards the milder teachers of his infancy, he was an
abject pupil towards explosives. The Sieur de Joinville left a
record of the energy with which the relatively harmless Greek
fire educated and enlarged the French mind in a single night in
the year 1249, when the crusaders were trying to advance on
Cairo. The good king St. Louis and all his staff dropped on their
knees at every fiery flame that flew by, praying -- "God have
pity on us!" and never had man more reason to call on his gods
than they, for the battle of religion between Christian and
Saracen was trifling compared with that of education between
gunpowder and the Cross.

  The fiction that society educated itself, or aimed at a
conscious purpose, was upset by the compass and gunpowder which
dragged and drove Europe at will through frightful bogs of
learning. At first, the apparent lag for want of volume in the
new energies lasted one or two centuries, which closed the great
epochs of emotion by the Gothic cathedrals and scholastic
theology. The moment had Greek beauty and more than Greek unity,
but it was brief; and for another century or two, Western society
seemed to float in space without apparent motion. Yet the
attractive mass of nature's energy continued to attract, and
education became more rapid than ever before. Society began to
resist, but the individual showed greater and greater insistence,
without realizing what he was doing. When the Crescent drove the
Cross in ignominy from Constantinople in 1453, Gutenberg and Fust
were printing their first Bible at Mainz under the impression
that they were helping the Cross. When Columbus discovered the
West Indies in 1492, the Church looked on it as a victory of the
Cross. When Luther and Calvin upset Europe half a century later,
they were trying, like St. Augustine, to substitute the Civitas
Dei for the Civitas Romae. When the Puritans set out for New
England in 1620, they too were looking to found a Civitas Dei in
State Street; and when Bunyan made his Pilgrimage in 1678, he
repeated St. Jerome. Even when, after centuries of license, the
Church reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned Giordano
Bruno in 1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630 -- as science
goes on repeating to us every day -- it condemned anarchists, not
atheists. None of the astronomers were irreligious men; all of
them made a point of magnifying God through his works; a form of
science which did their religion no credit. Neither Galileo nor
Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor
Newton, any more than Constantine the Great -- if so much --
doubted Unity. The utmost range of their heresies reached only
its personality.

  This persistence of thought-inertia is the leading idea of
modern history. Except as reflected in himself, man has no reason
for assuming unity in the universe, or an ultimate substance, or
a prime-motor. The a priori insistence on this unity ended by
fatiguing the more active -- or reactive -- minds; and Lord Bacon
tried to stop it. He urged society to lay aside the idea of
evolving the universe from a thought, and to try evolving thought
from the universe. The mind should observe and register forces --
take them apart and put them together -- without assuming unity
at all. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." "The
imagination must be given not wings but weights." As Galileo
reversed the action of earth and sun, Bacon reversed the relation
of thought to force. The mind was thenceforth to follow the
movement of matter, and unity must be left to shift for itself.

  The revolution in attitude seemed voluntary, but in fact was as
mechanical as the fall of a feather. Man created nothing. After
1500, the speed of progress so rapidly surpassed man's gait as to
alarm every one, as though it were the acceleration of a falling
body which the dynamic theory takes it to be. Lord Bacon was as
much astonished by it as the Church was, and with reason.
Suddenly society felt itself dragged into situations altogether
new and anarchic -- situations which it could not affect, but
which painfully affected it. Instinct taught it that the universe
in its thought must be in danger when its reflection lost itself
in space. The danger was all the greater because men of science
covered it with "larger synthesis," and poets called the undevout
astronomer mad. Society knew better. Yet the telescope held it
rigidly standing on its head; the microscope revealed a universe
that defied the senses; gunpowder killed whole races that lagged
behind; the compass coerced the most imbruted mariner to act on
the impossible idea that the earth was round; the press drenched
Europe with anarchism. Europe saw itself, violently resisting,
wrenched into false positions, drawn along new lines as a fish
that is caught on a hook; but unable to understand by what force
it was controlled. The resistance was often bloody, sometimes
humorous, always constant. Its contortions in the eighteenth
century are best studied in the wit of Voltaire, but all history
and all philosophy from Montaigne and Pascal to Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche deal with nothing else; and still, throughout it all,
the Baconian law held good; thought did not evolve nature, but
nature evolved thought. Not one considerable man of science dared
face the stream of thought; and the whole number of those who
acted, like Franklin, as electric conductors of the new forces
from nature to man, down to the year 1800, did not exceed a few
score, confined to a few towns in western Europe. Asia refused to
be touched by the stream, and America, except for Franklin, stood
outside.

  Very slowly the accretion of these new forces, chemical and
mechanical, grew in volume until they acquired sufficient mass to
take the place of the old religious science, substituting their
attraction for the attractions of the Civitas Dei, but the
process remained the same. Nature, not mind, did the work that
the sun does on the planets. Man depended more and more
absolutely on forces other than his own, and on instruments which
superseded his senses. Bacon foretold it: "Neither the naked hand
nor the understanding, left to itself, can effect much. It is by
instruments and helps that the work is done." Once done, the mind
resumed its illusion, and society forgot its impotence; but no
one better than Bacon knew its tricks, and for his true followers
science always meant self-restraint, obedience, sensitiveness to
impulse from without. "Non fingendum aut excogitandum sed
inveniendum quid Natura faciat aut ferat."

  The success of this method staggers belief, and even to-day can
be treated by history only as a miracle of growth, like the
sports of nature. Evidently a new variety of mind had appeared.
Certain men merely held out their hands -- like Newton, watched
an apple; like Franklin, flew a kite; like Watt, played with a
tea-kettle -- and great forces of nature stuck to them as though
she were playing ball. Governments did almost nothing but resist.
Even gunpowder and ordnance, the great weapon of government,
showed little development between 1400 and 1800. Society was
hostile or indifferent, as Priestley and Jenner, and even Fulton,
with reason complained in the most advanced societies in the
world, while its resistance became acute wherever the Church held
control; until all mankind seemed to draw itself out in a long
series of groups, dragged on by an attractive power in advance,
which even the leaders obeyed without understanding, as the
planets obeyed gravity, or the trees obeyed heat and light.

  The influx of new force was nearly spontaneous. The reaction of
mind on the mass of nature seemed not greater than that of a
comet on the sun; and had the spontaneous influx of force stopped
in Europe, society must have stood still, or gone backward, as in
Asia or Africa. Then only economies of process would have counted
as new force, and society would have been better pleased; for the
idea that new force must be in itself a good is only an animal or
vegetable instinct. As Nature developed her hidden energies, they
tended to become destructive. Thought itself became tortured,
suffering reluctantly, impatiently, painfully, the coercion of
new method. Easy thought had always been movement of inertia, and
mostly mere sentiment; but even the processes of mathematics
measured feebly the needs of force.

  The stupendous acceleration after 1800 ended in 1900 with the
appearance of the new class of supersensual forces, before which
the man of science stood at first as bewildered and helpless as,
in the fourth century, a priest of Isis before the Cross of
Christ.

  This, then, or something like this, would be a dynamic formula
of history. Any schoolboy knows enough to object at once that it
is the oldest and most universal of all theories. Church and
State, theology and philosophy, have always preached it,
differing only in the allotment of energy between nature and man.
Whether the attractive energy has been called God or Nature, the
mechanism has been always the same, and history is not obliged to
decide whether the Ultimate tends to a purpose or not, or whether
ultimate energy is one or many. Every one admits that the will is
a free force, habitually decided by motives. No one denies that
motives exist adequate to decide the will; even though it may not
always be conscious of them. Science has proved that forces,
sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and
complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract,
without stop; that man's senses are conscious of few, and only in
a partial degree; but that, from the beginning of organic
existence, his consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained
in the lines of his sensitiveness; and that the rise of his
faculties from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a
wider field, may be due to the function of assimilating and
storing outside force or forces. There is nothing unscientific in
the idea that, beyond the lines of force felt by the senses, the
universe may be -- as it has always been -- either a
supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly
attracts, and is either life or death to penetrate. Thus far,
religion, philosophy, and science seem to go hand in hand. The
schools begin their vital battle only there. In the earlier
stages of progress, the forces to be assimilated were simple and
easy to absorb, but, as the mind of man enlarged its range, it
enlarged the field of complexity, and must continue to do so,
even into chaos, until the reservoirs of sensuous or
supersensuous energies are exhausted, or cease to affect him, or
until he succumbs to their excess.

  For past history, this way of grouping its sequences may answer
for a chart of relations, although any serious student would need
to invent another, to compare or correct its errors; but past
history is only a value of relation to the future, and this value
is wholly one of convenience, which can be tested only by
experiment. Any law of movement must include, to make it a
convenience, some mechanical formula of acceleration.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXXIV

A LAW OF ACCELERATION (1904)

  IMAGES are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, but the
mind craves them, and, of late more than ever, the keenest
experimenters find twenty images better than one, especially if
contradictory; since the human mind has already learned to deal
in contradictions.

  The image needed here is that of a new centre, or
preponderating mass, artificially introduced on earth in the
midst of a system of attractive forces that previously made their
own equilibrium, and constantly induced to accelerate its motion
till it shall establish a new equilibrium. A dynamic theory would
begin by assuming that all history, terrestrial or cosmic,
mechanical or intellectual, would be reducible to this formula if
we knew the facts.

  For convenience, the most familiar image should come first; and
this is probably that of the comet, or meteoric streams, like the
Leonids and Perseids; a complex of minute mechanical agencies,
reacting within and without, and guided by the sum of forces
attracting or deflecting it. Nothing forbids one to assume that
the man-meteorite might grow, as an acorn does, absorbing light,
heat, electricity -- or thought; for, in recent times, such
transference of energy has become a familiar idea; but the
simplest figure, at first, is that of a perfect comet -- say that
of 1843 -- which drops from space, in a straight line, at the
regular acceleration of speed, directly into the sun, and after
wheeling sharply about it, in heat that ought to dissipate any
known substance, turns back unharmed, in defiance of law, by the
path on which it came. The mind, by analogy, may figure as such a
comet, the better because it also defies law.

  Motion is the ultimate object of science, and measures of
motion are many; but with thought as with matter, the true
measure is mass in its astronomic sense -- the sum or difference
of attractive forces. Science has quite enough trouble in
measuring its material motions without volunteering help to the
historian, but the historian needs not much help to measure some
kinds of social movement; and especially in the nineteenth
century, society by common accord agreed in measuring its
progress by the coal-output. The ratio of increase in the volume
of coal-power may serve as dynamometer.

  The coal-output of the world, speaking roughly, doubled every
ten years between 1840 and 1900, in the form of utilized power,
for the ton of coal yielded three or four times as much power in
1900 as in 1840. Rapid as this rate of acceleration in volume
seems, it may be tested in a thousand ways without greatly
reducing it. Perhaps the ocean steamer is nearest unity and
easiest to measure, for any one might hire, in 1905, for a small
sum of money, the use of 30,000 steam-horse-power to cross the
ocean, and by halving this figure every ten years, he got back to
234 horse-power for 1835, which was accuracy enough for his
purposes. In truth, his chief trouble came not from the ratio in
volume of heat, but from the intensity, since he could get no
basis for a ratio there. All ages of history have known high
intensities, like the iron-furnace, the burning-glass, the
blow-pipe; but no society has ever used high intensities on any
large scale till now, nor can a mere bystander decide what range
of temperature is now in common use. Loosely guessing that
science controls habitually the whole range from absolute zero to
3000 degrees Centigrade, one might assume, for convenience, that
the ten-year ratio for volume could be used temporarily for
intensity; and still there remained a ratio to be guessed for
other forces than heat. Since 1800 scores of new forces had been
discovered; old forces had been raised to higher powers, as could
be measured in the navy-gun; great regions of chemistry had been
opened up, and connected with other regions of physics. Within
ten years a new universe of force had been revealed in radiation.
Complexity had extended itself on immense horizons, and
arithmetical ratios were useless for any attempt at accuracy. The
force evolved seemed more like explosion than gravitation, and
followed closely the curve of steam; but, at all events, the
ten-year ratio seemed carefully conservative. Unless the
calculator was prepared to be instantly overwhelmed by physical
force and mental complexity, he must stop there.

  Thus, taking the year 1900 as the starting point for carrying
back the series, nothing was easier than to assume a ten-year
period of retardation as far back as 1820, but beyond that point
the statistician failed, and only the mathematician could help.
Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of
progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz,
Newton, and himself. Watt could have given in pounds the increase
of power between Newcomen's engines and his own. Volta and
Benjamin Franklin would have stated their progress as absolute
creation of power. Dalton could have measured minutely his
advance on Boerhaave. Napoleon I must have had a distinct notion
of his own numerical relation to Louis XIV. No one in 1789
doubted the progress of force, least of all those who were to
lose their heads by it.

  Pending agreement between these authorities, theory may assume
what it likes -- say a fifty, or even a five-and-twenty-year
period of reduplication for the eighteenth century, for the
period matters little until the acceleration itself is admitted.
The subject is even more amusing in the seventeenth than in the
eighteenth century, because Galileo and Kepler, Descartes,
Huygens, and Isaac Newton took vast pains to fix the laws of
acceleration for moving bodies, while Lord Bacon and William
Harvey were content with showing experimentally the fact of
acceleration in knowledge; but from their combined results a
historian might be tempted to maintain a similar rate of movement
back to 1600, subject to correction from the historians of
mathematics.

  The mathematicians might carry their calculations back as far
as the fourteenth century when algebra seems to have become for
the first time the standard measure of mechanical progress in
western Europe; for not only Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, but even
artists like Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Albert Durer worked by
mathematical processes, and their testimony would probably give
results more exact than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare; but, to
save trouble, one might tentatively carry back the same ratio of
acceleration, or retardation, to the year 1400, with the help of
Columbus and Gutenberg, so taking a uniform rate during the whole
four centuries (1400-1800), and leaving to statisticians the task
of correcting it.

  Or better, one might, for convenience, use the formula of
squares to serve for a law of mind. Any other formula would do as
well, either of chemical explosion, or electrolysis, or vegetable
growth, or of expansion or contraction in innumerable forms; but
this happens to be simple and convenient. Its force increases in
the direct ratio of its squares. As the human meteoroid
approached the sun or centre of attractive force, the attraction
of one century squared itself to give the measure of attraction
in the next.

  Behind the year 1400, the process certainly went on, but the
progress became so slight as to be hardly measurable. What was
gained in the east or elsewhere, cannot be known; but forces,
called loosely Greek fire and gunpowder, came into use in the
west in the thirteenth century, as well as instruments like the
compass, the blow-pipe, clocks and spectacles, and materials like
paper; Arabic notation and algebra were introduced, while
metaphysics and theology acted as violent stimulants to mind. An
architect might detect a sequence between the Church of St.
Peter's at Rome, the Amiens Cathedral, the Duomo at Pisa, San
Marco at Venice, Sancta Sofia at Constantinople and the churches
at Ravenna. All the historian dares affirm is that a sequence is
manifestly there, and he has a right to carry back his ratio, to
represent the fact, without assuming its numerical correctness.
On the human mind as a moving body, the break in acceleration in
the Middle Ages is only apparent; the attraction worked through
shifting forms of force, as the sun works by light or heat,
electricity, gravitation, or what not, on different organs with
different sensibilities, but with invariable law.

  The science of prehistoric man has no value except to prove
that the law went back into indefinite antiquity. A stone
arrowhead is as convincing as a steam-engine. The values were as
clear a hundred thousand years ago as now, and extended equally
over the whole world. The motion at last became infinitely
slight, but cannot be proved to have stopped. The motion of
Newton's comet at aphelion may be equally slight. To
evolutionists may be left the processes of evolution; to
historians the single interest is the law of reaction between
force and force -- between mind and nature -- the law of
progress.

  The great division of history into phases by Turgot and Comte
first affirmed this law in its outlines by asserting the unity of
progress, for a mere phase interrupts no growth, and nature shows
innumerable such phases. The development of coal-power in the
nineteenth century furnished the first means of assigning closer
values to the elements; and the appearance of supersensual forces
towards 1900 made this calculation a pressing necessity; since
the next step became infinitely serious.

[combinator]

  A law of acceleration, definite and constant as any law of
mechanics, cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the
convenience of man. No one is likely to suggest a theory that
man's convenience had been consulted by Nature at any time, or
that Nature has consulted the convenience of any of her
creations, except perhaps the Terebratula. In every age man has
bitterly and justly complained that Nature hurried and hustled
him, for inertia almost invariably has ended in tragedy.
Resistance is its law, and resistance to superior mass is futile
and fatal.

  Fifty years ago, science took for granted that the rate of
acceleration could not last. The world forgets quickly, but even
today the habit remains of founding statistics on the faith that
consumption will continue nearly stationary. Two generations,
with John Stuart Mill, talked of this stationary period, which
was to follow the explosion of new power. All the men who were
elderly in the forties died in this faith, and other men grew old
nursing the same conviction, and happy in it; while science, for
fifty years, permitted, or encouraged, society to think that
force would prove to be limited in supply. This mental inertia of
science lasted through the eighties before showing signs of
breaking up; and nothing short of radium fairly wakened men to
the fact, long since evident, that force was inexhaustible. Even
then the scientific authorities vehemently resisted.

  Nothing so revolutionary had happened since the year 300.
Thought had more than once been upset, but never caught and
whirled about in the vortex of infinite forces. Power leaped from
every atom, and enough of it to supply the stellar universe
showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could
no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him
about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway
automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth for the
purposes of an elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris, who
never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an
accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the
neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a
bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs
would double in force and number every ten years.

  Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One's life had
fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he
had seen four impossibilities made actual -- the ocean-steamer,
the railway, the electric telegraph, and the Daguerreotype; nor
could he ever learn which of the four had most hurried others to
come. He had seen the coal-output of the United States grow from
nothing to three hundred million tons or more. What was far more
serious, he had seen the number of minds, engaged in pursuing
force -- the truest measure of its attraction -- increase from a
few scores or hundreds, in 1838, to many thousands in 1905,
trained to sharpness never before reached, and armed with
instruments amounting to new senses of indefinite power and
accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places where Nature
herself had never known it to be, making analyses that
contradicted being, and syntheses that endangered the elements.
No one could say that the social mind now failed to respond to
new force, even when the new force annoyed it horribly. Every day
Nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with
enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing
at man, who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but
never for a single instant could stop. The railways alone
approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire-arms ravaged
society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation.
An immense volume of force had detached itself from the unknown
universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to be
infinite, steadily revealed themselves, attracting mankind with
more compulsive course than all the Pontic Seas or Gods or Gold
that ever existed, and feeling still less of retiring ebb.

  In 1850, science would have smiled at such a romance as this,
but, in 1900, as far as history could learn, few men of science
thought it a laughing matter. If a perplexed but laborious
follower could venture to guess their drift, it seemed in their
minds a toss-up between anarchy and order. Unless they should be
more honest with themselves in the future than ever they were in
the past, they would be more astonished than their followers when
they reached the end. If Karl Pearson's notions of the universe
were sound, men like Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton
should have stopped the progress of science before 1700,
supposing them to have been honest in the religious convictions
they expressed. In 1900 they were plainly forced back; on faith
in a unity unproved and an order they had themselves disproved.
They had reduced their universe to a series of relations to
themselves. They had reduced themselves to motion in a universe
of motions, with an acceleration, in their own case of
vertiginous violence. With the correctness of their science,
history had no right to meddle, since their science now lay in a
plane where scarcely one or two hundred minds in the world could
follow its mathematical processes; but bombs educate vigorously,
and even wireless telegraphy or airships might require the
reconstruction of society. If any analogy whatever existed
between the human mind, on one side, and the laws of motion, on
the other, the mind had already entered a field of attraction so
violent that it must immediately pass beyond, into new
equilibrium, like the Comet of Newton, to suffer dissipation
altogether, like meteoroids in the earth's atmosphere. If it
behaved like an explosive, it must rapidly recover equilibrium;
if it behaved like a vegetable, it must reach its limits of
growth; and even if it acted like the earlier creations of energy
-- the saurians and sharks -- it must have nearly reached the
limits of its expansion. If science were to go on doubling or
quadrupling its complexities every ten years, even mathematics
would soon succumb. An average mind had succumbed already in
1850; it could no longer understand the problem in 1900.

  Fortunately, a student of history had no responsibility for the
problem; he took it as science gave it, and waited only to be
taught. With science or with society, he had no quarrel and
claimed no share of authority. He had never been able to acquire
knowledge, still less to impart it; and if he had, at times, felt
serious differences with the American of the nineteenth century,
he felt none with the American of the twentieth. For this new
creation, born since 1900, a historian asked no longer to be
teacher or even friend; he asked only to be a pupil, and promised
to be docile, for once, even though trodden under foot; for he
could see that the new American -- the child of incalculable
coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy,
as well as of new forces yet undetermined -- must be a sort of
God compared with any former creation of nature. At the rate of
progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000
would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in
complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with
problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him
the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the
fourth -- equally childlike -- and he would only wonder how both
of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have
done so much. Perhaps even he might go back, in 1964, to sit with
Gibbon on the steps of Ara Coeli.

  Meanwhile he was getting education. With that, a teacher who
had failed to educate even the generation of 1870, dared not
interfere. The new forces would educate. History saw few lessons
in the past that would be useful in the future; but one, at
least, it did see. The attempt of the American of 1800 to educate
the American of 1900 had not often been surpassed for folly; and
since 1800 the forces and their complications had increased a
thousand times or more. The attempt of the American of 1900 to
educate the American of 2000, must be even blinder than that of
the Congressman of 1800, except so far as he had learned his
ignorance. During a million or two of years, every generation in
turn had toiled with endless agony to attain and apply power, all
the while betraying the deepest alarm and horror at the power
they created. The teacher of 1900, if foolhardy, might stimulate;
if foolish, might resist; if intelligent, might balance, as wise
and foolish have often tried to do from the beginning; but the
forces would continue to educate, and the mind would continue to
react. All the teacher could hope was to teach it reaction.

  Even there his difficulty was extreme. The most elementary
books of science betrayed the inadequacy of old implements of
thought. Chapter after chapter closed with phrases such as one
never met in older literature: "The cause of this phenomenon is
not understood"; "science no longer ventures to explain causes";
"the first step towards a causal explanation still remains to be
taken"; "opinions are very much divided"; "in spite of the
contradictions involved"; "science gets on only by adopting
different theories, sometimes contradictory." Evidently the new
American would need to think in contradictions, and instead of
Kant's famous four antinomies, the new universe would know no law
that could not be proved by its anti-law.

  To educate -- one's self to begin with -- had been the effort
of one's life for sixty years; and the difficulties of education
had gone on doubling with the coal-output, until the prospect of
waiting another ten years, in order to face a seventh doubling of
complexities, allured one's imagination but slightly. The law of
acceleration was definite, and did not require ten years more
study except to show whether it held good. No scheme could be
suggested to the new American, and no fault needed to be found,
or complaint made; but the next great influx of new forces seemed
near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently
coercive. The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200
and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration.
Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social
mind. As though thought were common salt in indefinite solution
it must enter a new phase subject to new laws. Thus far, since
five or ten thousand years, the mind had successfully reacted,
and nothing yet proved that it would fail to react -- but it
would need to jump.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXXV

NUNC AGE (1905)

  NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary
landed at New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when
they saw American society as a long caravan stretching out
towards the plains. As he came up the bay again, November 5,
1904, an older man than either his father or Motley in 1868, he
found the approach more striking than ever -- wonderful -- unlike
anything man had ever seen -- and like nothing he had ever much
cared to see. The outline of the city<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/NxPiPj70txI&rel=0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/NxPiPj70txI&rel=0</a>became frantic in its
effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to
have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The
cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam
against the sky. The city had the air and movement of hysteria,
and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm,
that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control.
Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man,
speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world
irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New
York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed
into corporations, were demanding a new type of man -- a man with
ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type --
for whom they were ready to pay millions at sight. As one jolted
over the pavements or read the last week's newspapers, the new
man seemed close at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the
end of his strength, and his failure had become catastrophic.
Every one saw it, and every municipal election shrieked chaos. A
traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club
window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome,
under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the
compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence
the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The
two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from
Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.

  Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washington
to wait the end. There Roosevelt was training Constantines and
battling Trusts. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/TvZP93XqyTw&rel=0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/TvZP93XqyTw&rel=0</a> the Battle of Trusts, a student of
mechanics felt entire sympathy, not merely as a matter of
politics or society, but also as a measure of motion. The Trusts
and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that
had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their
vigorous and unscrupulous energy. They were revolutionary,
troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of
ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They tore
society to pieces and trampled it under foot. As one of their
earliest victims, a citizen of Quincy, born in 1838, had learned
submission and silence, for he knew that, under the laws of
mechanics, any change, within the range of the forces, must make
his situation only worse; but he was beyond measure curious to
see whether the conflict of forces would produce the new man,
since no other energies seemed left on earth to breed. The new
man could be only a child born of contact between the new and the
old energies.

  Both had been familiar since childhood, as the story has shown,
and neither had warped the umpire's judgment by its favors. If
ever judge had reason to be impartial, it was he. The sole object
of his interest and sympathy was the new man, and the longer one
watched, the less could be seen of him. Of the forces behind the
Trusts, one could see something; they owned a complete
organization, with schools, training, wealth and purpose; but of
the forces behind Roosevelt one knew little; their cohesion was
slight; their training irregular; their objects vague. The public
had no idea what practical system it could aim at, or what sort
of men could manage it. The single problem before it was not so
much to control the Trusts as to create the society that could
manage the Trusts. The new American must be either the child of
the new forces or a chance sport of nature. The attraction of
mechanical power had already wrenched the American mind into a
crab-like process which Roosevelt was making heroic efforts to
restore to even action, and he had every right to active support
and sympathy from all the world, especially from the Trusts
themselves so far as they were human; but the doubt persisted
whether the force that educated was really man or nature -- mind
or motion. The mechanical theory, mostly accepted by science,
seemed to require that the law of mass should rule. In that case,
progress would continue as before.

  In that, or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was
as useless or misleading as an eighteenth-century education had
been to the child of 1838; but Adams had a better reason for
holding his tongue. For his dynamic theory of history he cared no
more than for the kinetic theory of gas; but, if it were an
approach to measurement of motion, it would verify or disprove
itself within thirty years. At the calculated acceleration, the
head of the meteor-stream must very soon pass perihelion.
Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was futile, and silence,
next to good-temper, was the mark of sense. If the acceleration,
measured by the development and economy of forces, were to
continue at its rate since 1800, the mathematician of 1950 should
be able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as
accurately as that of the November meteoroids.

  Naturally such an attitude annoyed the players in the game, as
the attitude of the umpire is apt to infuriate the spectators.
Above all, it was profoundly unmoral, and tended to discourage
effort. On the other hand, it tended to encourage foresight and
to economize waste of mind. If it was not itself education, it
pointed out the economies necessary for the education of the new
American. There, the duty stopped.

  There, too, life stopped. Nature has educated herself to a
singular sympathy for death. On the antarctic glacier, nearly
five thousand feet above sea-level, Captain Scott found carcasses
of seals, where the animals had laboriously flopped up, to die in
peace. "Unless we had actually found these remains, it would have
been past believing that a dying seal could have transported
itself over fifty miles of rough, steep, glacier-surface," but
"the seal seems often to crawl to the shore or the ice to die,
probably from its instinctive dread of its marine enemies." In
India, Purun Dass, at the end of statesmanship, sought solitude,
and died in sanctity among the deer and monkeys, rather than
remain with man. Even in America, the Indian Summer of life
should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and
infinite in wealth and depth of tone -- but never hustled. For
that reason, one's own passive obscurity seemed sometimes nearer
nature than John Hay's exposure. To the normal animal the
instinct of sport is innate, and historians themselves were not
exempt from the passion of baiting their bears; but in its turn
even the seal dislikes to be worried to death in age by creatures
that have not the strength or the teeth to kill him outright.

  On reaching Washington, November 14, 1904, Adams saw at a
glance that Hay must have rest. Already Mrs. Hay had bade him
prepare to help in taking her husband to Europe as soon as the
Session should be over, and although Hay protested that the idea
could not even be discussed, his strength failed so rapidly that
he could not effectually discuss it, and ended by yielding
without struggle. He would equally have resigned office and
retired, like Purun Dass, had not the President and the press
protested; but he often debated the subject, and his friends
could throw no light on it. Adams himself, who had set his heart
on seeing Hay close his career by making peace in the East, could
only urge that vanity for vanity, the crown of peacemaker was
worth the cross of martyrdom; but the cross was full in sight,
while the crown was still uncertain. Adams found his formula for
Russian inertia exasperatingly correct. He thought that Russia
should have negotiated instantly on the fall of Port Arthur,
January 1, 1905; he found that she had not the energy, but meant
to wait till her navy should be destroyed. The delay measured
precisely the time that Hay had to spare.

  The close of the Session on March 4 left him barely the
strength to crawl on board ship, March 18, and before his steamer
had reached half her course, he had revived, almost as gay as
when he first lighted on the Markoe house in I Street forty-four
years earlier. The clouds that gather round the setting sun do
not always take a sober coloring from eyes that have kept watch
on mortality; or, at least, the sobriety is sometimes scarcely
sad. One walks with one's friends squarely up to the portal of
life, and bids good-bye with a smile. One has done it so often!
Hay could scarcely pace the deck; he nourished no illusions; he
was convinced that he should never return to his work, and he
talked lightly of the death sentence that he might any day
expect, but he threw off the coloring of office and mortality
together, and the malaria of power left its only trace in the
sense of tasks incomplete.

  One could honestly help him there. Laughing frankly at his
dozen treaties hung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs in
a butcher's shop, one could still remind him of what was solidly
completed. In his eight years of office he had solved nearly
every old problem of American statesmanship, and had left little
or nothing to annoy his successor. He had brought the great
Atlantic powers into a working system, and even Russia seemed
about to be dragged into a combine of intelligent equilibrium
based on an intelligent allotment of activities. For the first
time in fifteen hundred years a true Roman pax was in sight, and
would, if it succeeded, owe its virtues to him. Except for making
peace in Manchuria, he could do no more; and if the worst should
happen, setting continent against continent in arms -- the only
apparent alternative to his scheme -- he need not repine at
missing the catastrophe.

  This rosy view served to soothe disgusts which every parting
statesman feels, and commonly with reason. One had no need to get
out one's notebook in order to jot down the exact figures on
either side. Why add up the elements of resistance and anarchy?
The Kaiser supplied him with these figures, just as the Cretic
approached Morocco. Every one was doing it, and seemed in a panic
about it. The chaos waited only for his landing.

  Arrived at Genoa, the party hid itself for a fortnight at
Nervi, and he gained strength rapidly as long as he made no
effort and heard no call for action. Then they all went on to
Nanheim without relapse. There, after a few days, Adams left him
for the regular treatment, and came up to Paris. The medical
reports promised well, and Hay's letters were as humorous and
light-handed as ever. To the last he wrote cheerfully of his
progress, and amusingly with his usual light scepticism, of his
various doctors; but when the treatment ended, three weeks later,
and he came on to Paris, he showed, at the first glance, that he
had lost strength, and the return to affairs and interviews wore
him rapidly out. He was conscious of it, and in his last talk
before starting for London and Liverpool he took the end of his
activity for granted. "You must hold out for the peace
negotiations," was the remonstrance. "I've not time!" he replied.
"You'll need little time!" was the rejoinder. Each was correct.

  There it ended! Shakespeare himself could use no more than the
commonplace to express what is incapable of expression. "The rest
is silence!" The few familiar words, among the simplest in the
language, conveying an idea trite beyond rivalry, served
Shakespeare, and, as yet, no one has said more. A few weeks
afterwards, one warm evening in early July, as Adams was
strolling down to dine under the trees at Armenonville, he
learned that Hay was dead. He expected it; on Hay's account, he
was even satisfied to have his friend die, as we would all die if
we could, in full fame, at home and abroad, universally
regretted, and wielding his power to the last. One had seen
scores of emperors and heroes fade into cheap obscurity even when
alive; and now, at least, one had not that to fear for one's
friend. It was not even the suddenness of the shock, or the sense
of void, that threw Adams into the depths of Hamlet's
Shakespearean silence in the full flare of Paris frivolity in its
favorite haunt where worldly vanity reached its most futile
climax in human history; it was only the quiet summons to follow
-- the assent to dismissal. It was time to go. The three friends
had begun life together; and the last of the three had no motive
-- no attraction -- to carry it on after the others had gone.
Education had ended for all three, and only beyond some remoter
horizon could its values be fixed or renewed. Perhaps some day --
say 1938, their centenary -- they might be allowed to return
together for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives
made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors; and
perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education
among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and
timid natures could regard without a shudder.

THE END

[combinator]

The Education of Henry Adams

A pivotal account of a pivotal time in the grid of history, authored by the grandson of one president and great-grandson of another, who served as private secretary to his father, the ambassador to the Court of Saint James during the U.S.Civil War.  Intimate friend of Mr. Abraham Lincoln's private secretary John Hay.  Autobiographical third-person narrative.

by Henry Adams

THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

        CONTENTS
        EDITOR'S PREFACE
        PREFACE
        I. QUINCY (1838-1848) (1/3 chapter)
        I. QUINCY (1838-1848) (2/3 chapter)
        I. QUINCY (1838-1848) (3/3 chapter)
        II. BOSTON (1848-1854) (1/2 chapter)
        II. BOSTON (1848-1854) (2/2 chapter)
        III. WASHINGTON (1850-1854) (1/2 chapter)
        III. WASHINGTON (1850-1854) (2/2 chapter)
        IV. HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)  (1/2 chapter)
        IV. HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)  (2/2 chapter)
        V. BERLIN (1858-1859) (1/2 chapter)
        V. BERLIN (1858-1859) (2/2 chapter)
        VI. ROME (1859-1860) (1/2 chapter)
        VI. ROME (1859-1860) (2/2 chapter)
        VII. TREASON (1860-1861) (1/2 chapter)
        VII. TREASON (1860-1861) (2/2 chapter)
        VIII. DIPLOMACY (1861) (1/2 chapter)
        VIII. DIPLOMACY (1861) (2/2 chapter)
        IX. FOES OR FRIENDS (1862) (1/2 chapter)
        IX. FOES OR FRIENDS (1862) (2/2 chapter)
        X. POLITICAL MORALITY (1862) (1/3 chapter)
        X. POLITICAL MORALITY (1862) (2/3 chapter)
        X. POLITICAL MORALITY (1862) (3/3 chapter)
        XI. THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863) (1/2 chapter)
        XI. THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863) (2/2 chapter)
        XII. ECCENTRICITY (1863) (1/2 chapter)
        XII. ECCENTRICITY (1863) (2/2 chapter)
        XIII. THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864) (1/2 chapter)
        XIII. THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864) (2/2 chapter)
        XIV. DILETTANTISM (1865-1866) (1/2 chapter)
        XIV. DILETTANTISM (1865-1866) (2/2 chapter)
        XV. DARWINISM (1867-1868) (1/2 chapter)
        XV. DARWINISM (1867-1868) (1/2 chapter)
        XVI. THE PRESS (1868) (1/2 chapter)
        XVI. THE PRESS (1868) (2/2 chapter)
        XVII. PRESIDENT GRANT (1869) (1/2 chapter)
        XVII. PRESIDENT GRANT (1869) (2/2 chapter)
        XVIII. FREE FIGHT (1869-1870) (1/2 chapter)
        XVIII. FREE FIGHT (1869-1870) (2/2 chapter)
        XIX. CHAOS (1870) (1/2 chapter)
        XIX. CHAOS (1870) (2/2 chapter)
        XX. FAILURE (1871) (1/2 chapter)
        XX. FAILURE (1871) (2/2 chapter)
        XXI. TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892) (1/2 chapter)
        XXI. TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892) (2/2 chapter)
        XXII. CHICAGO (1893) (1/2 chapter)
        XXII. CHICAGO (1893) (2/2 chapter)
        XXIII. SILENCE (1894-1898) (1/2 chapter)
        XXIII. SILENCE (1894-1898) (2/2 chapter)
        XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899) (1/2 chapter)
       XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899) (2/2 chapter)
      XXV. THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900) (1/2 chapter)
      XXV. THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900) (2/2 chapter)
      XXVI. TWILIGHT (1901) (1/2 chapter)
      XXVI. TWILIGHT (1901) (2/2 chapter)
      XXVII. TEUFELSDROCKH (1901) (1/2 chapter)
      XXVII. TEUFELSDROCKH (1901) (2/2 chapter)
      XXVIII. THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902) (1/2 chapter)
      XXVIII. THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902) (2/2 chapter)
      XXIX. THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902) (1/2 chapter)
      XXIX. THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902) (2/2 chapter)
      XXX. VIS INERTIAE (1903) (1/2 chapter)
      XXX. VIS INERTIAE (1903) (2/2 chapter)
      XXXI. THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903) (1/2 chapter)
      XXXI. THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903) (2/2 chapter)
      XXXII. VIS NOVA (1903-1904) (1/2 chapter)
      XXXII. VIS NOVA (1903-1904) (2/2 chapter)
      XXXIII. A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904) (1/2 chapter)
      XXXIII. A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904) (2/2 chapter)
      XXXIV. A LAW OF ACCELERATION (1904) (1/2 chapter) 
      XXXIV. A LAW OF ACCELERATION (1904) (2/2 chapter) 
      XXXV. NUNC AGE (1905)