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.

  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.

Henry continues to struggle toward a scientific understanding of history. He now sees lines of force in the actions of mankind where he once saw lines of will. Henry reconsiders the concepts of unity and multiplicity and wonders if these apparent opposites may not be the same thing. He studies this possibility within the concept of the kinetic theory of gases with startling results. Placing a great deal of importance on unity and multiplicity, he begins to write his Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres ; he will ultimately think of The Education of Henry Adams as its companion piece.

After he has realized that the height of the old knowledge is really the abyss of ignorance, Henry has found a starting point for the development of his dynamic theory of history. He feels certain that there is a relationship between the lines of force studied in new science and the lines of force in history. Perhaps disingenuously, the narrator claims that Henry begins to see "lines of force all about him, where he had always seen lines of will," independently but in the manner of Michael Faraday, the English physicist who discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831. Faraday proved that electrical charges are subject to polarity, leading to the invention of the dynamo. Adams has mentioned Faraday's work in Chapter XXVI  and has employed the dynamo as a symbol of modern multiplicity in Chapter XXV , but here, the narrator dubiously claims that Henry has never heard of Faraday and comes to his observations independently. The significance of force versus will is that the former allows for a dynamic, mechanical, scientific motive to the direction of history instead of relying on maxims like "God's will be done" or "it's God's will," which were adequate for the medieval churchman. Adams suggests that Thomas Aquinas, for example, may say, "To me, Christ and the Mother are one Force -- Love -- simple, single, and sufficient for all human wants." The force for Aquinas is God's will manifested through love. But as science progresses, the force is understood in more complex ways. There are many forces, and one understands them through scientific theories or formulae. One is the kinetic theory of gases, which Henry finds instructive. Molecules of gas exist in each portion of space. What looks like a unit is really a vast complex of molecules and movement. Henry is impressed that the molecules fly at each other at speeds up to a mile a second, colliding as many as 17,750,000 times a second. This is a world in flux. Scientific "unity" thus is made up of millions of molecules, all in motion. As Henry concludes, "he scientific synthesis commonly called unity  the scientific analysis commonly called multiplicity." For the scientist, then, unity and multiplicity are the same phenomena. Henry wonders how this can apply to the study of history. He is beginning to believe that man is no longer a projection of God's will or even a manifestation of man's will. In one of his more entertaining metaphors, Adams suggests that man is "an acrobat, with a dwarf on his back, crossing a chasm on a slack rope, and commonly breaking his neck." More seriously, Henry is beginning to believe that mankind is part of the flux and subject to rules of force and motion. From the abyss of ignorance, Henry seeks understanding consistent with the new science. He sees two helpful points of reference. One is the medieval century from 1150 to 1250 from which he "might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation." He sets himself the task of writing the Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, which he here subtitles, "a study of thirteenth-century unity." The second point of perspective will be the Education, which, we know from his letters, is actually thought of as he is working on the first volume of Chartres; it is not yet part of the plan. He subtitles this second work, "a study of twentieth-century multiplicity." Glossary coquetry flirting. vis a tergo  force from behind. kinetic of or caused by motion. metaphysics the branch of philosophy that seeks to explain the nature of being or reality  and the origin and structure of the universe ; it is closely related to the study of the nature of knowledge .


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.

  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.

Adams turns his attention back to international politics and his friend John Hay, now at "the summit of his career." Henry attempts to speak of the political influence of nations in terms of inertia and is specifically interested in Russia, China, and the Russo-Japanese War. He fears that the Open Door to China is about to be closed, perhaps permanently. Adams discusses his attitude toward women and comments on the emancipation of the gender in America in the early 1900s as well as the dangers that he thinks this entails. He mentions women's "superiority" but in a somewhat patronizing and limited way.

Adams is an expert on international politics; his observations regarding the current scene, as well as the coming century, are always worth noting. John Hay has been brilliant in his efforts to open China to international commerce and to maintain its integrity after the Boxer Rebellion. However, Henry worries that this success may be threatened by the ambitions of two emerging modern powers: Russia and Japan. Japan sees itself as the dominant nation in Asia; it has already established economic influence in Korea and hopes to gain a strong foothold on the Chinese mainland. Russia is also interested in establishing control in China. Having invested military interests in Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion, Russia  has leased the seaport of Port Arthur  in Liaoning province, the intent being to establish a center for Russian naval power in the Pacific. Tensions increase in 1903 as Russia refuses to withdraw its troops from Manchuria or to recognize Japan's interests. The Japanese attack Port Arthur on February 8, 1904 and blockade the Russian fleet. With superior naval power and effective use of land forces, Japan has the better of the war. The United States brokers a peace treaty on September 5, 1905, stipulating that Russia must withdraw from Manchuria and surrender its base at Port Arthur. Henry's initial concern is that China will be closed to international trade. Six days after the Japanese surprise attack on Port Arthur, he writes Elizabeth Cameron that "the 8th of February will be a pretty serious and solemn anniversary I reckon, a good while after I have done my yawp." Henry further fears that Germany will be drawn into Asian interests by the inertia and gravitational pull of Russia. He hopes that Germany can be held in the Atlantic system, sharing interests with England and France, as Hay has arranged after several years of maneuvering. If Germany's interests are drawn away, Adams correctly anticipates "a century of friction" in Europe. He also wisely warns that, in the long run, Russia may be an even greater threat to Western interests than Germany will be. As prescient and insightful as Adams can be regarding international affairs, his insistence on applying laws of force or mass to the movements of economics or diplomacy is less fruitful. As a metaphor, inertia may be of some interest; but the attempt to approach international politics, let alone world history, as if it were a scientific study of matter is more ambitious than informing. Here, for example, one may expect Russia to defeat Japan easily, considering only mass and inertia, but Japan wins the war. The reader may wish that Adams could just share his considerable political insight and not be quite so impressed with the methods of modern science. When it comes to women, Adams is a hopeless romantic and idealist. In his letters to Elizabeth, for example, and often throughout the Education , he speaks of the "superiority" of women; but he does so with such grand chivalry that one wonders about the practical application of his evaluation. At best, women have a function in the home, the Church, and perhaps the arts for Henry. The ideal woman would seem to be the Madonna. He places women on a pedestal, which may be reverent from Adams's viewpoint but is out of step with the political and economic interests of actual American women in the early twentieth century. At this point, women are struggling just to get the vote in the States.  With the industrial revolution, they seek a place in the workforce. Adams acknowledges the latter when he speaks of women who work as typists, clerks, factory hands, and "telegraph-girls." He warns, however, that joining the work force is abandoning "the cradle and the family." To succeed, he concludes, women "must become sexless like the bees." As much as he avows that women are superior, it would rarely occur to Henry, or most men in his generation, to have women serve in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, or on the board of a major corporation. Henry would say that women are far too fine for the nasty old worlds of politics or commerce. In practical terms, it is false flattery, more restricting than liberating. Henry's attitude toward women may better be evaluated by their scarce representation in the Education. He does say that he has learned more from women than from men, which begs the questions, "Which women educated him and in what way?" The reader never knows. Aside from that and a few mentions of women in domestic or social roles, there is little about women in the Education. Glossary vis inertiae  the force of inertia, later simply referred to as "inertia," the tendency of matter to remain at rest if at rest or to stay in motion if in motion. enigma a perplexing, usually ambiguous, statement; a riddle. Mikado the emperor of Japan, a title no longer used. Cassini Count Arthur P. Cassini, Russian ambassador to the United States in 1903. vis nova  new force. ostentatiously in a showy manner.


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 find 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.

  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.

Karl Pearson's classic approach to scientific method, The Grammar of Science, first published in 1899, evokes both praise and condemnation from Adams. Henry deletes some of his stronger criticism from the 1907 edition of Education; but his written opinions, criticizing scientists for their reluctance to draw broad conclusions, exist elsewhere, including the margins of his copy of Pearson's book. Pearson emphasizes the importance of experiments, measurements, and observation. He is remembered as the first scientist to use statistics extensively in biological science, a practice soon extended to the social sciences. Adams observes that the only conclusion science offers is "ultimate chaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man." Henry seeks something more.

As Ernest Samuels points out, "By this time in the Education, 'historian' obviously had become to Adams a generic name for speculative philosopher or metaphysician." Prior to this, Henry has looked to the past for unity, speaking nostalgically of the guidance of the Virgin and the Church in medieval philosophy. Although he is impressed with scientific method and would like to apply it to the study of history, Adams is annoyed with scientists such as Pearson because they see their roles as observers, measurers, and recorders. They refuse to make judgments about ultimate reality beyond what they can observe and measure. The passage that Adams expurgates from his Education condemns Pearson for being overly devoted to experimentation and measurement; Henry wants some ultimate answers, a guide to metaphysics. In one of his better-known epigrams, Adams writes, "No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean." He wants scientists to say more, to become philosophers along with the ideal historian. Formerly, Adams points out, mankind could count on such certainties as "Unity, Continuity, Purpose, Order, Law, Truth, the Universe, God"; science takes these away and replaces them with "Multiplicity, Diversity, Complexity, Anarchy, Chaos." Adams admires the method, but the conclusion -- or lack of one -- at least privately annoys him. On the other hand, he offers this caveat: "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." To this extent, then, he accepts scientific method, in that he realizes that the result must come from observation and not a priori. But he does seek some conclusion, some guide through the maze of chaos. He is close to the creation of his "Dynamic Theory of History." Glossary Civitas Dei, Civitas Romae  City of God, City of Rome; the former refers to Saint Augustine's  De civitate Dei; the later is a secular reference. simian of or like an ape or monkey. fecund fruitful or fertile. aperture an opening, hole, or gap. fabulist a person who writes or tells fables.