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 pretence 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.

  Here education found new forage. That the power was wasted, the
art indifferent, 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.

Adams has spent most of the last third of his book dealing with new science; to the reader's benefit, he is also concerned with international politics. Here, the author uses the term vis nova to describe not only scientific advance but also the new role of the United States in the international scene. Returning from Paris, Henry is in for a shock: "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." As if to remind the reader of the importance of history, Henry returns to the topic of Chapter XXX, the Russo-Japanese War, and Secretary of State Hay's interest in keeping China's doors open. As Jean Gooder points out, Adams is friendly with Russia's Count Cassini; but his sympathies lie with the Japanese. If Russia's "inertia" moves it into a controlling position in Southeast Asia, Henry fears, China may be closed to the West for a long time. Japan is no innocent bystander; its military rivalry with China and Korea is traditional and will last at least another forty years. But Adams agrees with Hay that it is in the West's best interest to keep Russia out. The Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 puts Japan in a better position to confront Russia because of the support of England. Adams welcomes the success of the Open Door policy; he agrees with Hay that the West needs improved trade with China. The policy, says Adams, is Hay's "last great triumph." Henry's dear friend and neighbor will die on July 1, 1905. Henry witnesses the scientific aspect of vis nova at the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, timed to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase . Ever the New Englander, Adams finds the Midwest reeking with smoke and crawling with dirty suburbs: "Evidently, cleanliness was not to be the birthmark of the new American." St. Louis, he concludes, is "a third-rate town of half-a-million people without history, education, unity or art." But he is impressed by the overwhelming pageantry produced by electricity: "The world had never witnessed so marvelous a phantasm . . . a glow half so astonishing . . . long lines of white palaces, exquisitely lighted by thousands on thousands of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable." This is the third exposition that has overwhelmed Henry with the burgeoning force of science. To understand his awe, one needs only to live briefly in a world without electricity. As he approaches his seventieth year, Adams feels pressed for time. He feels he must "account to himself for himself somehow" and "invent a formula of his own for his universe." Adams claims he is not looking for absolute truth but merely "a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it." The spool will be his "Dynamic Theory of History." Glossary disconcerted frustrated, confused, or embarrassed. iniquity wickedness; lack of righteousness or justice. Fete Dieu God's Festival; the Feast of Corpus Christi, a festival celebrated on the Thursday or Sunday after Trinity Sunday, in honor of the Eucharist. seneschal a steward or major-domo in the household of a medieval noble.


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 sought 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.

  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.

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.

  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.

Adams approaches the entire span of mankind's history on earth from the point of view of "progress" and "forces," for which he has specific definitions. His theory "defines Progress as the development and economy of forces." "Force" can be anything that produces work; but he also speaks, perhaps more importantly, of the "attractive force" of opposing bodies, the gravitational pull of an entity. He applies his theory to what he considers to be the major divisions of history. The first runs from the dawn of time to 3000 B.C. . Second is the period from 3000 B.C. to 1000 A.D., concerned primarily with economies of energy rather than their development, according to Adams. The era from 1000 to 1800 features declining energy of the Church and increasing interest in science. In the nineteenth century, scientific discovery begins to grow. Finally, Adams is concerned about the future, which will require a new kind of intelligence.

The central metaphor of Adams's dynamic theory is the gravitational attraction of an entity. This is a dynamic theory because it considers concepts, as well as objects, to be constantly in motion; in flux, not static. Adams is interested in social and intellectual movement, the evolution of mankind from the dawn of time to 1900 and, speculatively, beyond. He covers this in about fourteen pages. Students should not be surprised if he seems abstract or, at times, confusing. The top Adams scholar of the twentieth century, Ernest Samuels, in The Major Phase, even wonders if the entire, extreme approach may be satire; he is sympathetic with students who may wonder what is going on and asks, "Who is not lost in wild surmise at the crux?" However, you need not remain lost. To find your way through the maze, hold onto that central metaphor: the gravitational attraction of an entity. Adams is saying that, from the beginning, mankind has been drawn to the "attractive force" of various concepts. Man is not shaping nature; nature is interacting with mankind. The earliest man was different from Darwin's apes or monkeys, according to Adams, because he was able to respond to higher "forces" or concepts; they attracted his capacity to learn. There have been various stages of attraction: survival, power, philosophy, and the appeal of divinity were among the most important through the year 1000. Mankind was drawn to these as if by a gravitational pull, distinguishing him from other primates: "Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius; selection between them is the highest science; their mass is the highest educator." From 1000 to 1800, Adams sees mankind as drawn more toward scientific experimentation in the natural world; the attraction of theology waned. This attraction to scientific investigation increased in the nineteenth century at such an exponential rate that Adams is concerned about mankind's capacity to keep up during the next  century. Adams feels that the laws of acceleration may provide scientific force that is too much for the human mind. If the attraction of scientific information continues to increase at the current rate, mankind will have to make some sort of intellectual leap to keep up. Sometimes Adams's examples seem absurd. For example, he bases his rate of scientific expansion on the increased use of coal power between 1800 and 1900, a convenient doubling every ten years or so. On the other hand, his predictions are often amazingly accurate. He anticipates that the scientific body of information is increasing so quickly that the human brain will be unable to keep up. With a leap of intellect, however, he thinks that Americans in the year 2000 would be able to "control unlimited power" and "think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind." One could now say that the leap of intellect that Adams anticipates is, in fact, accomplished through use of the computer and artificial intelligence. Adams is right. He is also prescient about the dangers as well as positive potential of nuclear power, stating that power comes from every atom, "enough of it to supply the stellar universe. . . . Man could no longer hold it off." Throughout these chapters, Adams relies on two guides that are important to his process and, therefore, his conclusions. The English philosopher, essayist and statesman Francis Bacon  directs him with his belief that truth is discovered through empirical observation, which is compatible with the approach of Pearson  and his contemporaries. Speaking of Bacon, Adams writes, "He urged society to lay aside the idea of evolving the universe from a thought, and to try evolving thought from the universe." When considering mankind's future, Adams compares the orbit of the Great Comet of 1843 to the path of humankind as it approaches the twentieth century. Although he is incorrect in thinking that the spectacular comet moved "in defiance of  law," Adams helpfully infers from the comet a need for man's leap of intellect to project the human mind into a sphere of understanding congruent with the amount of new knowledge. As the comet is attracted to the sun, which Adams thinks it orbits with a leap, the mind of man is attracted to scientific inquiry. The central metaphor of gravitational attraction holds throughout. Glossary fetish here, any object believed by superstitious people to have magical power. audaciously boldly, fearlessly. In hoc signo vinces!  In  this sign, you will conquer!  ignominy loss of one's reputation; shame and dishonor; infamy. ordnance cannon or artillery. dynamometer an apparatus for measuring force or power. antinomy a contradiction or inconsistency between two laws, principles, and so on.


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
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. With 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

In this short, concluding chapter, Adams briefly mentions scientific power and politics, but despite the forward-looking chapter title, Nunc Age , his focus really is on the past and on endings. On November 5, 1904, as he approaches New York City, returning from yet another trip to Europe, Henry is excited by the vitality of the great city, which "became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom." This is the age that he has anticipated in the last third of the Education, but he leaves the work of the future to the next generation. Adams feels that he and his contemporaries are near the end. Clarence King died -- broken -- in 1901; John Hay is in poor shape and, despite Henry's efforts, dies on July 1, 1905. Three days later, Henry writes to Mrs. Hay to express condolences and reflect on the twilight of his own life: "I had not the heart to telegraph. All the world will have done that, and will have overwhelmed you with messages of condolence. I can say nothing. You will understand it. . . . As for me, it is time to bid good-bye. I am tired. My last hold on the world is lost with him." Adams has privately printed the Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres in 1904; the first private edition of the Education will come out in 1907. He will write a little more in the next few years, but he suffers a disabling stroke in 1912 and dies on March 27, 1918. However, the story of the education of the boy from Boston stops in 1905. Henry wonders, at the end, whether he and his old friends may be allowed to return just for one day -- in 1938, say, their centenary -- to see the "mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors." He wistfully wonders if it will be, for the first time in history, a world that "sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder." For once, Henry's speculation seems wrong. With Hitler leading the Third Reich into World War II, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon to come, 1938 will be no time for timid natures. But having completed this journey with him, the reader knows that Henry already suspects something like that. Glossary querulous inclined to find fault; complaining. repine to feel or express unhappiness or discontent. "The rest is silence." Hamlet's dying words in William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark . assent agree; concur.