The Education of Henry Adams
too; he must leave her; even though his wife, to find her own way, and
all the world saw her trying to find her way by imitating him.
The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in
feminine history. Tragedy had been woman's lot since Eve. Her problem
had been always one of physical strength and it was as physical
perfection of force that her Venus had governed nature. The woman's
force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had
been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all
history; it was a palaeontological falsehood that even an Eocene female
monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if her force
were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the
family must pay for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become
sexless like the bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia to
carry on the race.
The story was not new. For thousands of years women had
rebelled. They had made a fortress of religion--had buried themselves
in the cloister, in self-sacrifice, in good works--or even in bad.
One's studies in the twelfth century, like one's studies in the fourth,
as in Homeric and archaic time, showed her always busy in the illusions
of heaven or of hell--ambition, intrigue, jealousy, magic--but the
American woman had no illusions or ambitions or new resources, and
nothing to rebel against, except her own maternity; yet the rebels
increased by millions from year to year till they blocked the path of
rebellion. Even her field of good works was narrower than in the
twelfth century. Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophical
anarchism, which promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off the
few avenues of escape which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she
saw before her only the future reserved for machine-made, collectivist
females.
From the male, she could look for no help; his instinct of
power was blind. The Church had known more about women than science
will ever know, and the historian who studied the sources of
Christianity felt sometimes convinced that the Church had been made by
the woman chiefly as her protest against man. At times, the historian
would have been almost willing to maintain that the man had overthrown
the Church chiefly because it was feminine. After the overthrow of the
Church, the woman had no refuge except such as the man created for
himself. She was free; she had no illusions; she was sexless; she had
discarded all that the male disliked; and although she secretly
regretted the discard, she knew that she could not go backward. She
must, like the man, marry machinery. Already the American man sometimes
felt surprise at finding himself regarded as sexless; the American
woman was oftener surprised at finding herself regarded as sexual.
No honest historian can take part with--or against--the
forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race
should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics. No
doubt every one in society discussed the subject, impelled by President
Roosevelt if by nothing else, and the surface current of social opinion
seemed set as strongly in one direction as the silent undercurrent of
social action ran in the other; but the truth lay somewhere unconscious
in the woman's breast. An elderly man, trying only to learn the law of
social inertia and the limits of social divergence could not compel the
Superintendent of the Census to ask every young woman whether she
wanted children, and how many; he could not even require of an
octogenarian Senate the passage of a law obliging every woman, married
or not, to bear one baby--at the expense of the Treasury--before she
was thirty years old, under penalty of solitary confinement for life;
yet these were vital statistics in more senses than all that bore the
name, and tended more directly to the foundation of a serious society
in the future. He could draw no conclusions whatever except from the
birth-rate. He could not frankly discuss the matter with the young
women themselves, although they would have gladly discussed it, because
Faust was helpless in the tragedy of woman. He could suggest nothing.
The Marguerite of the future could alone decide whether she were better
off than the Marguerite of the past; whether she would rather be victim
to a man, a church, or a machine.
Between these various forms of inevitable inertia--sex and
race--the student of multiplicity felt inclined to admit
that--ignorance against ignorance--the Russian problem seemed to him
somewhat easier of treatment than the American. Inertia of race and
bulk would require an immense force to overcome it, but in time it
might perhaps be partially overcome. Inertia of sex could not be
overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an immense force, doubling
every few years, was working irresistibly to overcome it. One gazed
mute before this ocean of darkest ignorance that had already engulfed
society. Few centres of great energy lived in illusion more complete or
archaic than Washington with its simple-minded standards of the field
and farm, its Southern and Western habits of life and manners, its
assumptions of ethics and history; but even in Washington, society was
uneasy enough to need no further fretting. One was almost glad to act
the part of horseshoe crab in Quincy Bay, and admit that all was
uniform--that nothing ever changed--and that the woman would swim about
the ocean of future time, as she had swum in the past, with the
gar-fish and the shark, unable to change.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)
OF all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante, this
new exploration along the shores of Multiplicity and Complexity
promised to be the longest, though as yet it had barely touched two
familiar regions--race and sex. Even within these narrow seas the
navigator lost his bearings and followed the winds as they blew. By
chance it happened that Raphael Pumpelly helped the winds; for, being
in Washington on his way to Central Asia he fell to talking with Adams
about these matters, and said that Willard Gibbs thought he got most
help from a book called the "Grammar of Science," by Karl Pearson. To
Adams's vision, Willard Gibbs stood on the same plane with the three or
four greatest minds of his century, and the idea that a man so
incomparably superior should find help anywhere filled him with wonder.
He sent for the volume and read it. From the time he sailed for Europe
and reached his den on the Avenue du Bois until he took his return
steamer at Cherbourg on December 26, he did little but try to find out
what Karl Pearson could have taught Willard Gibbs.
Here came in, more than ever, the fatal handicap of ignorance
in mathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed, as the right to
judge the product of the tool. Ignorant as one was of the finer values
of French or German, and often deceived by the intricacies of thought
hidden in the muddiness of the medium, one could sometimes catch a
tendency to intelligible meaning even in Kant or Hegel; but one had not
the right to a suspicion of error where the tool of thought was
algebra. Adams could see in such parts of the "Grammar" as he could
understand, little more than an enlargement of Stallo's book already
twenty years old. He never found out what it could have taught a master
like Willard Gibbs. Yet the book had a historical value out of all
proportion to its science. No such stride had any Englishman before
taken in the lines of English thought. The progress of science was
measured by the success of the "Grammar," when, for twenty years past,
Stallo had been deliberately ignored under the usual conspiracy of
silence inevitable to all thought which demands new thought-machinery.
Science needs time to reconstruct its instruments, to follow a
revolution in space; a certain lag is inevitable; the most active mind
cannot instantly swerve from its path; but such revolutions are
portentous, and the fall or rise of half-a-dozen empires interested a
student of history less than the rise of the "Grammar of Science," the
more pressingly because, under the silent influence of Langley, he was
prepared to expect it.
For a number of years Langley had published in his Smithsonian
Reports the revolutionary papers that foretold the overthrow of
nineteenth-century dogma, and among the first was the famous address of
Sir William Crookes on psychical research, followed by a series of
papers on Roentgen and Curie, which had steadily driven the scientific
lawgivers of Unity into the open; but Karl Pearson was the first to pen
them up for slaughter in the schools. The phrase is not stronger than
that with which the "Grammar of Science" challenged the fight:
"Anything more hopelessly illogical than the statements with regard to
Force and Matter current in elementary textbooks of science, it is
difficult to imagine," opened Mr. Pearson, and the responsible author
of the "elementary textbook," as he went on to explain, was Lord Kelvin
himself. Pearson shut out of science everything which the nineteenth
century had brought into it. He told his scholars that they must put up
with a fraction of the universe, and a very small fraction at that--the
circle reached by the senses, where sequence could be taken for
granted--much as the deep-sea fish takes for granted the circle of
light which he generates. "Order and reason, beauty and benevolence,
are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated
with the mind of man." The assertion, as a broad truth, left one's mind
in some doubt of its bearing, for order and beauty seemed to be
associated also in the mind of a crystal, if one's senses were to be
admitted as judge; but the historian had no interest in the universal
truth of Pearson's or Kelvin's or Newton's laws; he sought only their
relative drift or direction, and Pearson went on to say that these
conceptions must stop: "Into the chaos beyond sense-impressions we
cannot scientifically project them." We cannot even infer them: "In the
chaos behind sensations, in the 'beyond' of sense-impressions, we
cannot infer necessity, order or routine, for these are concepts formed
by the mind of man on this side of sense-impressions"; but we must
infer chaos: "Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of
the supersensuous." The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of
ultimate chaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was
the dream of man.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean,
for words are slippery and thought is viscous; but since Bacon and
Newton, English thought had gone on impatiently protesting that no one
must try to know the unknowable at the same time that every one went on
thinking about it. The result was as chaotic as kinetic gas; but with
the thought a historian had nothing to do. He sought only its
direction. For himself he knew, that, in spite of all the Englishmen
that ever lived, he would be forced to enter supersensual chaos if he
meant to find out what became of British science--or indeed of any
other science. From Pythagoras to Herbert Spencer, every one had done
it, although commonly science had explored an ocean which it preferred
to regard as Unity or a Universe, and called Order. Even Hegel, who
taught that every notion included its own negation, used the negation
only to reach a "larger synthesis," till he reached the universal which
thinks itself, contradiction and all. The Church alone had constantly
protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was not God, that
pantheism was worse than atheism, and that Unity could not be proved as
a contradiction. Karl Pearson seemed to agree with the Church, but