The Education of Henry Adams
every one else, including Newton, Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, had sailed
gaily into the supersensual, calling it:--
"One God, one Law, one Element,
And one far-off, divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."
Suddenly, in 1900, science raised its head and denied.
Yet, perhaps, after all, the change had not been so sudden as
it seemed. Real and actual, it certainly was, and every newspaper
betrayed it, but sequence could scarcely be denied by one who had
watched its steady approach, thinking the change far more interesting
to history than the thought. When he reflected about it, he recalled
that the flow of tide had shown itself at least twenty years before;
that it had become marked as early as 1893; and that the man of science
must have been sleepy indeed who did not jump from his chair like a
scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical
bomb she called radium. There remained no hole to hide in. Even
metaphysics swept back over science with the green water of the
deep-sea ocean and no one could longer hope to bar out the unknowable,
for the unknowable was known.
The fact was admitted that the uniformitarians of one's youth
had wound about their universe a tangle of contradictions meant only
for temporary support to be merged in "larger synthesis," and had
waited for the larger synthesis in silence and in vain. They had
refused to hear Stallo. They had betrayed little interest in Crookes.
At last their universe had been wrecked by rays, and Karl Pearson
undertook to cut the wreck loose with an axe, leaving science adrift on
a sensual raft in the midst of a supersensual chaos. The confusion
seemed, to a mere passenger, worse than that of 1600 when the
astronomers upset the world; it resembled rather the convulsion of 310
when the Civitas Dei cut itself loose from the Civitas Romae, and the
Cross took the place of the legions; but the historian accepted it all
alike; he knew that his opinion was worthless; only, in this case, he
found himself on the raft, personally and economically concerned in its
drift.
English thought had always been chaos and multiplicity itself,
in which the new step of Karl Pearson marked only a consistent
progress; but German thought had affected system, unity, and abstract
truth, to a point that fretted the most patient foreigner, and to
Germany the voyager in strange seas of thought alone might resort with
confident hope of renewing his youth. Turning his back on Karl Pearson
and England, he plunged into Germany, and had scarcely crossed the
Rhine when he fell into libraries of new works bearing the names of
Ostwald, Ernst Mach, Ernst Haeckel, and others less familiar, among
whom Haeckel was easiest to approach, not only because of being the
oldest and clearest and steadiest spokesman of nineteenth-century
mechanical convictions, but also because in 1902 he had published a
vehement renewal of his faith. The volume contained only one paragraph
that concerned a historian; it was that in which Haeckel sank his voice
almost to a religious whisper in avowing with evident effort, that the
"proper essence of substance appeared to him more and more marvellous
and enigmatic as he penetrated further into the knowledge of its
attributes--matter and energy--and as he learned to know their
innumerable phenomena and their evolution." Since Haeckel seemed to
have begun the voyage into multiplicity that Pearson had forbidden to
Englishmen, he should have been a safe pilot to the point, at least, of
a "proper essence of substance" in its attributes of matter and energy:
but Ernst Mach seemed to go yet one step further, for he rejected
matter altogether, and admitted but two processes in nature--change of
place and interconversion of forms. Matter was Motion--Motion was
Matter--the thing moved.
A student of history had no need to understand these scientific
ideas of very great men; he sought only the relation with the ideas of
their grandfathers, and their common direction towards the ideas of
their grandsons. He had long ago reached, with Hegel, the limits of
contradiction; and Ernst Mach scarcely added a shade of variety to the
identity of opposites; but both of them seemed to be in agreement with
Karl Pearson on the facts of the supersensual universe which could be
known only as unknowable.
With a deep sigh of relief, the traveller turned back to
France. There he felt safe. No Frenchman except Rabelais and Montaigne
had ever taught anarchy other than as path to order. Chaos would be
unity in Paris even if child of the guillotine. To make this assurance
mathematically sure, the highest scientific authority in France was a
great mathematician, M. Poincare of the Institut, who published in 1902
a small volume called "La Science et l'Hypothese," which purported to
be relatively readable. Trusting to its external appearance, the
traveller timidly bought it, and greedily devoured it, without
understanding a single consecutive page, but catching here and there a
period that startled him to the depths of his ignorance, for they
seemed to show that M. Poincare was troubled by the same historical
landmarks which guided or deluded Adams himself: "[In science] we are
led," said M. Poincare, "to act as though a simple law, when other
things were equal, must be more probable than a complicated law. Half a
century ago one frankly confessed it, and proclaimed that nature loves
simplicity. She has since given us too often the lie. To-day this
tendency is no longer avowed, and only as much of it is preserved as is
indispensable so that science shall not become impossible."
Here at last was a fixed point beyond the chance of confusion
with self-suggestion. History and mathematics agreed. Had M. Poincare
shown anarchistic tastes, his evidence would have weighed less heavily;
but he seemed to be the only authority in science who felt what a
historian felt so strongly--the need of unity in a universe.
"Considering everything we have made some approach towards unity. We
have not gone as fast as we hoped fifty years ago; we have not always
taken the intended road; but definitely we have gained much ground."
This was the most clear and convincing evidence of progress yet offered
to the navigator of ignorance; but suddenly he fell on another view
which seemed to him quite irreconcilable with the first: "Doubtless if
our means of investigation should become more and more penetrating, we
should discover the simple under the complex; then the complex under
the simple; then anew the simple under the complex; and so on without
ever being able to foresee the last term."
A mathematical paradise of endless displacement promised
eternal bliss to the mathematician, but turned the historian green with
horror. Made miserable by the thought that he knew no mathematics, he
burned to ask whether M. Poincare knew any history, since he began by
begging the historical question altogether, and assuming that the past
showed alternating phases of simple and complex--the precise point that
Adams, after fifty years of effort, found himself forced to surrender;
and then going on to assume alternating phases for the future which,
for the weary Titan of Unity, differed in nothing essential from the
kinetic theory of a perfect gas.
Since monkeys first began to chatter in trees, neither man nor
beast had ever denied or doubted Multiplicity, Diversity, Complexity,
Anarchy, Chaos. Always and everywhere the Complex had been true and the
Contradiction had been certain. Thought started by it. Mathematics
itself began by counting one--two--three; then imagining their
continuity, which M. Poincare was still exhausting his wits to explain
or defend; and this was his explanation: "In short, the mind has the
faculty of creating symbols, and it is thus that it has constructed
mathematical continuity which is only a particular system of symbols."
With the same light touch, more destructive in its artistic measure
than the heaviest-handed brutality of Englishmen or Germans, he went on
to upset relative truth itself: "How should I answer the question
whether Euclidian Geometry is true? It has no sense!... Euclidian
Geometry is, and will remain, the most convenient."
Chaos was a primary fact even in Paris--especially in Paris--as it was
in the Book of Genesis; but every thinking being in Paris or out of it
had exhausted thought in the effort to prove Unity, Continuity,
Purpose, Order, Law, Truth, the Universe, God, after having begun by
taking it for granted, and discovering, to their profound dismay, that
some minds denied it. The direction of mind, as a single force of
nature, had been constant since history began. Its own unity had
created a universe the essence of which was abstract Truth; the
Absolute; God! To Thomas Aquinas, the universe was still a person; to
Spinoza, a substance; to Kant, Truth was the essence of the "I"; an
innate conviction; a categorical imperative; to Poincare, it was a
convenience; and to Karl Pearson, a medium of exchange.
The historian never stopped repeating to himself that he knew
nothing about it; that he was a mere instrument of measure, a
barometer, pedometer, radiometer; and that his whole share in the
matter was restricted to the measurement of thought-motion as marked by
the accepted thinkers. He took their facts for granted. He knew no more
than a firefly about rays--or about race--or sex--or ennui--or a bar of
music--or a pang of love--or a grain of musk--or of phosphorus--or
conscience--or duty--or the force of Euclidian geometry--or
non-Euclidian--or heat--or light--or osmosis--or electrolysis--or the
magnet--or ether--or vis inertiae--or gravitation--or cohesion--or
elasticity--or surface tension--or capillary attraction--or Brownian
motion--or of some scores, or thousands, or millions of chemical
attractions, repulsions or indifferences which were busy within and
without him; or, in brief, of Force itself, which, he was credibly
informed, bore some dozen definitions in the textbooks, mostly
contradictory, and all, as he was assured, beyond his intelligence; but
summed up in the dictum of the last and highest science, that Motion
seems to be Matter and Matter seems to be Motion, yet "we are probably
incapable of discovering" what either is. History had no need to ask
what either might be; all it needed to know was the admission of
ignorance; the mere fact of multiplicity baffling science. Even as to
the fact, science disputed, but radium happened to radiate something
that seemed to explode the scientific magazine, bringing thought, for
the time, to a standstill; though, in the line of thought-movement in
history, radium was merely the next position, familiar and inexplicable
since Zeno and his arrow: continuous from the beginning of time, and
discontinuous at each successive point. History set it down on the
record--pricked its position on the chart--and waited to be led, or
misled, once more.
The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values
his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify
his facts. The laws of history only repeat the lines of force or
thought. Yet though his will be iron, he cannot help now and then
resuming his humanity or simianity in face of a fear. The motion of
thought had the same value as the motion of a cannon-ball seen
approaching the observer on a direct line through the air. One could
watch its curve for five thousand years. Its first violent acceleration
in historical times had ended in the catastrophe of 310. The next
swerve of direction occurred towards 1500. Galileo and Bacon gave a
still newer curve to it, which altered its values; but all these
changes had never altered the continuity. Only in 1900, the continuity
snapped.