The Education of Henry Adams
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