The Education of Henry Adams
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