The Education of Henry Adams
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.
CHAPTER XXXV
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