 CHAPTER 34 A LAW OF ACCELERATION 1904 Images are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, but the mind craves them, and of late more than ever the keenest experimenters find twenty images better than one, especially of contradictory, since the human mind has already learned to deal in contradictions. The image needed here is that of a new centre, or preponderating mass, artificially introduced on earth in the midst of a system of attractive forces that previously made their own equilibrium, and constantly induced to accelerate its motion till it shall establish a new equilibrium. A dynamic theory would begin by assuming that all history, terrestrial or cosmic, mechanical or intellectual, would be reducible to this formula if we knew the facts. For convenience the most familiar image should come first, and this is probably that of the comet or meteoric streams, like the Leonids and Perseids, a complex of minute mechanical agencies reacting within and without, and guided by the sum of forces attracting or deflecting it. Nothing forbids one to assume that the man meteorite might grow, as an acorn does, absorbing light, heat, electricity, or thought. For in recent times such transference of energy has become a familiar idea, but the simplest figure at first is that of a perfect comet, say that of 1843, which drops from space in a straight line at the regular acceleration of speed directly into the sun, and after wheeling sharply about it in heat that ought to dissipate any known substance, turns back unharmed in defiance of law by the path on which it came. The mind, by analogy, may figure as such a comet, the better because it also defies law. Motion is the ultimate object of science, and measures of motion are many, but with thought as with matter the true measure is mass in its astronomical sense, the sum or difference of attractive forces. Science has quite enough trouble in measuring its material motions without volunteering help to the historian, but the historian needs not much help to measure some kinds of social movement, and especially in the nineteenth century society by common accord agreed in measuring its progress by coal output. The ratio of increase in the volume of coal power may serve as dynamometer. The coal output of the world speaking roughly doubled every ten years between 1840 and 1900 in the form of utilized power, for the ton of coal yielded three or four times as much power in 1900 as in 1840. Rapid as this rate of acceleration in volume seems, it may be tested in a thousand ways without greatly reducing it. Perhaps the ocean steamer is nearest unity and easiest to measure. For anyone might hire in 1905, for a small sum of money, the use of thirty thousand steam horsepower to cross the ocean, and by having this figure every ten years he got back to 234 horsepower for 1835, which was accurate enough for his purposes. In truth his chief trouble came not from the ratio in volume of heat, but from the intensity, since he could get no basis for a ratio there. All ages of history have known high intensities, like the iron furnace, the burning glass, the blowpipe, but no society has ever used high intensities on any large scale till now, nor can a mere bystander decide what range of temperature is now in common use. Loosely guessing that science controls habitually the whole range from absolute zero to three thousand degrees centigrade, one might assume, for convenience, that the ten year ratio for volume could be used temporarily for intensity, and still there remained a ratio to be guessed for other forces than heat. Since 1800 scores of new forces had been discovered. Old forces had been raised to higher powers, as could be measured in the navy gun. Great regions of chemistry had been opened up and connected with other regions of physics. Within ten years a new universe of force had been revealed in radiation. Complexity had extended itself on immense horizons, and arithmetical ratios were useless for any attempt at accuracy. The force evolved seemed more like explosion than gravitation, and followed closely the curve of steam. But at all events the ten year ratio seemed carefully conservative. Unless the calculator was prepared to be instantly overwhelmed by physical force and mental complexity, he must stop there. Thus, taking the year 1900 as the starting point for carrying back the series, nothing was easier than to assume a ten year period of retardation as far back as 1820. But beyond that point the statistician failed, and only the mathematician could help. Laplace would have found it child's play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and himself. Watt could have given in pounds the increase of power between Newcomen's engines and his own. Volta and Benjamin Franklin would have stated their progress as absolute creation of power. Dalton could have measured minutely his advance on Bohr Haver. Napoleon I must have had a distinct notion of his own numerical relation to Louis XIV. No one in 1789 doubted the progress of force, least of all those who were to lose their heads by it. Pending agreement between these authorities, theory may assume what it likes, say a fifty or even a five and twenty year of re-duplication for the eighteenth century, for the period matters little until the acceleration itself is admitted. The subject is even more amusing in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century, because Galileo and Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, and Isaac Newton took vast pains to fix the laws of acceleration for moving bodies, while Lord Bacon and William Harvey were content with showing experimentally the fact of acceleration in knowledge. But from their combined results a historian might be tempted to maintain a similar rate of movement back to 1600, subject to correction from the historians of mathematics. The mathematicians might carry their calculations back as far as the fourteenth century, when algebra seems to have become, for the first time, the standard measure of mechanical progress in western Europe, for not only Copernicus and Ticobra, but even artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Albert Durer, worked by mathematical processes, and their testimony would probably give results more exact than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare. But to save trouble one might tentatively carry back the same ratio of acceleration or retardation to the year 1400, with the help of Columbus and Gutenberg, so taking a uniform rate during the whole four centuries, 1400 to 1800, and leaving to statisticians the task of correcting it. Or, better, one might for convenience use the formula of squares to serve for a law of mind. Many other formula would do as well, either of chemical explosion or electrolysis, or vegetable growth, or of expansion or contraction in innumerable forms. But this happens to be simple and convenient. Its force increases in the direct ratio of its squares. As the human meteoroid approached the sun or centre of attractive force, the attraction of one century squared itself to give the measure of attraction in the next. Behind the year 1400 the process certainly went on. But the progress becomes so slight as to be hardly measurable. What was gained in the East or elsewhere cannot be known, but forces, called loosely Greek fire and gunpowder, came into use in the West in the thirteenth century, as well as instruments like the compass, the blowpipe, clocks and spectacles, and materials like paper. Arabic notation and algebra were introduced, while metaphysics and theology acted as violent stimulants to mind. An architect might detect a sequence between the Church of Saint Peter's at Rome, the Amiens Cathedral, the Duomo at Pisa, San Marco at Venice, Sancta Sophia at Constantinople, and the Churches at Ravenna. All the historian dares affirm is that a sequence is manifestly there, and he has a right to carry back his ratio to represent the fact without assuming its numerical correctness. On the human mind as a moving body the break in acceleration in the Middle Ages is only apparent. The attraction worked through shifting forms of force, as the sun works by light or heat, electricity, gravitation or what not, on different organs with different sensibilities, but with invariable law. The science of prehistoric man has no value except to prove that the law went back into indefinite antiquity. A stone arrowhead is as convincing as a steam engine. The values were as clear a hundred thousand years ago as now, and extended equally over the whole world. The motion at last became infinitely slight, but cannot be proved to have stopped. The motion of Newton's comic, Ataphalion, might be equally slight. Two evolutionists may be left the processes of evolution. To historians the single interest is the law of reaction between force and force, between mind and nature, the law of progress. The great division of history into phases by Turgo and Kant first affirmed this law in its outlines by asserting the unity of progress, for a mere phase interrupts no growth, and nature shows innumerable such phases. The development of coal power in the 19th century furnished the first means of assigning closer values to the elements, and the appearance of super sensual forces toward 1900 made this calculation a pressing necessity, since the next step became infinitely serious. A law of acceleration, definite and constant as any law of mechanics, cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man. No one is likely to suggest a theory that man's convenience has been consulted by nature at any time, or that nature has consulted the convenience of any of her creations, except perhaps the terrobratula. In every age man has bitterly and justly complained that nature hurried and hustled him, for inertia almost invariably has ended in tragedy. Resistance is its law, and resistance to superior mass is futile and fatal. 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 awakened 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 rate 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 daggerotype. 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 mines engaged in pursuing force, the truest measure of its attraction, increased 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 synthesis 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 shuttered but never for a single instant could stop. The railways alone approached the carnage of war. Automobiles and firearms 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 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 they ever were in the past, they would be more astonished than their followers when they reached the end. If Carl Pearson's notions of the universe were sound, men like Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz and Newton should have stopped the progress of science before 1700, supposing them to have been honest in their religious convictions. In 1900 they were plainly forced back on faith in a unity unproved and in 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 metal since their science now lay in a plain 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, or 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 19th century he felt none with the American of the 20th. For this new creation, born since 1900, a historian asked no longer to be teacher or even friend. He asked only to be pupil and promised to be docile for once, even though trodden underfoot. 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 to 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 19th 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 he might even go back in 1964 to sit with Gibbon on the steps of Eric O'Ailey. Meanwhile he was getting an 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 toward 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 antimonies, the new universe would know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law. To educate oneself, 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 twelve hundred and nineteen hundred 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 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 toward 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, quarrelous, 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. Everyone saw it, and every municipal election shrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Street, and felt himself in Rome under diacletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The two-thousand-year failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight. Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washington to wait the end. There Roosevelt was training Constantines and battling trusts. With the battle of trusts, a student of mechanics felt entire sympathy, not merely as a matter of politics or society, but also as a measure of motion. The trusts and corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy. They were revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They tore society to pieces and trampled it underfoot. As one of their earliest victims, a citizen of Quincy born in 1838 had learned submission and silence, for he knew that under the laws of mechanics any change within the range of the forces must make his situation only worse. But he was beyond measure curious to see whether the conflict of forces would produce the new man, since no other energies seemed left on earth to breed. The new man could be only a child born of contact between the new and the old energies. Both had been familiar since childhood, as the story has shown, and neither had warped the umpire's judgment by its favours. If ever Judge had reason to be impartial, it was he. The sole object of his interest and sympathy was the new man, and the longer one watched, the less could be seen of him. Of the forces behind the trusts one could see something. They owned a complete organization, with schools, training, wealth and purpose. But of the forces behind Roosevelt, one knew little. Their cohesion was slight, their training irregular, their objects vague. The public had no idea what practical system it could aim at, or what sort of men could manage it. The single problem before it was not so much to control the trusts, as to create the society that could manage the trusts. The new American must be either the child of the new forces, or a chance sport of nature. The attraction of mechanical power had already wrenched the American mind into a crab-like process, which Roosevelt was making heroic efforts to restore to even action. And he had every right to active support and sympathy from all the world, especially from the trusts themselves, so far as they were human. But the doubt persisted whether the force that educated was really man or nature, mind or motion. The mechanical theory, mostly accepted by science, seemed to require that the law of mass should rule. In that case, progress would continue as before. In that or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was as useless or misleading as an eighteenth-century education had been to the child of eighteen thirty-eight. But Adams had a better reason for holding his tongue. For his dynamic theory of history he cared no more than for the kinetic theory of gas. But if it were an approach to measurement of motion, it would verify or disprove itself within thirty years. At the calculated acceleration, the head of the meteor stream must very soon pass perihelion. Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was futile, and silence, next to good temper, was the mark of sense. If the acceleration measured by the development and economy of forces were to continue at its rate since eighteen hundred, the mathematician of nineteen-fifty should be able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as accurately as that of the November meteoroids. Naturally, such an attitude annoyed the players in the game, as the attitude of the umpire is apt to infuriate the spectators. Above all it was profoundly un-moral and tended to discourage effort. On the other hand it tended to encourage foresight and to economize waste of mind. If it was not itself education, it pointed out the economies necessary for the education of the new American. There the duty stopped. There too life stopped. Nature has educated herself to a singular sympathy for death. On the Antarctic glacier nearly five thousand feet above sea level Captain Scott found carcasses of seals where the animals had laboriously flopped up to die in peace. Quote, unless we had actually found these remains it would have been past believing that a dying seal could have transported itself over fifty miles of rough, steep, glacier surface. But the seal seems often to crawl to the shore or to the ice to die, probably from its instinctive dread of its marine enemies. End quote. In India, poor on Dars, at the end of statesmanship sought solitude and died in sanctity among the deer and monkeys rather than remain with man. Even in America the Indian summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled. For that reason one's own passive obscurity seemed sometimes nearer nature than John Hayes' exposure. To the normal animal the instinct of sport is innate, and historians themselves were not exempt from the passion of baiting their bears. But in its turn even the seal dislikes to be worried to death in age by creatures that have not the strength or the teeth to kill him outright. On reaching Washington, November 14, 1904, Adam saw at a glance that Haye must have rest. Already Mrs. Haye had bade him prepare to help in taking her husband to Europe as soon as the session should be over, and although Haye protested that the idea could not even be discussed, his strength failed so rapidly that he could not effectually discuss it and ended by yielding without struggle. He would equally have resigned office and retired, like Porandars, had not the President and the press protested. But he often debated the subject, and his friends could throw no light on it. Adams himself, who had set his heart on seeing Haye close his career by making peace in the East, could only urge that vanity for vanity the crown of peacemaker was worth the cross of martyrdom. But the cross was in full sight while the crown was still uncertain. Adams found his formula for the Russian inertia exasperatingly correct. He thought that Russia should have negotiated instantly on the fall of Port Arthur, January 1, 1905. He found that she had not the energy, but meant to wait till her navy should be destroyed. The delay measured precisely the time that Haye had to spare. The close of the session on March 4 left him barely the strength to crawl on board ship March 18, and before his steamer had reached half her course he had revived, almost as gay as when he first lighted on the Marco House in I Street, forty-four years earlier. The clouds that gather round the setting sun do not always take a sober colouring from eyes that have kept watch on mortality, or at least the sobriety is sometimes scarcely mad. One walks with one's friends squarely up to the portal of life, and bids good-bye with a smile. One has done it so often. Haye could scarcely pace the deck. He nourished no illusions. He was convinced that he should never return to his work, and he talked lightly of the death sentence that he might any day expect. But he threw off the colouring of office and mortality together, and the malaria of power left its only trace in the sense of tasks incomplete. One could honestly help him there. Laughing frankly at his dozen treaties hung up in the Senate committee room like lambs in a butcher's shop, one could still remind him of what was solidly completed. In his eight years of office he had solved nearly every old problem of American statesmanship, and had left little or nothing to annoy his successor. He had brought the great Atlantic powers into a working system, and even Russia seemed about to be dragged into a combine of intelligent equilibrium based on an intelligent allotment of activities. For the first time in fifteen hundred years a true Roman parks was in sight, and would, if it succeeded, owe its virtues to him. Except for making peace in Manchuria he could do no more, and if the worst should happen, setting continent against continent in arms, the only apparent alternative to his scheme, he need not repine at missing the catastrophe. This rosy view served a soothe disgusts which every parting statesman feels, and commonly with reason. One had no need to get out one's notebook in order to jot down the exact figures on either side. Why add up the elements of resistance and anarchy? The Kaiser supplied him with these figures just as the Cretic approached Morocco. Everyone was doing it, and seemed in a panic about it. The chaos waited only for his landing. Arrived at Genoa the party hid itself for a fortnight at Nervi, and he gained strength rapidly as long as he made no effort and heard no call for action. Then they all went on to Nauheim without relapse. There after a few days Adams left him for the regular treatment and came up to Paris. The medical reports promised well and Hay's letters were as humorous and light-handed as ever. To the last he wrote cheerfully of his progress and amusingly with his usual light skepticism of his various doctors. But when the treatment ended three weeks later and he came on to Paris, he showed at the first glance that he had lost strength, and the return to affairs and interviews wore him rapidly out. He was conscious of it, and in his last talk before starting for London and Liverpool he took the end of his activity for granted. You must hold out for the peace negotiations, was the remonstrance. I've not time, he replied. You'll need little time, was the rejoinder. Each was correct. There it ended. Shakespeare himself could use no more than the common place to express what is incapable of expression. The rest is silence. The few familiar words among the simplest in the language conveying an idea trite beyond rivalry served Shakespeare, and as yet no one has said more. A few weeks afterwards, one warm evening in early July, as Adams was strolling down to dine under the trees at Arminon View, he learned that Haye was dead. He expected it. On Haye's account he was even satisfied to have his friend die, as we would all die if we could, in full fame, at home and abroad, universally regretted in wielding his power to the last. One had seen scores of emperors and heroes fade into cheap obscurity even when alive, and now at least one had not that to fear for one's friend. It was not even the suddenness of the shock or the sense of void that threw Adams into the depths of Hamlet's Shakespearean silence in the full flare of Paris frivolity in its favorite haunt where worldly vanity reached its most futile climax in human history. It was only the quiet summons to follow, the assent to dismissal. It was time to go. The three friends had begun life together, and the last of the three had no motive, no attraction, to carry it on after the others had gone. Education had ended for all three, and only beyond some remota horizon could its values be fixed or renewed. Perhaps some day, say 1938, their centenary, they might be allowed to return together for a holiday to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors. And perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder. End of chapter thirty-five and End of the Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams