 Chapter 30 of the Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 30 V. E. Nerty I. 1930 Washington was always amusing, but in 1900, as in 1800, its chief interest lay in its distance from New York. The movement of New York had become planetary, beyond control, while the task of Washington in 1900, as in 1800, was to control it. The success of Washington in the past century promised ill for its success in the next. To a student who had passed the best years of his life in pondering over the political philosophy of Jefferson, Gallatin, and Madison, the problem that Roosevelt took in hand seemed alive with historical interest, but it would need at least another half century to show its results. As yet, one could not measure the forces or their arrangement. The forces had not even aligned themselves except in foreign affairs, and there one turned to seek the channel of wisdom as naturally as though Washington did not exist. The President could do nothing effectual in foreign affairs, but at least he could see something of the field. Hay had reached the summit of his career and saw himself on the edge of wreck. Committed to the task of keeping China open, he saw China about to be shut. Almost alone in the world he represented the open door, and could not escape being crushed by it. Yet luck had been with him in full tide. Though Sir Julian Poncefort had died in May 1902 after carrying out tasks that filled an ex-private secretary of 1861 with open-mouthed astonishment, Hay had been helped by the appointment of Michael Herbert as his successor, who countered for double the value of an ordinary diplomat. To reduce friction is the chief use of friendship, and in politics the loss by friction is outrageous. To Herbert and his wife, the small knot of houses that seemed to give a vague unity to foreign affairs opened their doors and their hearts, for the Herbert's were already at home there, and this personal sympathy prolonged Hay's life, for it not only eased the effort of endurance, but it also led directly to a revolution in Germany. Down to that moment the Kaiser, rightly or wrongly, had countered as the ally of the Tsar in all matters relating to the East. Halleben and Cassini were taken to be a single force in eastern affairs, and this supposed alliance gave Hay no little anxiety and some trouble. Suddenly Halleben, who seemed to have had no thought but to obey with almost agonized anxiety the least hint of the Kaiser's will, received a telegram ordering him to pre-text illness and come home, which he obeyed within four and twenty hours. The ways of the German foreign office had been always abrupt, not to say ruthless towards its agents, and yet commonly some discontent had been shown as excuse, but in this case no cause was guessed for Halleben's disgrace, except the Kaiser's wish to have a personal representative at Washington. Breaking down all precedent he sent Speck von Sternberg to counterbalance Herbert. Welcome as Speck was in the same social intimacy and valuable as his presence was to Hay, the personal gain was trifling compared with the political. With Hay's official tasks one knew no more than any newspaper reporter did, but of one's own diplomatic education the successive steps had become strides. The scholar was studying not on Hay's account but on his own. He had seen Hay in 1898 bring England into his combine. He had seen the steady movement which was to bring France back into an Atlantic system, and now he saw suddenly the dramatic swing of Germany toward the West, the movement of all others, nearest mathematical certainty. Whether the Kaiser meant it or not he gave the effect of meaning to assert his independence of Russia, and to Hay this change of front had enormous value. The least was that it seemed to isolate Cassini and unmask the Russian movement which became more threatening every month as the Manchurian scheme had to be revealed. Of course the students saw whole continents of study opened to him by the Kaiser's coup d'état. Unfortunately as he had tried to follow the Kaiser's career he had never suspected such refinement of policy which raised his opinion of the Kaiser's ability to the highest point and altogether upset the centre of statesmanship. That Germany could be so quickly detached from separate objects and brought into an Atlantic system seemed a paradox more paradoxical than any that one's education had yet offered, though it had offered little but paradox. If Germany could be held there a century of friction would be saved, no price would be too great for such an object, although no price could probably be rung out of Congress as equivalent for it. The Kaiser by one personal act of energy freed Hay's hands so completely that he saw his problem simplified to Russia alone. Naturally Russia was a problem ten times as difficult. The history of Europe for two hundred years had accomplished little but to state one or two sides of the Russian problem. Long's year of Berlin in youth, though it taught no civil law, had opened one's eyes to the Russian enigma, and both German and French historians had laboured over its proportions with a sort of fascinated horror. Germany of all countries was most vitally concerned in it, but even a cave-dweller in Lafayette Square seeking only a measure of motion since the Crusades saw before his eyes, in the spring of 1903, a survey of future order or anarchy that would exhaust the power of his telescopes and devy the accuracy of his theodolites. The drama had become passionately interesting and grew every day more Byzantine, for the Russian government itself showed clear signs of dislocation, and the orders of Lamstorff and David were reversed when applied in Manchuria. Historians and students should have no sympathies or antipathies, but Adams had private reasons for wishing well to the Tsar and his people. At much length in several laboured chapters of history he had told how the personal friendliness of the Tsar Alexander I in 1810 saved the fortunes of J. Q. Adams, and opened to him the brilliant diplomatic career that ended in the White House. Even in his own effaced existence he had reasons, not altogether trivial, for gratitude to the Tsar Alexander II, whose firm neutrality had saved him some terribly anxious days and nights in 1862, while he had seen enough of Russia to sympathise warmly with Prince Kilkoff's railways and David's industries. The last and highest triumph of history would, to his mind, be the bringing of Russia into the Atlantic Combine, and the just and fair allotment of the whole world among the regulated activities of the universe. At the rate of unification since 1840 this end should be possible within another sixty years, and in foresight of that point Adams could already finish, provisionally, his chart of international unity. But for the moment the gravest doubts and ignorance covered the whole field. No one, Tsar or diplomat, Kaiser or Mikado, seemed to know anything. Through individual Russians one could always see, with ease, for their diplomacy never suggested depth, and perhaps Hey protected Cassini for the very reason that Cassini could not disguise an emotion, and never failed to betray that in setting the enormous bulk of Russian inertia to roll over China, he regretted infinitely that he should have to roll it over Hey, too. He would almost rather have rolled it over David and Lamestorff. His political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed in the single idea that Russia must fatally roll, must, by her irresistible inertia, crush whatever stood in her way. For Hey and his pooling policy, inherited from McKinley, the fatalism of Russian inertia meant the failure of American intensity. When Russia rolled over a neighbouring people she absorbed their energies in her own movement of custom and race, which neither Tsar nor peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any Western equivalent. In 1903 Hey saw Russia knocking away the last blocks that held back the launch of this huge mass into the China Sea. The vast force of inertia known as China was to be united with the huge bulk of Russia in a single mass which no amount of new force could hence forward deflect. Had the Russian government, with the sharpest sense of enlightenment, employed scores of divots and kilkoffs, and borrowed all the resources of Europe, it could not have lifted such a weight, and had no idea of trying. These were the positions chartered on the map of political unity by an insect in Washington in the spring of 1903, and they seemed to him fixed. Russia held Europe and America in her grasp, and Cassini held Hey in his. The Siberian railway offered a checkmate to all possible opposition. England must make the best term she could. England must go on receding. America and Germany would look on at the Avalanche. The wall of Russian inertia that barred Europe across the Baltic would bar America across the Pacific, and Hey's policy of the open door would infallibly fail. Thus the game seemed lost, in spite of the Kyve's brilliant stroke, and the movement of Russia eastward must drag Germany after it by its mere mass. To the humble student the loss of Hey's game affected only Hey. For himself the game, not the stakes, was the chief interest, and the want of habit made him object to read his newspapers blackened, since he liked to blacken them himself. He was in any case condemned to pass but a short space of time either in Siberia or in Paris, and could balance his endless columns of calculation equally in either place. The figures, not the facts, concerned his chart, and he mused deeply over his next equation. The Atlantic would have to deal with a vast continental mass of inert motion, like a glacier, which moved, and consciously moved, by mechanical gravitation alone. Russia saw herself so, and so must an American see her. He had no more to do than measure if he could the mass. Was volume or intensity the stronger? What and where was the vis nova that could hold its own before this prodigious ice-cap of vis inertii? What was movement of inertia, and what its laws? Obviously a student knew nothing about mechanical laws, but he took for granted that he could learn, and went to his books to ask. He found that the force of inertia had troubled wiser men than he. The dictionary said that inertia was a property of matter, by which matter tends when at rest to remain so, and when in motion to move on in a straight line. Finding that his mind refused to imagine itself at rest or in a straight line, he was forced, as usual, to let it imagine something else. And since the question concerned the mind and not the matter, he decided from personal experience that his mind was never at rest, but moved, when normal, about something it called a motive, and never moved without motives to move it. So long as these motives were habitual, and their attraction regular, the consequent result might for convenience be called movement of inertia, to distinguish it from movement caused by new or higher attraction. But the greater the bulk to move, the greater must be the force to accelerate or deflect it. Race seemed simple as running water. But simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student and the professor had gone on complaining that minds were unequally inert. The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One class of minds responded only to habit, another only to novelty. Race classified thought, class lists classified mind. No two men thought alike, and no woman thought like a man. This inertia seemed to be fairly constant, and made the chief trouble in the Russian future. History looked doubtful when asked whether race inertia had ever been overcome without destroying the race in order to reconstruct it. But surely sex inertia had never been overcome at all. Of all movements of inertia, maternity and reproduction are the most typical, and women's property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence. Where else stops the woman must go on reproducing as she did in the Siluria of Taraspis. Sex is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind. The American always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history mentioned hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled them as timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species. But if the problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race question, it involved that of sex far more deeply and to Americans vitally. The task of accelerating or deflecting the movement of the American woman had interest infinitely greater than that of any race whatever, Russian or Chinese, Asiatic or African. On this subject as on the Senate and the banks, Adams was conscious of having been born an 18th century remainder. As he grew older he found that early institutions lost their interest, but that early women became a passion. Without understanding movement of sex history seemed to him mere pedantry. So insistent had he become on this side of his subject that with women he talked of little else, and because women's thought is mostly subconscious and particularly sensitive to suggestion, he tried tricks and devices to disclose it. The woman seldom knows her own thought. She is as curious to understand herself as the man to understand her, and responds far more quickly than the man to a sudden idea. Sometimes at dinner one might wait till talk flagged, and then, as mildly as possible, ask one's liveliest neighbor whether she could explain why the American woman was a failure. Without an instant's hesitation she was sure to answer because the American man is a failure. She meant it. Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American men he had ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his sex who seemed able to take care of themselves. But from the point of view of sex he felt much curiosity to know how far the woman was right, and in pursuing this inquiry he caught the trick of affirming that the woman was the superior. Apart from truth he owed her at least that compliment. The habit led sometimes to perilous personalities in the sudden give-and-take of table-talk. This spring, just before sailing for Europe in May 1903, he had a message from his sister-in-law, Mrs. Brooks Adams, to say that she and her sister, Mrs. Lodge, and the senator, were coming to dinner by way of farewell. Bay Lodge and his lovely young wife sent word to the same effect. Mrs. Roosevelt joined the party, and Michael Herbert shyly slipped down to escape the solitude of his wife's absence. The party were too intimate for reserve, and they soon fell on Adams's hobby, with derision which stung him to pungent rejoinder. The American man is a failure. You are all failures, he said. Has not my sister here more sense than my brother Brooks? Is not Bessie worth two of Bay? Shouldn't we all elect Mrs. Lodge, senator, against Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a chance if Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him? Do you want to stop at the Embassy on your way home and ask which would run at best, Herbert, or his wife? The men laughed a little, not much. Each probably made allowance for his own wife as an unusually superior woman. Someone afterwards remarked that these half-dozen women were not a fair average. Adams replied that the half-dozen men were above all possible average. She could not lay his hands on another half-dozen there equals. Gay or serious, the question never failed to stir a feeling. The cleverer the woman, the less she denied the failure. She was bitter at heart about it. She had failed even to hold the family together, and her children ran away like chickens with their first feathers. The family was extinct, like chivalry. She had failed not only to create a new society that satisfied her, but even to hold her own in the old society of church or state, and was left for the most part with no place but the theatre or streets to decorate. She might glitter with historical diamonds and sparkle with wit as brilliant as the gems, in rooms as splendid as any in Rome at its best. But she saw no one except her own sex who knew enough to be worth dazzling, or was competent to pay her intelligent homage. She might have her own way without restraint or limit, but she knew not what to do with herself when free. Never had the world known a more capable or devoted mother, but at forty her task was over, and she was left with no stage except that of her old duties, or of Washington society, where she had enjoyed for a hundred years every advantage, but had created only a medley where nine men out of ten refused her request to be civilized, and the tenth bore her. On most subjects one's opinions must defer to science, but on this the opinion of a senator or a professor, a chairman of a state Central Committee or a railway president, is worth less than that of any woman on Fifth Avenue. The inferiority of man on this, the most important of all social subjects, is manifest. Adams here had no occasion to deprecate scientific opinions since no woman in the world would have paid the smallest respect to the opinions of all professors since the serpent. His own object had little to do with theirs. He was studying the laws of motion, and had struck two large questions of vital importance to America, inertia of race and inertia of sex. He had seen Mr. David and Prince Kilkoff turn artificial energy to the value of three thousand million dollars more or less upon Russian inertia in the last twenty years, and he needed to get some idea of the effects. He had seen artificial energy to the amount of twenty or five and twenty million steam horsepower created in America since 1840, and as much more economized, which had been socially turned over to the American woman, she being the chief object of social expenditure, and the household the only considerable object of American extravagance. According to scientific notions of inertia and force, what ought to be the result? In Russia, because of race and bulk, no result had yet shown itself, but in America the results were evident and undisputed. The woman had been set free, volatilized, like Clerk Maxwell's perfect gas, almost brought to the point of explosion, like steam. The woman had but to pass a week in Florida, or on any of the hundred huge ocean steamers, or walk through the Place Vendome, or join a party of Cook's tourists to Jerusalem to see that the woman had been set free. But these swarms were ephemeral, like clouds of butterflies in season, blown away and lost, while the reproductive sources lay hidden. At Washington one saw other swarms as grave gatherings of dames or daughters, taking themselves seriously, or brides fluttering fresh pinions. But all these shifting visions, unknown before 1840, touched the true problems slightly and superficially. Behind them, in every city, town, and farmhouse, were myriads of new types, or typewriters, telephones and telegraph girls, shop clerks, factory hands, running into millions on millions, and as classes unknown to themselves as to historians. Even the schoolmistresses were inarticulate. All these new women had been created since 1840. All were to show their meaning before 1940. Whatever they were, they were not content, as the ephemera proved, and they were hungry for illusions as ever in the fourth century of the Church. But this was probably survival and gave no hint of the future. The problem remained, to find out whether movement of inertia, inherent in function, could take direction except in lines of inertia. This problem needed to be solved in one generation of American women, and was the most vital of all problems of force. The American woman at her best, like most other women, exerted great charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive type. She appeared as the result of a long series of discards, and her chief interest lay in what she had discarded. When closely watched, she seemed making a violent effort to follow the man, who had turned his mind and hand to mechanics. The typical American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in the road. His living depended on keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions or anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whisky or drugs without raking his neck. He could not run his machine and a woman, too. He must leave her, even though his wife, to find her own way. And all the world saw her trying to find her way by imitating him. The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in feminine history. Tragedy had been women's lot since Eve. Her problem had been always one of physical strength, and it was as physical perfection of force that her Venus had governed nature. The woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all history. It was a paleontological falsehood that even an eocene female monkey would have laughed at. But it was surely true that if her force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become sexless, like the bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia to carry on her race. The story was not new. For thousands of years women had rebelled. They had made a fortress of religion, had buried themselves in the cloister in self-sacrifice, in good works, or even in bad. One's studies in the twelfth century, like one's studies in the fourth, as in Homeric and Archaic time, showed her always busy in the illusions of heaven or of hell—ambition, intrigue, jealousy, magic. But the American woman had no illusions or ambitions or new resources, and nothing to rebel against except her own maternity. Yet the rebels increased by millions from year to year till they blocked the path of rebellion. Even her field of good works was narrower than in the twelfth century. Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophical anarchism, which promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off the few avenues of escape which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she saw before her the future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females. From the male she could look for no help. His instinct of power was blind. The church had known more about women than science will ever know, and the historian who studied the sources of Christianity felt sometimes convinced that the church had been made by women chiefly as her protest against man. At times the historian would have been almost willing to maintain that the man had overthrown the church chiefly because it was feminine. After the overthrow of the church the woman had no refuge except such as the man created for himself. She was free. She had no illusions. She was sexless. She had discarded all that the male disliked. And although she secretly regretted the discard she knew that she could not go backward. She must, like the man, marry machinery. Already the American man sometimes felt surprised at finding himself regarded as sexless. The American woman was often surprised at finding herself regarded as sexual. No honest historian can take part with or against the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics. No doubt everyone in society discussed the subject impelled by President Roosevelt if by nothing else, and the surface current of social opinion seemed set as strongly in one direction as the silent undercurrent of social action ran in the other. But the truth lay somewhere unconscious in the woman's breast. An elderly man trying only to learn the law of social inertia and the limits of social divergence could not compel the superintendent of the census to ask every young woman whether she wanted children and how many. He could not even require of an octogenarian senate the passage of a law obliging every woman married or not to bear one baby at the expense of the treasury before she was thirty years old, under penalty of solitary confinement for life. These were vital statistics in more senses than all that bore the name, and tended more directly to the foundation of a serious society in the future. He could draw no conclusions whatever except from the birth rate. He could not frankly discuss the matter with the young women themselves although they would have gladly discussed it because Faust was helpless in the tragedy of woman. He could suggest nothing. The margarite of the future could alone decide whether she were better off than the margarite of the past, whether she would rather be victim to a man, a church, or a machine. Between these various forms of inevitable inertia, sex and race, the student of multiplicity felt inclined to admit that ignorance against ignorance, the Russian problem seemed to him somewhat easier of treatment than the American. Inertia of race and bulk would require an immense force to overcome it, but in time it might perhaps be partially overcome. Inertia of sex could not be overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an immense force, doubling every few years, was working irresistibly to overcome it. One gazed mute before this ocean of darkest ignorance that had already engulfed society. Few centers of great energy lived in illusion more complete or archaic than Washington, with its simple-minded standards of the field and farm, its southern and western habits of life and manners, its assumptions of ethics and history. But even in Washington society was uneasy enough to need no further fretting. One was almost glad to act the part of horseshoe-crab in Quincy Bay, and admit that all was uniform, that nothing ever changed, and that the woman would swim about the ocean of future time as she had swum in the past with the garfish and the shark, unable to change. CHAPTER XXXI Of all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante, this new exploration along the shores of multiplicity and complexity promised to be the longest, though as yet it had barely touched two familiar regions, race and sex. Even within these narrow seas the navigator lost his bearings and followed the winds as they blew. By chance it happened that Raphael Pumpley helped the winds. For being in Washington on his way to Central Asia, he felt talking with Adams about these matters, and said that Wolcott Gibbs thought he got most help from a book called The Grammar of Science by Carl Pearson. To Adams's vision, Wolcott stood on the same plane with the three or four greatest minds of his century, the more so because in his ignorance he confounded him with another great mind, his rival, Willard Gibbs, in the idea that a man so incomparably superior should find help anywhere filled him with wonder. He sent for the volume and read it. From the time he sailed for Europe and reached his den on the avenue de Bois until he took his return steamer at Sherbourg on December 26th, he did little but try to find out what Carl Pearson could have taught Wolcott Gibbs. Here came in more than ever the fatal handicap of ignorance in mathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed as the right to judge the product of the tool. Ignorant as one was of the finer values of French or German, and often deceived by the intricacies of thought hidden in the muddiness of the medium, one could sometimes catch a tendency to intelligible meaning even in Kant or Hegel, but one had not the right to a suspicion of error where the tool of thought was algebra. Adams could see in such parts of the grammar as he could understand little more than an enlargement of Stalo's book already twenty years old. He never found out what it could have taught a master like Wolcott Gibbs. Yet the book had a historical value out of all proportion to its science. No such stride had any Englishman before taken in the lines of English thought. The progress of science was measured by the success of the grammar when for twenty years past Stalo had been deliberately ignored under the usual conspiracy of silence inevitable to all thought, which demands new thought machinery. Science needs time to reconstruct its instruments, to follow a revolution in space, a certain lag is inevitable. The most active mind cannot instantly swerve from its path, but such revolutions are pretentious, and the fall or rise of half a dozen empires interested a student of history less than the rise of the grammar of science, the more pressingly because under the silent influence of Langley he was prepared to expect it. For a number of years Langley had published in his Smithsonian reports the revolutionary papers that foretold the overthrow of nineteenth century dogma, and among the first was the famous address of Sir William Crookes on Psychical Research, followed by a series of papers on Runcheon and Curie, which had steadily driven the scientific law-givers of unity into the open. But Carl Pearson was the first to pen them up for slaughter in the schools. The phrase is not stronger than that with which the grammar of science challenged the fight. Quote, anything more hopelessly illogical than the statements with regard to force and matter current in elementary textbooks of science it is difficult to imagine. Open to Mr. Pearson. And the responsible author of the elementary textbook, as he went on to explain, was Lord Kelvin himself. Pearson shut out of science everything which the nineteenth century had brought into it. He told his scholars that they must put up with the fraction of the universe, and a very small fraction at that. The circle reached by the senses, where sequence could be taken for granted, much as the deep sea fish takes for granted the circle of light which he generates. Quote, order and reason, beauty and benevolence are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man. The assertion as a broad truth left one's mind in some doubt of its bearing, for order and beauty seemed to be associated also with the mind of a crystal, if one's senses were to be admitted as judge. But the historian had no interest in the universal truth of Pearson's or Kelvin's or Newton's laws. He sought only their relative drift or direction, and Pearson went on to say that these conceptions must stop. Into the chaos beyond sense impressions we cannot scientifically project them. We cannot even infer them. In the chaos behind sensations, in the beyond of the sense impressions, we cannot infer necessity, order, or routine, for these are concepts formed by the mind of man on this side of sense impressions. But we must infer chaos. Briefly, chaos is all that science can logically assert of the super sensuous, end quote. The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos. In plain words, chaos was the law of nature. Order was the dream of man. No one means all, he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words of slippery and thought is viscous. But since Bacon and Newton, English thought had gone on impatiently protesting that no one must try to know the unknowable at the same time that everyone went on thinking about it. The result was as chaotic as kinetic gas, but with the thought a historian had nothing to do. He sought only its direction. For himself he knew that in spite of all the Englishmen that ever lived he would be forced to enter super sensual chaos if he meant to find out what became of British science, or indeed of any other science. From Pythagoras to Herbert Spencer everyone had done it, although commonly science had explored an ocean which had preferred to regard as unity, or a universe, and called order. Even Hegel, who taught that every notion included its own negation, used the negation only to reach a larger synthesis, till he reached the universal which thinks itself, contradiction, and all. The church alone had constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was not God, that pantheism was worse than atheism, and that unity could not be proved as a contradiction. While Pearson seemed to agree with the church, but everyone else, including Newton, Darwin, and Clerk Maxwell, had sailed gaily into the super sensual calling it, quote, one God, one law, one element, and one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves, end quote. 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 would watch 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 up from his chair like a scared dog when, in 1898, Madame 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 that larger synthesis in silence and in vain. They had refused to hear, Stallow. They had betrayed little interest in crooks. At last their universe had been wrecked by rays, and Carl Pearson undertook to cut the wreck loose with an axe, leaving science adrift on a sensual raft in the middle of a super-sensual 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 Kivitas Dei cut itself loose from the Kivitas Romai, 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 Carl 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 Carl Pearson in 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 face. 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 in 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 toward the ideas of their grandsons. He had long ago reached with Haeckel 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 Carl 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 Rabelier and Montaigne had ever taught anarchy other than as a path to order. France 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, Monsieur Poincaré of the Institute, who published in 1902 a small volume called La Science et l'hypothèse, 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 Monsieur Poincaré was troubled by the same historical landmarks which guided or deluded Adams himself. In science we are led, said Monsieur Poincaré, 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. He has since given us, too often, the lie. Today 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 Monsieur Poincaré 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 toward 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. Perhaps 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 Monsieur Poincaré 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 of 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 Monsieur Poincaré 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 Euclidean geometry is true? It has no sense. Euclidean 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 eye. An innate conviction, a categorical imperative, to Poincaré it was a convenience, and to Carl 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 race, or about race, or sex, or ennui, or a bar of music, or a pang of love, or a grain of musk, or a phosphorus, or conscience, or duty, or the force of Euclidean geometry, or non-Euclidean, or heat, or light, or osmosis, or electrolysis, or the magnet, or ether, or vis inertii, or gravitation, or cohesion, or elasticity, or surface tension, or capillary attraction, or brownie in 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, a 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 the face of fear. The motion of thought had the same value as the motion of a cannonball 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 toward 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. Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world sometimes dated it from 1893 by the Runch and Reyes, or from 1898 by the Curie's Radium. But in 1904 Arthur Balfour announced on the part of British science that the human race, without exception, had lived and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the century. The date was convenient, and convenience was truth. The child born in 1900 would then be born into a new world, which would not be a unity, but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before, where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature. Artificial compulsion imposed on motion against which every free energy of the universe revolted, and which being merely occasional resolved itself back into anarchy at last. He could not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man, the perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the perpetual revolt of society against the law it had established, the perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual appeal to force to overthrow it, the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one, the perpetual victory of the principles of freedom and their perpetual conversion into principles of power. But the staggering problem was the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred. The physicists had a phrase for it, unintelligible to the vulgar. All that we win is a battle lost in advance with the irreversible phenomena in the background of nature. All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He saw his education complete and was sorry he ever began it. As a matter of taste he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century education when God was a father and nature a mother, and all was for the best in a scientific universe. He repudiated all share in the world as it was to be, and yet he could not detect the point where his responsibility began or ended. As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit its conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that embodied all its notions of the perfect. Man knew it was true because he made it and he loved it for the same reason. He sacrificed millions of lives to acquire his unity, but he achieved it and justly thought it a work of art. The woman especially did great things, creating her deities on a higher level than the male, and in the end compelling the man to accept the Virgin as guardian of the man's God. The man's part in his universe was secondary, but the woman was at home there and sacrificed herself without limit to make it habitable when man permitted it, as sometimes happened for brief intervals of war and famine. But she could not provide protection against forces of nature. She did not think of her universe as a raft to which the limpets stuck for life in the surge of a super sensual chaos. She conceived herself and her family as the center and flower of an ordered universe, which she knew to be unity because she had made it after the image of her own fecundity, and this creation of hers was surrounded by beauties and perfections which she knew to be real because she herself had imagined them. Even the masculine philosopher admired and loved and celebrated her triumph, and the greatest of them sang it in the noblest of his verses. Alma Venus co-ailey subter labentia signa quai mari navegarum, quai terres frugi ferentes conselebras, quai quonium rerum naturam sola gubernas, nexine te quidquam dias in luminous oras exoritor, neque fit laetam, neque amabilae quidquam, tesokiam studio. Now the man nor woman ever wanted to quit this Eden of their own invention, and could no more have done it of their own accord than the pearl oyster could quit its shell. But although the oyster might perhaps assimilate or embalm a grain of sand forced into its aperture, it could only perish in face of the cyclonic hurricane or the volcanic upheaval of its bed. Her super sensual chaos killed her. Such seemed the theory of history to be imposed by science on the generation born after 1900. For this theory Adams felt himself in no way responsible. Even as historian he had made it his duty always to speak with respect of everything that had ever been thought respectable, except in occasional statesmen. But he had submitted to force all his life, and he meant to accept it for the future as for the past. All his efforts had been turned only to the search for its channel. He never invented his fats. They were furnished him by the only authorities he could find. As for himself, according to Hemholz, Ernst Mach, an author Balfour, he was henceforth to be a conscious ball of vibrating motions traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotation or vibration, rolling at the feet of the virgin at Châtres or of Monsieur Poincaré in an attic at Paris, a centre of super sensual chaos. The discovery did not distress him. A solitary man of sixty-five years or more, alone in a gothic cathedral or a Paris apartment, need fret himself little about a few illusions, more or less. He should have learned his lesson fifty years earlier. The times had long passed when a student could stop before chaos or order. He had no choice but to march with his world. Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human mind has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the chaos which caged it, how appearing suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void, passing half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep, victim even when awake, to its own ill adjustment, to disease, to age, to external suggestion, to nature's compulsion, doubting its sensations, and in the last resort trusting only to instruments and averages. After sixty or seventy years of growing astonishment, the mind wakes to find itself looking blankly into the void of death. That it should profess itself pleased by this performance was all that the highest rules of good breeding could ask, but that it should actually be satisfied would prove that it existed only as idiocy. Satisfied, the future generation could scarcely think itself for even when the mind existed in a universe of its own creation, it had never been quite at ease. As far as one ventured to interpret actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself by an infinite series of infinitely delicate adjustments, forced on it by the infinite motion of an infinite chaos of motion, dragged at one moment into the unknowable and unthinkable, then trying to scramble back within its senses and to bar the chaos out, but always assimilating bits of it, until at last, in nineteen hundred, a new avalanche of unknown forces had fallen on it, which required new mental powers to control. If this view was correct, the mind could gain nothing by flight or by fight. It must merge in its super sensual multiverse, or succumb to it. END OF CHAPTER XXXII Paris, after Midsummer, is a place where only the industrious poor remain, unless they can get away. But Adams knew no spot where history would be better off, and the calm of the Champs Elysees was so deep that when Mr. David was promoted to a powerless dignity, no one whispered that the promotion was disgrace, while one might have supposed, from the silence, that the viceroy Alexiaf had reoccupied Manchuria as a fulfillment of treaty obligation. For once the conspiracy of silence became crime. Arthur had so modern and so vital a riddle been put before Western society, but society shut its eyes. Manchuria knew every step into the war. Japan had completed every preparation. Alexiaf had collected his army and fleet at Port Arthur, mounting his siege-guns and laying in enormous stores, ready for the expected attack. From Yokohama to Irkutsk, the whole east was under war conditions, but Europe knew nothing. The banks would not allow disturbance. The press said not a word, and even the embassies were silent. Every anarchist in Europe buzzed excitement and began to collect in groups, but the hotel-ritz was calm, and the grand dukes who swarmed there professed to know directly from the Winter Palace that there would be no war. As usual, Adams felt as ignorant as the best-informed statesman, and although the sense was familiar, for once he could see that the ignorance was assumed. After nearly fifty years of experience, he could not understand how the comedy could be so well acted. Even as late as November, diplomats were gravely asking every passer-by for his opinion, and avowed none of their own except what was directly authorized at St. Petersburg. He could make nothing of it. He found himself in face of his new problem, the workings of Russian inertia, and he could conceive no way of forming an opinion how much was real and how much was comedy had he been in the Winter Palace himself. At times he doubted whether the grand dukes or the czar knew, but old diplomatic training forbade him to admit such innocence. This was the situation at Christmas when he left Paris. On January 6, 1904, he reached Washington, where the contrast of atmosphere astonished him, for he had never before seen his country think as a world power. No doubt Japanese diplomacy had much to do with this alertness, but the immense superiority of Japanese diplomacy should have been more evident in Europe than in America, and in any case could not account for the total disappearance of Russian diplomacy. A government by inertia greatly disconcerted study. One was led to suspect that Cassini never heard from his government, and that Lamstorff knew nothing of his own department. Yet no such suspicion could be admitted. Cassini resorted to transparent blag. Quote, Japan seemed infatuated even to the point of war, but what can the Japanese do? As usual, sit on their heels and pray to Buddha. One of the oldest and most accomplished diplomatists in the service could never show his hands so empty as this, if he held a card to play. But he never betrayed stronger resource behind. Quote, if any Japanese succeed in entering Manchuria, they will never get out alive. The inertia of Cassini, who was naturally the most energetic of diplomatists, deeply interested a student of race inertia whose mind had lost itself in the attempt to invent scales of force. The air of official Russia seemed most dramatic in the air of the White House, by contrast with the outspoken candor of the President. Reticence had no place there. Everyone in America saw that whether Russia or Japan were victim, one of the decisive struggles in American history was pending, and any pretense of secrecy or indifference was absurd. This was acute and curiosity intense, for no one knew what the Russian government meant or wanted, while war had become a question of days. To an impartial student who gravely doubted whether the Tsar himself acted as a conscious force or an inert weight, the straightforward avowals of Roosevelt had singular value as a standard of measure. By chance it happened that Adams was obliged to take the place of his brother, Brooks, at the diplomatic reception immediately after his return home, and the part of proxy included his supping at the President's table, with Secretary Root on one side, the President opposite, and Miss Chamberlain between them. Naturally the President talked, and the guests listened, which seemed to one who had just escaped from the European conspiracy of silence, like drawing a free breath after stifling. Roosevelt, as everyone knew, was always an amusing talker, and had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond any other man of great importance in the world, except the Kaiser Wilhelm and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the father of his guest at table, and this evening he spared none. With the usual abuse of the coarse ego, common to vigorous statesmen, he said all that he thought about Russians and Japanese as well as about Boers and British, without restraint in full hearing of twenty people to the entire satisfaction of his listener, and concluded by declaring that war was imminent, that it ought to be stopped, that it could be stopped. I could do it myself, I could stop it tomorrow. And he went on to explain his reasons for restraint. That he was right, and that within another generation his successor would do what he would have liked to do, made no shadow of doubt in the mind of his hearer, though it would have been folly when he last subbed at the White House and the dynasty of President Hayes. But the listener cared less for the assertion of power than for the vigor of view. The truth was evident enough, ordinary, even commonplace if one liked, but it was not a truth of inertia, nor was the method to be mistaken for inert. Nor could the force of Japan be mistaken for a moment as a force of inertia, although its aggressive was taken as methodically, as mathematically as a demonstration of Euclid, and Adams thought that as against any but Russians it would have lost its opening. Each day counted as a measure of relative energy on the historical scale, and the whole story made a grammar of new science quite as instructive as that of Pearson. The forces thus launched were bound to reach some new equilibrium, which would prove the problem in one sense or another, and the war had no personal value for Adams except that it gave Hayes his last great triumph. He had carried on his long contest with Cassini so skillfully that no one knew enough to understand the diplomatic perfection of his work which contained no error. But such success is complete only when it is invisible, and his victory at last was victory of judgment, not of act. He could do nothing, and the whole country would have sprung on him had he tried. Stalin in England saved his open door and fought his battle. All that remained for him was to make the peace, and Adams set his heart on getting the peace quickly in hand for Hayes' sake as well as for that of Russia. He thought then that it could be done in one campaign, for he knew that in a military sense the fall of Port Arthur must lead to negotiation, and everyone felt that Hayes would inevitably direct it. But the race was close, and while the war grew every day in proportions, Hayes' strength every day declined. St. Gaudens came on to model his head, and Sergeant painted his portrait two steps essential to immortality which he bore with a certain degree of resignation, but he grumbled when the President made him go to St. Louis to address some gathering at the exposition, and Mrs. Haye bade Adams go with them for whatever use he could suppose himself to serve. He professed the religion of world's fares without which he held education to be a blind impossibility, and obeyed Mrs. Haye's bidding the more readily because it united his two educations in one. But theory and practice were put to equally severe test at St. Louis. Ten years had passed since he had crossed the Mississippi, and he found everything new. In this great region from Pittsburgh through Ohio and Indiana agriculture had made way for steam. Tall chimneys reeked smoke on every horizon, and dirty suburbs filled with scrap iron, scrap paper, and cinders formed the setting of every town. Evidently cleanliness was not to be the birthmark of the new American, but this matter of discards concerned the measure of force little, while the chimneys and cinders concerned it so much that Adams thought the Secretary of State should have rushed to the platform at every station to ask who were the people, for the American of the Prime seemed to be extinct with the Shawnee and the Buffalo. The subject grew quickly delicate. He told little about these millions of Germans and Slavs or whatever their race names, who had overflowed these regions as though the Rhine and the Danube had turned their floods into the Ohio. John Hay was as strange to the Mississippi River as though he had not been bred on its shores, and the city of St. Louis had turned its back on the noblest work of nature leaving it bankrupt between its own banks. The new American showed his parentage proudly. He was the child of steam and the brother of the dynamo, and already within less than thirty years this mass of mixed humanities brought together by steam was squeezed and welded into approach to shape, a product of so much mechanical power and bearing no distinctive marks but that of its pressure. The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the church, and the features would follow the parentage. The St. Louis exposition was its first creation in the twentieth century, and for that reason acutely interesting. John saw here a third-rate town of half a million people without history, education, unity, or art, and with little capital, without even an element of natural interest except the river which it studiously ignored. But doing what London, Paris, or New York would have shrunk from attempting. This new social conglomerate with no tie but its steam power, and not much of that, threw away thirty or forty million dollars on a pageant as ephemeral as a stage flat. The world had never witnessed so marvellous a phantasm. By night Arabia's crimson sands had never returned to glow half so astonishing, as one wandered among long lines of white palaces, exquisitely lighted by thousands on thousands of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable in their sensuous depths, all in deep silence, profound solitude, listening for a voice, or a footfall, or the plash of an oar, as though the emeer Mirza were displaying the beauties of this city of brass, which could show nothing half so beautiful as this illumination, with its vast white monumental solitude bathed in the pure light of setting suns. One enjoyed it with iniquitous rapture, not because of exhibits, but rather because of their want. Here was a paradox like the stellar universe that fitted one's mental faults. Had there been no exhibits at all, and no visitors, one would have enjoyed it only the more. Here education found new forage, that the power was wasted, the art indifferent, the economic failure complete, added just so much to the interest. The chaos of education approached a dream. One asked oneself whether this extravagance reflected the past or imagined the future, whether it was a creation of the old American or a promise of the new one. No prophet could be believed, but a pilgrim of power without constituency to flatter might allow himself to hope. The prospect from the exposition was pleasant. One seemed to see almost an adequate motive for power, almost a scheme for progress. In another half-century the people of the Central Valleys should have hundreds of millions to throw away more easily than in 1900 they could throw away tens, and by that time they might know which they wanted. Possibly they might even have learned how to reach it. This was an optimist's hope, shared by few except pilgrims of world's fairs, and frankly dropped by the multitude for east of the Mississippi the St. Louis exposition met a deliberate conspiracy of silence, discouraging, beyond measure, to an optimistic dream of future strength in American expression. The party got back to Washington on May 24th, and before sailing for Europe Adams went over one warm evening to bid goodbye on the garden porch of the White House. He found himself the first person who urged Mrs. Roosevelt to visit the exposition for its beauty, and as far as he knew, the last. He left St. Louis May 22nd, 1904, and on Sunday, June 5th, found himself again in the town of Coutance, where the people of Normandy had built toward the year 1250 an exposition which architects still admired and tourists visited, for it was thought singularly expressive of force as well as of grace in the Virgin. On this Sunday the Norman world was celebrating a pretty church feast. The faked year, and the streets were filled with alters to the Virgin, covered with flowers and foliage, the pavements strewn with paths of leaves and the spring-handiwork of nature, the cathedral densely thronged at mass. The scene was graceful. The Virgin did not shut her costly exposition on Sunday or any other day, even to American senators who had shut the St. Louis exposition to her, or for her, and a historical trap would gladly have offered a candle or even a candlestick in her honor if she would have taught him her relation with the deity of the senators. The power of the Virgin had been plainly one, embracing all human activity, while the power of the Senate or its deity seemed, might once say, to be more or less ashamed of man in his work. The matter had no great interest as far as it concerned at the somewhat obscure mental processes of senators who could probably have given no clearer idea than priests of the deity they supposed themselves to honor, if that was indeed their purpose. But it interested a student of force curious to measure its manifestations. Apparently the Virgin, or her son, had no longer the force to build expositions that one cared to visit, but had the force to close them. The force was still real, serious, and at St. Louis had been anxiously measured in actual money value. That it was actual and serious in France, as in the Senate Chamber at Washington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to buy an automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because this was the form of force which Adams most abominated. He had set aside the summer for study of the Virgin, not as a sentiment, but as a motive power, which had left monuments widely scattered and not easily reached. The automobile alone could unite them in any reasonable sequence, and although the force of the automobile, for the purposes of a commercial traveller, seemed to have no relation whatever to the force that inspired a Gothic cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would have guided and controlled both bagman and architect as she controlled the seeker of history. In his mind the problem offered itself, as to Newton, it was a matter of mutual attraction, and he knew it, in his own case, to be a formula as precise as s equals gt squared divided by two, if he could but experimentally prove it. Of the attraction he needed no proof on his own account. The costs of his automobile were more than sufficient, but as teacher he needed to speak for others than himself. For him the Virgin was an adorable mistress who led the automobile and its owner where she would, to her wonderful palaces in Chateau, from Chateau to Rouen, and there to Amiens and Laune, and a score of others, kindly receiving, amusing, charming, and dazzling her lover, as though she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever dreamed. He never doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre of his being, and could no more dispute its mastery than he could dispute the force of gravitation, of which he knew nothing but the formula. He was only too glad to yield himself entirely, not to her charm or to any sentimentality of religion, but to her mental and physical energy of creation, which had built up these world's fares of thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and St. Louis pale. Both were faiths, and both are gone, said Matthew Arnold of the Greek and Norse divinities. But the business of a student was to ask where they had gone. The virgin had not even altogether gone. Her fading away had been excessively slow. Her adorer had pursued her too long, too far, and in too many manifestations of her power to admit that she had any equivalent, either of quantity or kind, in the actual world. But he could still less admit her annihilation as energy. So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her lovers. Her own age had no time measure. For years passed, incited by John Lafarge, Adams had devoted his summer schooling to the study of her glass at Shatra and elsewhere, and if the automobile had one v. tess more useful than another, it was that of a century a minute, that of passing from one century to another without break. The centuries dropped like autumn leaves in one's road, and one was not fined for running over them too fast. From the thirteenth lost breath the fourteenth caught on, and the sixteenth ran close ahead. The hunt for the virgin's glass opened rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century ran riot in sensuous worship. Then the ocean of religion which had flooded France, broken to Shelley's light dissolved in star-showers throne, which had left every remote village strewn with fragments that flashed like jewels and were tossed into hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness. One dared not pass a parish church in Champagne or Touraine without stopping to look for its windows of fragments, where one's glass discovered the Christ-child in his manger, nursed by the head of a fragmentary donkey, with a cupid playing into its long ears from the balustrade of a Venetian palace, guarded by a legless, Flemish libe vodka, standing on his head with a broken halberd. All invoked in prayer by remnants of the donors and their children that might have been drawn by Fouquet or Pintericcio, in colors as fresh and living as the day they were burned in, and with feeling that still consoled the faithful for the paradise they had paid for and lost. France abounds in sixteenth-century glass. Paris alone contains acres of it, and the neighborhood within fifty miles contains scores of churches where the student may still imagine himself three hundred years old kneeling before the virgin's window in the silent solitude of an empty faith, crying his pulp, beating his breast, confessing his historical sins, carried down by the rubbish of sixty-six years' education and still desperately hoping to understand. He understood a little, though not much. The sixteenth century had a value of its own, as though the one had become several, and unity had counted more than three, though the multiples still showed modest numbers. The glass had gone back to the Roman Empire and forward to the American continent. It portrayed sympathy with Montaigne and Shakespeare, but the virgin was still supreme. But Beauvais, in the Church of St. Stephen, was a superb tree of Jesse, famous as the work of N. Grand-Le-Prance, about fifteen-seventy or fifteen-eighty, in whose branches, among the fourteen ancestors of the virgin, three-fourths wore features of the kings of France, among them Francis I and Henry II, who were hardly more edifying than the kings of Israel, and at least unusual as sources of divine purity. Compared with the still more famous tree of Jesse at Châtelet, dating from eleven-fifty or thereabouts, must one declare that N. Grand-Le-Prance proved progress? And in what direction? Complexity, multiplicity, even a step toward anarchy, it might suggest. But what step toward perfection? One late afternoon at mid-summer, the virgin's pilgrim was wandering through the streets of Twy, in close and intimate conversation with Thibault of Champagne, and his highly intelligent senuchel, the Sire de Joivier, when he noticed one or two men looking at a bit of paper stuck in a window. Approaching, he read that M. de Pleuve had been assassinated at St. Petersburg. The mad mixture of Russia and the Crusades, of the Hippodrome and the Renaissance, drove him for refuge into the fascinating church of St. Panteleon, nearby. Martyrs, murderers, caesars, saints and assassins, half in glass and half in telegram, chaos of time, place, morals, forces and motive, gave him vertigo. Had one sat all one's life on the steps of Arochoely for this, was assassination forever to be the last word of progress? No one in the street had shown a sign of protest. He himself felt none. The charming church, with its delightful windows, in its exquisite absence of other tourists, took a keener expression of celestial peace than could have been given it by any contrast short of explosive murder. The conservative Christian anarchist had come to his own, but which was he, the murderer or the murdered? The virgin herself never looked so winning, so one, as in this scandalous failure of her grace. To what purpose had she existed if, after nineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier than when she was born? The stupendous failure of Christianity tortured history. The effort for unity could not be a partial success, even alternating unity resolved itself into meaningless motion at last. To the tired student, the idea that he must give it up seemed sheer senility. As long as he could whisper he would go on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to meet his creator, with the admission that the creation had taught him nothing except that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle might, for convenience, be taken as equal to something else. Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account to himself, for himself, somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. There whether finished or not education stopped. The formula once made could be but verified. The effort must begin at once for time pressed. The old formulas had failed and a new one had to be made, but after all the object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it. Among indefinite possible orbits one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams. As term of a nineteenth-century education one sought a common factor for certain definite historical fractions. Any schoolboy could work out the problem if he were given the right to state it in his own terms. When the fogs and frosts stopped his slaughter of the centuries and shut him up again in his garret, he sat down as though he were again a boy at school, to shape, after his own needs, the values of a dynamic theory of history. CHAPTER XXXIII OF THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by Henry Adams CHAPTER XXXIII A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY, 1904 A dynamic theory, like most theories, begins by begging the question. It defines progress as the development and economy of forces. Further, it defines force as anything that does, or helps to do, work. Man is a force, so is the sun. So is a mathematical point, though without dimensions or known existence. Man commonly begs the question again by taking for granted that he captures the forces. A dynamic theory, assigning attractive force to opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass, takes for granted that the forces of nature capture man. The sum of force attracts. The feeble atom, or molecule, called man, is attracted. He suffers education or growth. He is the sum of the forces that attract him. His body and his thought are alike their product. The movement of the forces controls the progress of his mind, since he can know nothing but the motions which impinge on his senses, whose sum makes education. For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a spider in its web, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature dance like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them when it can. But it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory of force is sound. The spider mind acquires a faculty of memory, and with it a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honeybee. But he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn. Running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics. The animals helped to educate him, thrusting themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing. The grasses and grains were academies of study. With little or no effort on his part, all these forces formed his thought, induced his action, and even shaped his figure. Long before history began, his education was complete, for the record could not have been started until he had been taught to record. The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind as a reflection of his own unity, containing all forces except himself. Either separately or in groups, or as a whole, these forces never ceased to act on him, enlarging his mind as they enlarged the surface foliage of a vegetable, and the mind needed only to respond, as the forests did, to these attractions. Unity to the highest forces is the highest genius. Selection between them is the highest science. Their mass is the highest educator. Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap. But he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity, and worshipped as God. To this day his attitude toward it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name. Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sought a fetish or a planet in the world beyond. He cared little to know its immediate use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he could conceive to have possible value in this or any other existence. He waited for the object to teach him its use or want of use, and the process was slow. He may have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years waiting for nature to tell him her secrets, and to his rivals among the monkeys, nature has taught no more than at their start. But certain lines of force were capable of acting on individual apes, and mechanically selecting types of race or sources of variation. The individual that responded or reacted to lines of new force then was possibly the same individual that reacts on it now, and his conception of the unity seems never to have changed in spite of the increasing diversity of forces. But the theory of variation is an affair of other science than history, and matters nothing to dynamics. The individual or the race would be educated on the same lines of illusion which, according to Arthur Balfour, had not essentially varied down to the year 1900. To the highest attractive energy man gave the name of divine, and for its control he invented the science called religion, a word which meant, and still means, cultivation of a cult force, whether in detail or mass. Unable to define force as a unity, man symbolized it and pursued it both in himself and in the infinite as philosophy and 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. However, 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 the 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 in 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, Petolomy, 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 harbours, 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 skeptics were more apparently chaotic than ever. The experience of 3,000 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 AD 305, when the emperor Diocletian abdicated, and it was there that Adams broke down on the steps of Eric O'Ailey, 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 had ever been solved since. The Pax Romana, the civil law, and free trade should, in 400 years, have put Europe far in advance of the point reached by modern society in the 400 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 400 years of history before AD 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 elusive. 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 stockbroker 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, quote, 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, end quote. 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 Hock Signo Vincas, using the cross as a train of artillery, which to his mind it was. Society accepted it in the same character. Eighty years afterward 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. Turgo 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, 600 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 Kivitas Dei which had taken the place of the Kivitas Romai in human interest. Quote, 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 was rich before God? These are the wealth of Christians, end quote. The Kivitas 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 Kivitas Romai. Saint Augustine and his people perished at Hippo toward 430, leaving society in appearance dull to new attraction. Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of experimenting on a cult 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. It 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 today, great masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel from far countries to look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo and Pisa, Assisi, Cordoba, Shatka, with vague notions about the force that created 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 Sophia, but when he does, he is distinctly conscious of forces not quite the same. Justinian had not the simplicity of Charlemagne. The Eastern Empire showed an activity and variety of forces that the classical Europe had never possessed. The navy of Nikephorus Focas in the 10th 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 mote of 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 Sophia and the cathedral at Amiens. However much it was altered, enlarged, or removed to distance and 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 Kivitas 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 toward 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 toward the milder teachers of his infancy he was an abject pupil toward explosives. The sire de Joivy 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 upon 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 Kivitas Day for the Kivitas Romai. When the Puritans set out for New England in 1620 they too were looking to found a Kivitas Day 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 nor Spinoza nor Descartes neither Leibniz nor Newton any more than Constantina 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. Quote, nature to be commanded must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights. End quote. As Galileo reversed the action of earth and sun Bacon reversed the relation of thought to force. The mind was then swath to follow the movement of matter and unity must be left to shift for itself. The revolution and 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 gate as to alarm everyone 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 undeveloped 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 embruted 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 18th century are best studied in the wit de 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 Kivitas 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, quote, neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can affect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, end quote. 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-fegendum out ex cogitandum, said inveniendum quid natura facchi et out ferrat. The success of this method staggers belief and even today 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 teakettle, and great forces of nature stuck to them as though she were playing ball. Governments did almost nothing but resist. Even gun power and ordinance, the great weapon of government showed little development between 1400 and 1800. Society was hostile or indifferent, as priestly 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 super sensual 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 always been 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. Everyone 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 that forces, sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract without stop, that man's senses are conscious of few and only in a partial degree, but that from the beginning of organic existence his consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained in the lines of his sensitiveness, and that the rise of his faculties from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field may be due to the function of assimilating and storing outside force or forces. There is nothing unscientific in the idea that beyond the lines of force felt by the senses, the universe may be, as it has always been, either a supersensuous chaos or a divine unity which irresistibly attracts and is either life or death to penetrate. Thus far, religion, philosophy and science seem to go hand in hand. The schools begin their vital battle only there. In the earlier stages of progress, the forces to be assimilated were simple and easy to absorb, but as the mind of man enlarged its range, it enlarged the field of complexity and must continue to do so even into chaos until the reservoirs of sensuous or supersensuous energies are exhausted or cease to affect him or until he succumbs to their excess. For past history, this way of grouping its sequences may answer for a chart of relations, although any serious student would need to invent another to compare or correct its errors. But past history is only a value of relation to the future and this value is wholly one of convenience which can be tested only by experiment. Any law of movement must include to make it a convenience some mechanical formula of acceleration. End of chapter 33.