 CHAPTER 25 The Dynamo and the Virgin, 1900 Until the great exposition of 1900 closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge and helpless to find it. He would have liked to know how much of it could have been grasped by the best-informed man in the world. While he was thus meditating chaos, Langley came by and showed it to him. At Langley's behest, the exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin, for Langley knew what to study and why and how, while Adams might as well have stood outside in the night staring at the Milky Way. Yet Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one might not have learned from Lord Bacon three hundred years before. But though one should have known the advancement of science, as well as one knew the comedy of errors, the literary knowledge counted for nothing until some teacher should show how to apply it. Bacon took a vast deal of trouble in teaching King James I and his subjects, American or other, toward the year 1620, that true science was the development or economy of forces. That and elderly American in 1900 knew neither the formula nor the forces, or even so much as to say to himself that his historical business in the exposition concerned only the economies or developments of force since 1893, when he began the study at Chicago. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had looked at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses called art museums. But he did not know how to look at the art exhibits of 1900. He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris. Langley, with the ease of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new application of force, and naturally threw out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit. Equally, he ignored almost the whole industrial exhibit. He led his pupil directly to the forces. His chief interest was in new motors to make his airship feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new Daimler motor and of the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a nightmare at a hundred kilometers an hour, almost as destructive as the electric tram which was only ten years older, and threatening to become as terrible as the locomotive steam engine itself which was almost exactly Adams' own age. Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind, even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable volume, but which as far as he knew might spout less or more at any time for all the certainty he felt in it. To him the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight. But to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive in its old-fashioned deliberate annual or daily revolution than this huge wheel revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed and barely murmuring, scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's breath further for respect of power, while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end one began to pray to it. Inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silence and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive. Yet the dynamo next to the steam engine was the most familiar of exhibits. For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its occult mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house outside the break of continuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley could not help him. Indeed Langley seemed to be worried by the same trouble, for he constantly repeated that the new forces were anarchical and especially that he was not responsible for the new rays that were little short of parasital in their wicked spirit towards science. His own rays, with which he had doubled the solar spectrum, were altogether harmless and beneficent, but radium denied its God, or what was to Langley the same thing denied the truths of his science. The force was wholly new. A historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as Langley, or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and mixed himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branley had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo, while he lost his arithmetic in trying to figure out the equation between the discoveries and the economies of force. The economies, like the discoveries, were absolute, supersensual, occult, incapable of expression in horsepower. What mathematical equivalent could he suggest as the value of a Branley coherer? Frozen air, or the electric furnace, had some scale of measurement, no doubt, if somebody could invent a thermometer adequate to the purpose, but X-rays had played no part whatever in man's consciousness, and the atom itself had figured only as a fiction of thought. In these seven years man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused, physics stark mad in metaphysics. Historians undertake to arrange sequences, called stories or histories, assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike. So much so that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply with one voice that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about. Adams, for one, had toiled in vain to find out what he meant. He had even published a dozen volumes of American history for no other purpose than to satisfy himself, whether by the severest process of stating with the least possible comment such facts as seemed sure in such order as seemed rigorously consequent, he could fix, for a familiar moment, a necessary sequence of human movement. The result had satisfied him as little as at Harvard College. Where he saw sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure. He cared little about his experiments and less about his statesmen, who seemed to him quite as ignorant as himself and, as a rule, no more honest. But he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by one method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing, and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned it last to the sequence of force. And thus it happened that after ten years' pursuit he found himself lying in the gallery of machines at the great exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken by the sudden eruption of forces totally new. Since no one else showed much concern, an elderly person without other cares had no need to betray alarm. The year 1900 was not the first to upset school masters. Pernicus and Galileo had broken many professorial necks about 1600. Columbus had stood the world on its head toward 1500. But the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the cross. The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, were occult, supersensual, irrational. They were a revelation of mysterious energy like that of the cross. They were what, in terms of medieval science, were called immediate modes of the divine substance. The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this common value could have no measure but that of their attraction on his own mind. He must treat them as they had been felt, as convertible, reversible, interchangeable attractions on thought. He made up his mind to venture it. He would risk translating rays into faith. Such a reversible process would vastly amuse a chemist, but the chemist could not deny that he or some of his fellow physicists could feel the force of both. When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the place had probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the Virgin except as idolatry. Neither had he heard of dynamos, or automobiles, or medium. Yet his mind was ready to feel the force of all, though the rays were unborn and the women were dead. Here opened another totally new education, which promised to be by far the most hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which he must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction. They were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, causing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lorde's, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays, but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force, at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either. This problem and dynamics gravely perplexed an American historian. The woman had once been supreme. In France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly magazine made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Everyone, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshiped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force. She was the animated dynamo. She was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies. All she needed was to be fecund. Singulily enough not one of Adam's as many schools of education had ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin, Quaequonium rerum naturalum sola gubernas. The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Beatles. Dona sei tanto grande e tanto vale, ce qual vuol grazia e a te non recore. Sua disianza vuol volar senzale. All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings. He read the letter, but he never felt the law. For this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adam's felt itself helpless. He turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a brandly coherer. On one side at the Louvre and at Chateau, as he knew by the record of work actually done, and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam engines and dynamos ever dreamed of. And yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command, and American Venus would never dare exist. The question which to any plain American of the nineteenth century seemed as remote as it did to Adam's, drew him almost violently to study once it was posed. And on this point Langleys were as useless as though they were Herbert Spencer's, or Dynamo's. The idea survived only as art. Where one turned as naturally as though the artist were himself a woman. Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex, as every classic had always done. What he could think only of Walt Whitman, Bret Hart, as far as the magazines would let him venture, and one or two painters for the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex for sentiment, never for force. To them Eve was a tender flower, and herodious, and unfeminine horror. American art, like the American language and American education, was, as far as possible, sexless. Society regarded this victory over sex as its greatest triumph, and the historian readily admitted it, since the moral issue for the moment did not concern one who was studying the relations of un-moral force. He cared nothing for the sex of the Dynamo until he could measure its energy. Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered before the art exhibit, and in his stroll stopped almost every day before St. Gauden's General Sherman, which had been given the central post of honor. St. Gauden himself was in Paris, putting on the work of his usual interminable last touches, and listening to the usual contradictory suggestions of brother sculptors. Of all the American artists who gave to American art whatever life it breathed in the seventies, St. Gauden's was perhaps the most sympathetic, but certainly the most inarticulate. General Grant or Don Cameron had scarcely less instinctive rhetoric than he. All the others—the Hunts, Richardson, John LeFarge, Stanford White—were exuberant, only St. Gauden's could never discuss or dilate on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to his work the forms that he felt. He never laid down the law, or affected the despot, or become brutalized like Whistler by the brutalities of his world. He required no incense, he was no egoist. His simplicity of thought was excessive. He could not imitate, or give any form but his own to the creations of his hand. No one felt more strongly than he the strength of other men, but the idea that they could affect him never stirred an image in his mind. This summer his health was poor, and his spirits were low. For such a temper, Adams was not the best companion. This his own gaiety was not full. But he risked going now and then to the studio on Montparnasse, to draw him out for a stroll in the Bordeaux-Bloyne, or dinner as pleased his moods, and in return St. Gauden sometimes let Adams go about in his company. Once St. Gauden's took him down to Amiens, with a party of Frenchmen to see the cathedral. Not until they found themselves actually studying the sculpture of the western portal did it dawn on Adams's mind that, for his purposes, St. Gauden's on that spot had more interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great men before great monuments express great truths, provided they are not taken too solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the supreme phrase of his idol, Gibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals, I darted a contemptuous look on the stately monuments of superstition. Even in the footnotes of his history Gibbon had never inserted a bit of humor more human than this, and one would have paid largely for a photograph of the fat little historian on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to persuade his readers, perhaps himself, that he was darting a contemptuous look on the stately monument, for which he felt, in fact, the respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always feels before objects worthy of it. But besides the humor, one felt also the relation. Gibbon ignored the virgin because in 1789 religious monuments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark sounded fresh and simple as the green fields to ears that had heard a hundred years of other remarks, mostly no more fresh and certainly less simple. Without malice one might find it more instructive than a whole lecture of Ruskin. One sees what one brings, and at that moment Gibbon brought the French Revolution. Ruskin brought reaction against the Revolution. St. Gaudens had passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much more than he liked Gibbon or Ruskin. He loved their dignity, their unity, their scale, their lines, their lights and shadows, their decorative sculpture. But he was even less conscious than they of the force that created it all, the virgin, the woman, by whose genius the stately monuments of superstition were built, through which she was expressed. He would have seen more meaning in Isis with the cowshorns at Edfou, who expressed the same thought. The art remained, but the energy was lost, even upon the artist. Yet in mind and in person St. Gaudens was a survival of the fifteen hundreds. He bore the stamp of the Renaissance and should have carried an image of the virgin round his neck, or stuck in his hat, like Louis XI. In mere time he was a lost soul that had strayed by chance into the twentieth century, and forgotten where it came from. He writhed and cursed at his ignorance, much as Adams did at his own, but in the opposite sense. St. Gaudens was a child of Benvenuto Cellini, smothered in an American cradle. Adams was a quintessence of Boston devoured by curiosity to think like Benvenuto. St. Gaudens's art was starved from birth, and Adams's instinct was blighted from babyhood. Each had but half of a nature, and when they came together before the Virgin of Amiens, they ought both to have felt in her the force that made them one, but it was not so. To Adams she became more than ever a channel of force, to St. Gaudens she remained as before a channel of taste. For a symbol of power St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the horse, as was plain in his horse and victory of the Sherman Monument. Doubtless Sherman also felt it so. The attitude was so American that for at least forty years Adams had never realised that any other could be in sound taste. How many years had he taken to admit a notion of what Michelangelo and Rubens were driving at? He could not say, but he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Châtres, perhaps at Lourdes, possibly at Nidos, if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxitalies, but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the Grand Châtres. Neither of them felt goddesses as power, only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they and all the other artists constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Châtres. Yet in mechanics whatever the mechanicians might think, both energies acted as interchangeable forces on man, and by action on man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no symbol, unproved or unprovable, that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a compass needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value. Symbol or energy the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities to herself more strongly than any other power natural or supernatural had ever done. The historian's business was to follow the track of the energy, to find where it came from and where it went to, its complex source in shifting channels, its values, equivalents, conversions. It could scarcely be more complex than radium. It could hardly be deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other radiant matter. Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as a mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all were a cult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the Virgin easiest to handle. The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last into the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with the instinctive despair could one force oneself into this old thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed at a score of entrances more promising and more popular. Thus far no path had led anywhere, unless perhaps to an exceedingly modest living. Forty-five years of study had proved to be quite futile for the purpose of power. One controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of force controlled by society had enormously increased. The secret of education still hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and one fumbled over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths the staff is a force almost more necessary than the legs. The pen becomes a sort of blind man's dog to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen works for itself and acts like a hand, modeling the plastic material over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well. For often the pencil or pen runs into the side paths and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops, or is bogged. Then it has to return on its trail and recover if it can its line of force. The result of a year's work depends more on what is struck out than on what is left in. From the sequence of the main lines of thought than on their play or variety. Compelled once more to lean heavily on this support, Adams covered more thousands of pages with figures as formal as though they were algebra, laboriously striking out, altering, burning, experimenting until the year expired, the exposition had long been closed, and winter drawing to its end before he sailed from Sherbourg on January 19, 1901, for home. CHAPTER XXVI While the world that thought itself frivolous, and submitted meekly to hearing itself decried as vain, fluttered through the Paris Exposition, jogging the futilities of St. Godin's, Rodin, and Bernard, the world that thought itself serious and showed other infallible marks of coming mental paroxysm, was engaged in weird doings at P. King and elsewhere such as startled even itself. Of all branches of education, the science of gauging people and events by their relative importance defies study most insolently. For three or four generations society has united in withering with contempt and approbrium the shameless futility of Madame de Pompadour and Madame de Barry. Yet if one bid at an auction for some object that had been approved by the taste of either lady, one quickly found that it would better to buy half a dozen Napoleon's or Frederick's or Maria Theresa's, or all the philosophy and science of their time than to bid for a cane-bottomed chair that either of these two ladies had adorned. The same thing might be said in a different sense of Voltaire, while as everyone knows the money value of any hand-stroke of Watteau or Hogarth, Natier or Sir Joshua is out of all proportion to the importance of the men. Society seemed to delight in talking with solemn conviction about serious values and in paying fantastic prices for nothing but the most futile. The drama acted at P. King in the summer of 1900 was, in the eyes of a student, the most serious that could be offered for his study since it brought him suddenly to the inevitable struggle for the control of China, which in his view must decide the control of the world. Yet as a money value the fall of China was chiefly studied in Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese porcelain. The value of a Ming vase was more serious than universal war. The drama of the legations interested the public much as though it were a novel of Alexander Dumas, but the bearing of the drama on future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew no more about it than though he were the best informed statesmen in Europe. Like them all he took for granted that the legations were massacred and that John Hay, who alone championed China's administrative entity, would be massacred too, since he must henceforth look on in impotence while Russia and Germany dismembered China and shut up America at home. Nine statesmen out of ten in Europe accepted this result in advance, seeing no way to prevent it. Adams saw none and laughed at Hay for his helplessness. When Hay suddenly ignored European leadership, took the lead himself, rescued the legations and saved China, Adams looked on as incredulous as Europe, though not quite so stupid, since on that branch of education he knew enough for his purpose. Nothing so meteoric had ever been done in American diplomacy. On returning to Washington, January 30, 1901, he found most of the world as astonished as himself, but less stupid than usual. For a moment indeed the world had been struck dumb at seeing Hay put Europe aside and set the Washington government at the head of civilization so quietly that civilization submitted by mere instinct of desolity to receive and obey his orders. But after the first shock of silence, society felt the force of the stroke through its fineness and burst into almost tumultuous applause. Instantly the diplomacy of the nineteenth century with all its painful scuffles and struggles was forgotten, and the American blushed to be told of his submissions in the past. History broken halves. Hay was too good an artist not to feel the artistic skill of his own work, and the success reacted on his health, giving him fresh life, for with him as with most men success was atomic and depression a specific poison. But as usual his troubles nested at home. Success doubles strain. President McKinley's diplomatic court had become the largest in the world, and the diplomatic relations required far more work than ever before, while the staff of the department was a little more efficient, and the friction in the Senate had become coagulated. Hay took to studying the diary of John Quincy Adams eighty years before, and calculated that the resistance had increased about ten times, as measured by waste of days and increase of effort, although Secretary of State J. Q. Adams thought himself very hardly treated. Hay cheerfully noted that it was killing him, and proved it, for the effort of the afternoon walk became sometimes painful. For the moment things were going fairly well, and Hay's unruly team were less fidgety, but Ponsfault still pulled the whole load, and turned the dangerous corners safely, while Cassini and Hollenben helped the Senate to make what trouble they could, about serious offence, and the Irish, after the genial Celtic nature obstructed even themselves. The fortunate Irish, thanks to their sympathetic qualities, never made lasting enmities, but the Germans seemed in a fair way to rouse ill-will and even ugly temper in the spirit of politics, which was by no means a part of Hay's plans. He had as much as he could do to overcome domestic friction, and felt no wish to alienate foreign powers. Yet so much could be said in favour of the foreigners, but they commonly knew why they made trouble, and were steady to a motive. Cassini had for years pursued, in Peking, as in Washington, a policy of his own, never disguised, and as little in harmony with his chief as with Hay. He made his opposition on fixed lines for notorious objects, but Senators could seldom give a reason for obstruction. In every hundred men a certain number obstruct by instinct, and try to invent reasons to explain it afterwards. The Senate was no worse than the Board of a University, but the Incorporators, as a rule, have not made this class of men dictators on purpose to prevent action. In the Senate a single vote commonly stopped legislation, or, in committee, stifled discussion. Hay's policy of removing, one after another, all irritations, and closing all discussions with foreign countries, roused incessant obstruction, which could be overcome only by patience and bargaining and executive patronage, if indeed it could be overcome at all. The price actually paid was not very great, except in the physical exhaustion of Hay and Ponsvot, Root, and McKinley. No serious bargaining of equivalence could be attempted. Senators would not sacrifice five dollars in their own states to gain five hundred thousand in another. But whenever a foreign country was willing to surrender an advantage without an equivalent, Hay had a chance to offer the Senate a treaty. In all such cases the price paid for the treaty was paid wholly to the Senate, and amounted to nothing very serious, except in waste of time and wear of strength. Life is so gay and horrid, laughed Hay. The Major will have promised all the consulates in the service. The Senators will all come to me and refuse to believe me, disconsulate, and I shall see all my treaties slaughtered one by one, by the thirty-four percent of kickers and strikers. The only mitigation I can foresee is being sick a good part of the time. I am nearing my grand climacteric, and the great Kulbut is approaching. He was thinking of his friend Blaine, and might have thought of all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as historian their sufferings had been a long delight. The solitary picturesque and tragic elements in politics, incidentally requiring character studies like Aaron Burr and William B. Giles, Calhoun and Webster and Sumner, with surforceable feebles like James M. Mason and stage exaggerations like Roscoe Conkling. The Senate took the place of Shakespeare, and offered real brutishes and bowling-brokes, Jack Cadiz, Falstaffs, and Malvolios. Endless varieties of human nature know where else to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed, or because they were like schoolboys in their simplicity. Life is so gay and horrid. Hay still felt the humor, though more and more rarely. But what he felt most was the enormous complexity and friction of the vast mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly complained that it had made him a bore, of all things the most senatorial, and to him the most obnoxious. The old friend was lost, and only the teacher remained, driven to madness by the complexities and multiplicities of his new world. To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately seeking education, these small or large annoyances had no great value except as measures of mass and motion. For him the practical interest and the practical man were such as looked forward to the next election, or perhaps in corporations five or ten years. Scarcely half a dozen men in America could be named who were known to have looked a dozen years ahead, while any historian who means to keep his alignment with past and future must cover a horizon of two generations at least. If he seeks to align himself with the future he must assume a condition of some sort for a world fifty years beyond his own. Every historian, sometimes unconsciously but always inevitably, must have put to himself the question, how long could such or such an outworn system last? He can never give himself less than one generation to show the full effects of a changed condition. His object is to triangulate from the widest possible base to the furthest point he thinks he can see, which is always far beyond the curvature of the horizon. To the practical man such an attempt is idiotic and probably the practical man is in the right today. But whichever is right, if the question of right or wrong enters it all into the matter, the historian has no choice but to go on alone. Even in his own profession few companions offer help and his walk soon becomes solitary, leading further and further into a wilderness where twilight is short and the shadows are dense. Already hay literally staggered in his tracks for weariness. More worn than he, Clarence King dropped. One day in the spring he stopped an hour in Washington to bid good-bye, cheerily and simply, telling how his doctors had condemned him to Arizona for his lungs. All three friends knew that they were nearing the end, and that if it were not the one it would be the other. But the effectation of readiness for death is a stage role, and stoicism is a stupid resource, though the only one. Non-dollet paite, one is ashamed of it even in the acting. The sunshine of life had not been so dazzling of late, but that a share of it flickered out for Adams and Hay when King disappeared from their lives. But Hay still had his family and ambition while Adams could only blunder back alone, helplessly, wearily, his eyes rather dim with tears, to his vague trail across the darkening prairie of education, without a motive, big or small, except curiosity to reach, before he too should drop, some point that would give him a far look ahead. He was morbidly curious to see some light at the end of the passage, as though thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to fall into King's arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left in life. Time had become terribly short, and the sense of knowing so little when others knew so much crushed out hope. He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk, idly pulling threads out of the tangled skein of science, to see whether or why they aligned themselves. The commonest and oldest toy he knew was the child's magnet, with which he had played since babyhood, the most familiar of puzzles. He covered his desk with magnets, and mapped out their lines of force by compass. Then he read all the books he could find, and tried in vain to make his lines of force agree with theirs. The books confounded him. He could not credit his own understanding. Here was literally the most concrete fact in nature, next to gravitation which it defied, a force which must have radiated lines of energy without stop since time began, if not longer, and which might probably go on radiating after the sun should fall into the earth, since no one knew why or how or what it radiated, or even whether it radiated at all. Perhaps the earliest known of all natural forces after the solar energies, it seemed to have suggested no idea to anyone until some mariner but thought himself that it might serve for a pointer. Another thousand years passed when it taught some other intelligent man to use it as a pump, supply pipe, sieve, or reservoir for collecting electricity, still without knowing how it worked or what it was. For a historian, the story of Faraday's experiments and the invention of the dynamo past belief, he revealed a condition of human ignorance and helplessness before the commonest forces, such as his mind refused to credit. He could not conceive but that someone somewhere could tell him all about the magnet, if one could but find the book, although he had been forced to admit the same helplessness in the face of gravitation, phosphorescence, and odors. And he could imagine no reason why society should treat radium as revolutionary in science when every infant for ages past had seen the magnet doing what radium did. For surely the kind of radiation mattered nothing compared with the energy that radiated and the matter supplied for radiation. He dared not venture into the complexities of chemistry or microbes so long as this child's toy offered complexities that befogged his mind beyond X-rays and turned the atom into an endless variety of pumps endlessly pumping an endless variety of ethers. He wanted to ask Madame Curie to invent a motor attachable to her salt of radium and pump its forces through it as Faraday did with the magnet. He figured the human mind itself as another radiating matter through which man had always pumped a subtler fluid. In all this futility it was not the magnet or the rays or the microbes that troubled him or even his helplessness before the forces. To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in its new relations staggered his new education by its evidence of growing complexity and multiplicity and even contradiction in life. He could not escape it. Politics or science the lesson was the same and at every step it blocked his path whichever way he turned. He founded in politics. He ran against it in science. He struck it in everyday life as though he were still Adam and the Garden of Eden between God who was unity and Satan who was complexity with no means of deciding which was truth. The problem was the same for McKinley as for Adam and for the Senate as for Satan. Hay was going to wreck on it like King and Adams. All one's life one had struggled for unity and unity had always won. The national government and the national unity had overcome every resistance and the Darwinian evolutionists were triumphant over all the curates. Yet the greater the unity and the momentum the worse became the complexity and the friction. One had in vain bowed one's neck to railways, banks, corporations, trusts and even to the popular will as far as one could understand it. Or even further the multiplicity of unity had steadily increased was increasing and threatened to increase beyond reason. He had surrendered all his favorite prejudices and foresworn even the forms of criticism except for his pet amusement the Senate which was a tonic or stimulant necessary to healthy life. He had accepted uniformity and teraspis and ice age and tramways and telephones and now just when he was ready to hang the crowning garland on the brow of a completed education science itself warned him to begin it again from the beginning. Mondering among the magnets he thought himself that once a full generation earlier he had begun active life by writing a confession of geological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles Lyle and that it might be worth looking at if only to steady his vision. He read it again and thought it better than he could do at sixty-three, but elderly minds always work loose. He saw his doubts grow larger and became curious to know what had been said about them since 1870. The geological survey supplied stacks of volumes and reading for steady months while the longer he read the more he wondered, pondered, doubted what his delightful old friend Sir Charles Lyle would have said about it. The animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught young. Unity is vision. It must have been part of the process of learning to see. The older the mind the older its complexities and the further it looks the more it sees, and to leave in the stars resolve themselves into multiples, yet the child will always see but one. Adams asked whether geology since 1867 had drifted toward unity or multiplicity and he felt that the drift would depend on the age of the man who drifted. Using some impersonal point for measure he turned to see what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin, the ganoid fish, the teraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had sported when geological life was young, as though they had all remained together in time to act the mask of comus at Ludlow Castle and repeat how charming his divine philosophy. He felt almost aggrieved to find Walcott so vigorously acting the part of comus as to have flung the ganoid all the way off to Colorado and far back into the lower Trenton limestone, making the teraspis as modern as a Mississippi garpike by spawning an ancestry for him, infinitely more remote in the dawn of known organic life. A few thousand feet more or less of limestone were the liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the uniformitarian alive under the weight of his own uniformity. Not for all the ganoid fish that ever swam would a discreet historian dare to hazard, even in secret, an opinion about the value of natural selection by minute changes under uniform conditions, for he could know no more about it than most of his neighbors who knew nothing. But natural selection that did not select, evolution finished before it began, minute changes that refused to change anything during the whole geological record, survival of the highest order in a fauna which had no origin, uniformity under conditions which had disturbed everything else in creation, to an honest meaning though ignorant student who needed to prove natural selection and not assume it. Such sequence brought no peace. He wished to be shown that changes in form caused evolution in force, that chemical or mechanical energy had by natural selection and minute changes under uniform conditions converted itself into thought. The ganoid fish seemed to prove, to him, that it had selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in intensity only by help of outside force. To him the ganoid was a huge perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid troubled Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal that Darwinism seemed to survive only in England. In vain he asked what sort of evolution had taken its place. Almost any doctrine seemed orthodox. Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force acting on its own lines quite beyond mechanical explanation had cropped up again. A little more, and he would be driven back on old independence of species. What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like the theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to them. But to the historian who sought only the direction of thought and had begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyle in 1867, the matter of direction seemed vital. Then he had entered gaily the door of the glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of unities and uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in every direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side paths that led nowhere and sequences that could not be proved. The active geologists had mostly become specialists dealing with complexities far too technical for an amateur. But the old formulas still seemed to serve for beginners, as they had served when new. So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of Lyle and Kroll, although Geeky had split up the period into half a dozen intermittent chills in recent geology, and in the northern hemisphere alone, while no geologist had ventured to assert that the glaciation of the southern hemisphere could possibly be referred to a horizon more remote. It still rose wildly and wildly sank, though Professor Seuss of Vienna had written an epoch-making work showing that continents were anchored like crystals, and only oceans rose and sank. Lyle's genial uniformity seemed genial still, for nothing had taken its place, though in the interval granite had grown young, nothing had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge over-thrusts had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even to discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing that progress depended on studying each rock as a law unto itself. Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science than the Garpike, or the Port Jackson Shark, for its correctness in no way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or discuss the principles of any science. But the history of the mind concerned the historian alone, and the historian had no vital concern in anything else, for he found no change to record in the body. Even thought the schools like the Church raised ignorance to a faith and degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution survived like the trilobites without evolving, and yet the evolutionists held the whole field, and had even plucked up the courage to rebel against the Cossack U.K.'s of Lord Kelvin, forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly to this last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the pontiff of physical religion in the effort to force unification of the universe. They had protested with mild conviction that they could not state the geological record in terms of time. They had murmured ignoramus under their breath, but they had never dared to assert the ignorabimus that lay on the tips of their tongues. Yet the admissions seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supracensual, electrolytic—who knew what?—defying science if not denying known law. And the wisest of men could but imitate the Church and invoke a larger synthesis to unify the anarchy again. Historians have got into far too much trouble by following schools of theology in their efforts to enlarge their synthesis, but they should willingly repeat the process in science. For human purposes a point must always be reached soon where larger synthesis is suicide. Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of rapidly increasing complexity, but still an elderly man knew that the change might only be in himself. The admission cost nothing. Any student of any age thinking only of a thought and not of his thought should delight in turning about and trying the opposite motion as he delights in the spring which brings even to a tired and irritated statesman the larger synthesis of peach blooms, cherry blossoms, and dogwood to prove the folly of fret. Every schoolboy knows that this sum of all knowledge never saved him from whipping. Mere years helped nothing. King and Hay and Adams could neither of them escape floundering through the corridors of chaos that opened as they passed to the end. But they could at least float with the stream if they only knew which way the current ran. Students would have liked to begin afresh with the limulus and the Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree side by side with Adams's and Quincy's and Harvard College all unchanged and unchangeable since archaic time. But what purpose would it serve? A seeker of truth or illusion would be none the less restless, though a shark. CHAPTER 27 Toyfelsduck, 1901 Inevitable Paris beckoned, and resistance became more and more futile as the store of years grew less. For the world contains no other spot than Paris where education can be pursued from every side. Even more vigorously than in the twelfth century Paris taught in the twentieth with no other school approaching it for variety of direction and energy of mind. Of the teaching in detail a man who knew only what accident had taught him in the nineteenth century could know next to nothing since science had got quite beyond his horizon, and mathematics had become the only necessary language of thought. But one could play with the toys of childhood, including ming porcelain, salons of painting, operas and theatres, bozarts and gothic architecture, theology and anarchy in any jumble of time, or taught or about with Joe Stigney talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry, or studying Louise at the opera commique, or discussing the charm of youth and the zen with Bay Lodge and his exquisite young wife. Paris remained Parisian in spite of change, mistress of herself though China fell. Nurses of artists, sculptors and painters, poets and dramatists, workers in gems and metals, designers in stuffs and furniture, hundreds of chemists, physicists, even philosophers, philologists, physicians and historians were at work. A thousand times as actively as ever before, and the mass and originality of their product would have swamped any previous age, as it very nearly swamped its own. But the effect was one of chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as before the chaos of New York. His single thought was to keep in front of the movement and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall behind. Only the young have time to linger in the rear. The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even pugilism needs more staying power than the labours of the pale-faced student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of Montparnasse or Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two o'clock in the morning in a beer-garden, even after four hours of monnaie-souillet at the Théâtre Français. In those branches education might be called closed. Fashion too could no longer teach anything worth knowing to a man who, holding open the door into the next world, regarded himself as merely looking round to take a last glance of this. The glance was more amusing than any he had known in his act of life, but it was more, infinitely more, chaotic and complex. Still something remained to be done for education beyond the chaos and, as usual, the women helped. For thirty years of their abouts he had been repeating that he really must go to Bayreuth. Suddenly Mrs. Lodge appeared on the horizon and bade him come. He joined them, parents and children, alert and eager and appreciative as ever, at the little old town of Rottenburg on the Taube, and they went on to the Bayreuth Festival together. Thirty years earlier a Bayreuth Festival would have made an immense stride in education, and the spirit of the master would have opened a vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether different from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the Rococo setting of Bayreuth seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried and Brunhilde, perhaps even for Parseval. Bayreuth was out of the world, calm, contemplative and remote. In 1901 the world had altogether changed and Wagner had become a part of it, as familiar as Shakespeare or Bret Hart. The Rococo element jarred. Even the Hudson and the Susquehanna, perhaps the Potomac itself, had often risen to drown out the gods of Valhalla, and one could hardly listen to the Gata Damarong in New York, among throngs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms of nervous excitement that toned down to musical Philistineism at Bayreuth, as though the gods were Bavarian composers. New York or Paris might be whatever one pleased, venal, sordid, vulgar, but society nursed there in the rottenness of its decay certain anarchistic firmance, and thought them proof of art. Perhaps they were, and at all events Wagner was chiefly responsible for them as artistic emotion. New York knew better than Bayreuth what Wagner meant, and the frivolities of Paris had more than once included the rising of the Seine to drown out the Étoile or Montmartre, as well as the sorcery of ambition that casts spells of enchantment on the hero. Paris still felt a subtle flattery in the thought that the last great tragedy of gods and men would surely happen there, while no one could conceive of its happening at Bayreuth, or would care if it did. Paris coquetted with catastrophe as though it were an old mistress, faced it almost gaily as she had often done, for they were acquainted since Rome began to ravage Europe, while New York met it with a glow of fascinated horror, like an inevitable earthquake, and heard Ternina announce it with conviction that made nerves quiver and thrill as they had long ceased to do under the accents of popular oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had lost its charm, but the fluke motif went home. Adams had been carried with the tide till Brunhilde had become a habit and Ternina an ally. He too had played with anarchy, though not with socialism, which to young men who nourished artistic emotions under the dome of the pantheon seemed hopelessly bourgeois and lowest middle-class. Baylodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to the holy new and original party of conservative Christian anarchists, to restore true poetry under the inspiration of the God of Dameron. Such a party saw no inspiration in Bayreuth, where landscape, history, and audience were relatively stodgy, and where the only emotion was a musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred. Yet Bayreuth still amused even a conservative Christian anarchist who cared as little as Grann Meinrass, whether the singers sang false, and who came only to learn what Wagner had supposed himself to mean. This end attained, as pleased Frau Wagner and the Heilergegeist, he was ready to go on, and the senator, yearning for a sterner study, pointed to a haven at Moscow. For years Adams had taught American youth never to travel without a senator who was useful even in America at times, but indispensable in Russia, where in 1901 anarchists, even though conservative and Christian, were ill-seen. The wing of the anarchistic party consisted rigorously of but two members, Adams and Baylodge. The conservative Christian anarchist, as a party, drew life from Hegel and Schopenhauer, rightly understood. By the necessity of their philosophical dissent, each member of the fraternity denounced the other as unequal to his lofty task, and inadequate to grasp it. Of course no third member could be so much as considered, since the great principle of contradiction could be expressed only by opposites, and no agreement could be conceived, because anarchy, by definition, must be chaos and collision, as in the kinetic theory of a perfect gas. Thus this law of contradiction was itself agreement, a restriction of personal liberty inconsistent with freedom. But the larger synthesis admitted a limited agreement, provided it were strictly confined to the end of larger contradiction. Thus the great end of all philosophy, the larger synthesis, was attained, but the process was arduous. And while Adams, as the older member, assumed to declare the principle, Lodge necessarily denied both the assumption and the principle in order to assure its truth. Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis order and anarchy were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conservative, and Christian he had no motive or duty but to attain the end, and to hasten it he was bound to accelerate progress, to concentrate energy, to accumulate power, to multiply and intensify forces, to reduce friction, increase velocity, and magnify momentum. Partly because this was the mechanical law of the universe as science explained it. Partly also in order to get done with the present which artists and some others complained of. And finally, and chiefly, because a rigorous philosophy required it in order to penetrate the beyond and satisfy man's destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its ultimate contradiction. Of course the untaught critic instantly objected that this scheme was neither conservative, Christian nor anarchic, but such objection meant only that the critic should begin his education in any infant school in order to learn that anarchy, which should be logical, would cease to be anarchic. To the conservative Christian anarchist, the amiable doctrines of Kropotkin were sentimental ideas of Russian mental inertia covered with the name of anarchy merely to disguise their innocence. And the outpourings of Elysee reclues were ideals of the French ouvrier, diluted with absente, resulting in a bourgeois dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretense of anarchy except as a momentary stage toward order and unity. Neither of them had formed any other conception of the universe than what they had inherited from the priestly class to which their minds obviously belonged. With them, as with the Socialist, Communist, or collectivist, the mind that followed nature had no relation. If anarchists needed order they must go back to the twelfth century where their thought had enjoyed its thousand years of reign. The conservative Christian anarchist could have no associate, no object, no faith except the nature of nature itself. And his larger synthesis had only the fault of being so supremely true that even the highest obligation of duty could scarcely oblige Lodge to deny it in order to prove it. Only the self-evident truth that no philosophy of order except the church had ever satisfied the philosopher reconciled the conservative Christian anarchist to prove his own. Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that hardly more people could understand them than understood Wagner or Hegel, or for that matter since the time of Socrates wise men have been mostly shy of claiming to understand anything, but such refinements were Greek or German and affected the practical American but little. He admitted that for the moment the darkness was dense. He could not affirm with confidence even to himself that his largest synthesis would certainly turn out to be chaos since he would be equally obliged to deny the chaos. The poet groped blindly for an emotion. The play of thought for thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a hundred million steam horsepower doubling every ten years and already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived and all the riders they ever carried drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to blame for all were equally servants of the power and worked merely to increase it, but the conservative Christian anarchist saw light. Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to Russia in order to enlarge his synthesis and much he needed it. In America all were conservative Christian anarchists. The faith was national, racial, geographic. The true American had never seen such supreme virtue in any of the innumerable shades between social anarchy and social order as to market for exclusively human and his own. He never had known a complete union either in church or state or thought and had never seen any need for it. The freedom gave him courage to meet any contradiction and intelligence enough to ignore it. Finally the opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The Tsar's empire was a phase of conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to history than all the complex variety of American newspapers, schools, trusts, sects, frauds, and congressmen. These were nature, pure and anarchic as the conservative Christian anarchists saw nature, active, vibrating, mostly unconscious, and quickly reacting on force. But from the first glimpse one caught from the sleeping car window in the early morning of the Polish Jew at the accidental railway station in all his weird horror, to the last vision of the Russian peasant lighting his candle and kissing his icon before the railway virgin in the station at St. Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, Christian, and anarchic. Russia had nothing in common with any ancient or modern world that history knew. She had been the oldest source of all civilization in Europe and had kept none for herself. Now the Europe nor Asia had ever known such a phase which seemed to fall into no line of evolution whatever, and was as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in the 12th century as to the student of the dynamo in the 20th. Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy, Russia became luminous like the salt of radium, but with a negative luminosity as though she were a substance whose energies had been sucked out and inert residuum with movement of pure inertia. From the car window one seemed to float past undulations of nomad life, herders deserted by their leaders and herds, wandering waves stopped in their wandering, waiting for their winds or warriors to return and lead them westward, tribes that had camped like the Kyrgyz for the season and had lost the means of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence. They waited and suffered. As they stood they were out of place and could never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice and snow. One Russian peasant kissing an icon on a saint's day in the Kremlin served for a hundred million. The student had no need to study Wallace or re-read Tolstoy or Turgenev or Dostoevsky to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis of human inertia ever put into words. Gorky was more than enough. Kropotkin answered every purpose. The Russian people could never have changed. Could they ever be changed? Could inertia of race on such a scale be broken up or take new form? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller scale, the question was old and unanswered. All the so-called primitive races and some nearer survivals had raised doubts which persisted against the most obstinate convictions of evolution. The senator himself shook his head, and after surveying Warsaw and Moscow to his content, went on to St. Petersburg to ask questions of Mr. David and Prince Kilkoff. Their conversation added new doubts, for their efforts had been immense, their expenditure enormous, and their results on the people seemed to be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or 15 years of violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing, for since 1898 Russia lagged. The tourist student, having duly reflected, asked the senator whether he should allow three generations or more to swing the Russian people into the Western movement. The senator seemed disposed to ask for more, the student had nothing to say. For him, all opinion founded on fact must be error, because the facts can never be complete, and their relations must always be infinite. Very likely Russia would instantly become the most brilliant constellation of human progress through all the ordered stages of good, but meanwhile one might give a value as movement of inertia to the mass, and assume a slow acceleration that would, at the end of a generation, leave the gap between East and West relatively the same. This result reached the lodges through their moral improvement required a visit to Berlin, but 40 years of varied emotions had not deadened Adams's memories of Berlin, and he preferred at any cost to escape new ones. When the lodges started for Germany, Adams took steamer for Sweden and landed happily in a day or two at Stockholm. Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he gains little by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might doubt whether Mr. David himself or Prince Kilkoff or any Grand Duke or the Emperor knew much more about it than their neighbors, and Adams was quite sure that even in America he should listen with uncertain confidence to the views of any Secretary of the Treasury or Railway President or President of the United States whom he had ever known that should concern the America of the next generation. The mere fact that any man should dare to offer them would prove his incompetence to judge. Yet Russia was too vast a force to be treated as an object of unconcern. As a nurseure, if in no other way, she represented three forces of the human race, and her movement might be the true movement of the future against the hasty and unsure acceleration of America. No one could yet know what would best suit humanity, and the tourists who carried his Lafontaine in mind caught himself talking as bear or as monkey according to the mirror he held before him. Am I satisfied? He asked. Moi? Pourquoi non? Mais je parle quatre pieds, aussi bien que les autres? Mon potrait jusqu'ici ne m'a rien reproché. Mais pour mon frère-l'aure, on ne l'a qu'ébaucher. Jamais, s'il me veut croire, il ne s'effera piendre. Granting that his brother the bear lacked perfection in details, his own figure as monkey was not necessarily ideal or decorative, nor was he in the least sure what form it might take, even in one generation. He had himself never ventured to dream of three. No man could guess what the Daimler motor and X-rays would do to him, but so much was sure. The monkey and motor were terribly afraid of the bear. How much? Only a man close to their foreign departments knew. As the monkey looked back across the Baltic from the safe battlements of Stockholm, Russia looked more potentious than from the Kremlin. The image was that of the retreating ice-cap, a wall of archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of archaic ice that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the northward, and more likely to advance. Scandinavia had been ever at its mercy. Europe had never changed. The imaginary line that crossed the level continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea merely extended the northern barrier line. The Hungarians and Poles on one side still struggled against the Russian inertia of race, and retained their own energies under the same conditions that caused inertia across the frontier. Race ruled the conditions. Conditions hardly affected race, and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was or how it should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound of the word. Evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very existence. No one knew what to make of it. Yet without the clue history was a nursery tale. The Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, and Hungarians, energetic as they were, had never held their own against the heterogenous mass of inertia called Russia, and trembled with terror whenever Russia moved. From Stockholm one looked back on it as though it were an ice sheet, and so had Stockholm watched it for centuries. In contrast with the dreary forests of Russia and the stern streets of St. Petersburg, Stockholm seemed a southern vision, and Sweden lured the tourist on. Through a cheerful New England landscape and bright autumn he rambled northwards till he found himself at Trondheim and discovered Norway. Education crowded upon him in immense masses as he triangulated these vast surfaces of history about which he had lectured and read for a lifetime. When the historian fully realizes his ignorance, which sometimes happens to Americans, he becomes even more tiresome to himself than to others because his naiveté is irrepressible. Adams could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached the Norse doctrine all his life against the stupid and beer-swelling Saxon boars whom Freeman loved, and who, to the despair of science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norway started voyages of thought, and under their illusions he took the male steamer to the north, and on September 14th reached Hammerfest. Frivolous amusement was hardly what one saw through the equinoctial twilight peering at the flying tourist down the deep fjords from dim patches of snow where the last laps and reindeer were watching the male steamer thread the intricate channels outside as their ancestors had watched the first Norse fishermen learn them in the succession of time. But it was not the laps or the snow or the arctic gloom that impressed the tourist so much as the lights of an electromagnetic civilization and the stupefying contrast with Russia which more and more insisted on taking the first place in historical interest. Nowhere had the new forces so vigorously corrected the errors of the old, or so effectively redressed the balance of the ecliptic. As one approached the end, the spot where, seventy years before, a futile Carlisleian Toyfelsdvok had stopped to ask futile questions of the silent infinite. The infinite seemed to have become loquacious, not to say familiar chattering gossip in one's ear. An installation of electric lighting in telephones led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond the level of the magnetic pole, and there the newer Toyfelsdvok sat dumb with surprise and glared at the permanent electric lights of Hammerfest. He had good reason, better than the Toyfelsdvok of 1830 in his liveliest scotch imagination ever dreamed or mortal man had ever told. At best a week in these dim northern seas without means of speech within the arctic circle at the equinox led itself to gravity if not to gloom. But only a week before, breakfasting in the restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught across the neighbouring table a headline in a Swedish newspaper announcing an attempt on the life of President McKinley, and from Stockholm to Trondheim, and so up the coast to Hammerfest, day after day the news came, telling of the President's condition and the do-ings and sayings of Hay and Roosevelt, and to last a little journal was cried on reaching some dim haven, announcing the President's death a few hours before. To Adams the death of McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt was not wholly void of personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his depth of wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate friends, sent to him far within the realm of night, not to please him, but to correct the faults of the solar system. The electro-dynamo social universe worked better than the sun. No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before ended upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous and wholly in the lines of unity. To recover his grasp of chaos he must look back across the gulf to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become an abyss. Russia was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the glacial ice-cap still pressed down on him from the hills in full vision, and no one could look out on the dusky and oily sea that lapped these spectral islands without consciousness that only a day's steaming to the northward would bring him to the ice barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which obliged tourists to stop where laps and reindeer and Norse fishermen had stopped so long ago that memory of their very origin was lost. Adams had never before met a Naples Ultra, and knew not what to make of it, but he felt at least the emotion of his Norwegian fishermen' ancestors, doubtless numbering hundreds of thousands, jammed with their faces to the sea, the ice on the north, the ice-cap of Russian inertia pressing from behind, and the ice a trifling danger compared with the inertia. From the day they first followed the retreating ice-cap round the North Cape down to the present moment, their problem was the same. The new Toyfell's Dock, though considerably older than the old one, saw no clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much perplexed. From the archaic ice barrier to the Caspian Sea, a long line of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took possession, divided his lines of force with no relation to climate or geography or soil. The lesser Taurus knows the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he carried letters and sought knowledge. Today he knows that no one knows. He needs too much, and ignorance is learning. He wandered south again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Culloyne. A mere glance showed him that here was a Germany new to mankind. Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years the green rusticity of Dusseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of Birmingham. The Rhine in 1900 resembled the Rhine of 1858, much as it had resembled the Rhine of the Salik Franks. Culloyne was a railway centre that had completed its cathedral which bore an absent-minded heir of a cathedral of Chicago. The thirteenth century, carefully strained off, catalogued and locked up, was visible to tourists as a kind of Neanderthal cave-dwelling curiosity. The Rhine was more modern than the Hudson, as might well be, since it produced far more coal. But all this counted for little beside the radical change in the lines of force. In 1858 the whole plain of northern Europe, as well as the Danube and the South, bore evident marks of being still the prehistoric highway between Asia and the ocean. The trade route followed the old routes of invasion, and Culloyne was a resting place between Warsaw and Flanders. Throughout northern Germany, Russia was felt even more powerfully than France. In 1901 Russia had vanished and not even France was felt, hardly England or America. Cull alone was felt. Its stamp alone pervaded the Rhine district and persisted to Picardy, and the stamp was the same as that of Birmingham and Pittsburgh. The Rhine produced the same power, and the power produced the same people, the same mind, the same impulse. For a man 63 years old who had no hope of earning a living, these three months of education were the most arduous he ever attempted, and Russia was the most indigestible morsel he had ever met. But the sum of it, viewed from Culloyne, seemed reasonable. From Hammerfest to Scherberg, on one shore of the ocean, from Halifax to Norfolk on the other, one great empire was ruled by one great emperor, Kohl. Political and human jealousies might tear it apart or divide it, but the power and the empire were one. Unity had gained that ground. Beyond lay Russia, and there an older, perhaps a sureer power, resting on the eternal law of inertia, held its own. As a personal matter, the relative values of the two powers became more interesting every year, for the mass of Russian inertia was moving irresistibly over China, and John Hei stood in its path. As long as David ruled, Hei was safe. Should David fall, Hei would totter. One could only sit down and watch the doings of Mr. David and Mr. de Pleuve. CHAPTER XXVIII America has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stop the activity of their twenty million-horsepower society, Americans ignore tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages, and the world learns to regard assassination as a form of hysteria, and death as neurosis, to be treated by arrest cure. Three hideous political murders that would have fattened the humanities with horror have thrown scarcely a shadow on the White House. The year 1901 was a year of tragedy that seemed to Hei to centre on himself. First came, in summer, the accidental death of his son, Del Hei. Close on the tragedy of his son followed that of his chief. All the more hideous that we were so sure of his recovery. The world turned suddenly into a graveyard. I have acquired the funeral habit. Nicolet is dying. I went to see him yesterday, and he did not know me. Among the letters of condolence showered upon him was one from Clarence King at Pasadena, heartbreaking in grace and tenderness the old king-manner, and King himself simply waiting till nature and the foe have done their struggle. The tragedy of King impressed him intensely. There you have it in the face, he said, the best and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably beyond any of his contemporaries, with industry that has often sickened me to witness it, with everything in his favour but blind luck hounded by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy of life to which he was entitled, dying at last with nameless suffering alone and uncared for in a California tavern. The first summons that met Adams before he had even landed on the pier at New York, December 29th, was to Clarence King's funeral, and from the funeral service he had no gayer road to travel than that which led to Washington, where a revolution had occurred that must in any case have made the men of his age instantly old, but which, besides hurrying to the front of the generation that till then he had regarded as boys, could not fail to break the social ties that had till then held them all together. Savus amuse, la vie. Honestly the lessons of education were becoming too trite. Hey himself, probably for the first time, felt half glad that Roosevelt should want him to stay in office if only to save himself the trouble of quitting, but to Adams all was pure loss. On that side his education had been finished at school, his friends and power were lost, and he knew life too well to risk total wreck by trying to save them. As far as concerned Roosevelt the chance was hopeless. To them at sixty-three Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken seriously in his old character, and could not be recovered in his new one. Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter, the quality that medieval theology assigned to God. He was pure act. With him wielding unmeasured power with immeasurable energy in the White House, the relation of age to youth, of teacher to pupil was altogether out of place, and no other was possible. Even Hayes' relation was a false one, while Adams's ceased of itself. History's truths are little valuable now, but human nature retains a few of its archaic proverbial laws, and the wisest courtier that ever lived, Lucius Seneca himself, must have remained in some shade of doubt what advantage he should get from the power of his friend and pupil, Nero Claudius, until, as a gentleman past sixty, he received Nero's filial invitation to kill himself. Seneca closed the vast circle of his knowledge by learning that a friend in power was a friend lost, a fact very much worth insisting upon. While the gray-headed moth that had fluttered through the many moth administrations, and had singed his wings more or less in them all, though he now slept nine months out of twelve, acquired an instinct of self-preservation that kept him to the northside of Lafayette Square, and after a sufficient habitude of presidents and senators deterred him from hovering between them. Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience he was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effects on presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards, but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it, and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion. Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct nature and honest intent, but he lived naturally in restless agitation that would have worn out most tempers in a month, and his first year of presidency showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble. The effect of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in presidents, because it must represent the same process in society, and the power of self-control must have limits somewhere in face of the control of the infinite. Here education seemed to see its first and last lesson, if this is a matter of psychology which lies far down in the depths of history and of science, it will recur in other forms. The personal lesson is different. Roosevelt was lost, but this seemed no reason why hay and lodge should also be lost, yet the result was mathematically certain. With hay it was only the steady decline of strength and the necessary economy of force, but with the lodge it was the law of politics. He could not help himself, for his position as the president's friend and independent statesman at once was false, and he must be unsure in both relations. To a student the importance of Cabot Lodge was great, much greater than that of the usual senator, but it hung on his position in Massachusetts rather than on his control of executive patronage, and his standing in Massachusetts was highly insecure. Nowhere in America was society so complex or change so rapid. No doubt the Bostonian had always been noted for a certain chronic irritability, a sort of Bostonitis, which in its primitive puritan forms seemed due to knowing too much of his neighbors and thinking too much of himself. Many years earlier William M. Everts had pointed out to Adams the impossibility of uniting New England behind a New England leader. The trait led to good ends, such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, but the virtue was exacting, for New England standards were various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and constantly multiplying in number until balance between them threatened to become impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough. State Street and the banks exacted one stamp, the old congregational clergy and other, Harvard College, poor in votes but rich in social influence, a third. The foreign element, especially the Irish, held aloof and seldom consented to approve any one. The new socialist class, rapidly growing, promised to become more exclusive than the Irish. New power was disintegrating society and setting independent centers of force to work until money had all it could do to hold the machine together. No one could represent it faithfully as a whole. Naturally Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but the task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than in that of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type for study or a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting of the two. Roosevelt's are born and never can be taught, but Lodge was a creature of teaching, Boston incarnate, the child of his local parentage, and while his ambition led him to be more, the intent, though virtuous, was, as Adams admitted in his own case, restless. An excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit and accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly at ease whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with painful strain of temper, from one sensitive muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromising Yankee, or a pure American, or a patriot in the still-pure atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews, or a scholar and historian of Harvard College. English to the last fiber of his thought, saturated with English literature, English tradition, English taste, revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and Germans, or any other continental standards, but at home and happy among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare, standing first on the social, then on the political foot, now worshiping, now banning, shocked by the wanton display of immorality but practicing the license of political usage, sometimes bitter, often genial, always intelligent, Lodge had the singular merit of interesting. The usual statesmen flocked and swarms like crows, black and monotonous, Lodge's plumage was varied, and like his flight harked back to race. He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past if they dared but avow it, and might have a future if they could but divine it. Adams too was Bostonian, and the Bostonian's uncertainty of attitude was as natural to him as to Lodge. Few Bostonians can understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the inconsequences of the Boston mind. His theory and practice were also at variance. He professed in theory equal distrust of English thought and called it a huge rag-bag of bric-a-brac, sometimes precious but never sure. For him only the Greek, the Italian, or the French standards had claims to respect, and the barbarism of Shakespeare was as flagrant as to Voltaire. But his theory never affected his practice. He knew that his artistic standard was the illusion of his own mind, that English disorder approached nearer to truth, if truth existed, than French measure, or Italian line, or German logic. He read his Shakespeare as the evangel of conservative Christian anarchy, neither very conservative nor very Christian but stupendously anarchistic. He loved the atrocities of English art and society as he loved Charles Dickens and Miss Austin, not because of their example but because of their humor. He made no scruple of defying sequence and denying consistency. But he was not a senator. Double standards are inspirational to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians. Adams had no reason to care whether his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared more than he, but Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in which they were always liable to find the shifty stands of American opinion yield suddenly under their feet. With this game an elderly friend had long before carried acquaintance as far as he wished. There was nothing in it for him but the amusement of the pugilist or acrobat. The larger study was lost in the division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men. But foreign affairs dealt only with large units and made personal relation possible with hay, which could not be maintained with Roosevelt or Lodge. As an affair of pure education the point is worth notice, from young men who are drawn into politics. The work of domestic progress is done by masses of mechanical power, steam, electric, furnace, or other, which have to be controlled by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity to manage it. The work of internal government has become the task of controlling these men, who are socially as remote as heathen gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell nothing of political value if one skinned them alive. Most of them have nothing to tell but are forces as dumb as their dynamos, absorbed in the development or economy of power. They are trustees for the public, and whenever society assumes the property it must confer on them that title. But the power will remain as before whoever manages it, and will then control society without appeal as it controls its stokers and pit men. Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces. This is a moral that man strongly objects to admit, especially in medieval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth while for a teacher to insist upon it. What he insists upon is only that, in domestic politics, everyone works for an immediate object, commonly for some private job, and invariably in a near horizon. While in foreign affairs the outlook is far ahead, over a field as wide as the world. There, the nearest scholar could see what he was doing. For history, international relations are the only sure standards of movement, the only foundation for a map. For this reason Adams had always insisted that international relation was the only sure base for a chart of history. He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his view, but as teacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he found it convenient. The Secretary of State has always stood as much alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and round him, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found Congress more or less hostile ever since Congress first sat. The Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world which Congress would rather ignore, of obligations which Congress repudiates whenever it can, of bargains which Congress distrusts and tries to turn to its advantage or to reject. Since the first day the Senate existed it has always intrigued against the Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has been obliged to extend his functions beyond the appointment of consuls and senator's service. This is a matter of history which any one may approve or dispute as he will, but as education it gave new resources to an old scholar, for it made of Hay the best schoolmaster since 1865. Hay had become the most imposing figure ever known in the office. He had an influence that no other Secretary of State ever possessed, as he had a nation behind him such as history had never imagined. He needed to write no state papers, he wanted no help, and he stood far above counsel or advice. But he could instruct an attentive scholar as no other teacher in the world could do, and Adam sought only instruction, wanted only to chart the international channel for fifty years to come, to triangulate the future, to obtain his dimension, and fix the acceleration of movement in politics since the year 1200, as he was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics, in finance, and force. Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at last the stream of events favored him. With infinite effort he had achieved the astonishing diplomatic feat of inducing the Senate with only six negative votes to permit Great Britain to renounce without equivalent treaty rights which she had for fifty years defended tooth and nail. This unprecedented triumph in his negotiations with the Senate enabled him to carry one step further his measures for general peace. About England the Senate could make no further effective opposition, for England was one, and Canada alone could give trouble. The next difficulty was with France, and there the Senate blocked advance, but England assumed the task, and owing to political changes in France affected the object, a combination which, as late as 1901, had been visionary. The next and far more difficult step was to bring Germany into the combine, while at the end of the vista, most unmanageable of all, Russia remained to be satisfied and disarmed. This was the instinct of what might be named McKinley-ism, the system of combinations, consolidations, trusts, realized at home, and realizable abroad. With the system a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth century had nothing to do, and made not the least pretence of meddling, but nothing forbade him to study, and he noticed, to his astonishment, that this capitalistic scheme of combining governments, like railways or furnaces, was in effect precisely the socialist scheme of Joaché and Babel. That John Hay of all men should adopt a socialist policy seemed an idea more absurd than conservative Christian anarchy, but paradox had become the only orthodoxy in politics, as in science. When one saw the field, one realized that Hay could not help himself, nor could Babel. Either Germany must destroy England and France to create the next inevitable unification as a system of continent against continent, or she must pool interests. Both schemes, in turn, were attributed to the Kaiser. One or the other he would have to choose. Opinion was balanced doubtfully on their merits, but granting both to be feasible, Hayes and McKinley's statesmanship turned on the point of persuading the Kaiser to join what might be called the coal-power combination, rather than build up the only possible alternative, a gun-power combination by merging Germany in Russia. Thus Babel and Joaché, McKinley and Hay, were partners. The problem was pretty, even fascinating, and to an old Civil War private soldier in diplomacy as rigorous as a geometrical demonstration. As the last possible lesson in life it had all sorts of ultimate values. Unless education marches on both feet, theory and practice, it risks going astray, and Hay was probably the most accomplished master of both then living. He knew not only the forces but also the men, and he had no other thought than his policy. Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a scholar could ever reach. He had under his eyes the whole educational staff of the government at a time when the government had just reached the heights of highest activity and influence. Since 1860 education had done its worst, under the greatest masters and at enormous expense to the world, to train these two minds to catch and comprehend every spring of international action, not to mention of personal influence, and the entire machinery of politics in several great countries had little to do but supply the last and best information. Education could be carried no further. With its effects on Hay, Adam said nothing to do, but its effects on himself were grotesque. Never had the proportions of his ignorance looked so appalling. He seemed to know nothing to be groping in darkness, to be falling forever in space, and the worst depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that no one knew more. He had at least the mechanical assurance of certain values to guide him, like the relative intensities of his coal powers and the relative inertia of his gun powers. But he conceived that had he known, besides the mechanics, every relative value of persons as well as he knew the inmost thoughts of his own government, had the Tsar and the Kaiser and the Mikado turn schoolmasters like Hay and taught him all they knew, he would still have known nothing. They knew nothing themselves. Only by comparison of their ignorance could the student measure his own. Chapter 29 The Abyss of Ignorance 1902 The years hurried past and gave hardly time to note their work. Three or four months, though big with change, come to an end before the mine can catch up with it. Winter vanished, spring burst into flower, and again Paris opened its arms, though not for long. Mr Cameron came over and took the castle of Invalochie for three months, which he summoned his friends to garrison. Lacharber seldom laughs, except for its children, such as Camerons, McDonald's, Campbell's, and other products of the mist. But in the spring of 1902 Scotland put on fewer airs of coquetry than usual. Since the terrible harvest of 1879, which one had watched sprouting on its stalks on the Shropshire hillsides, nothing had equaled the gloom. Even when the victims fled to Switzerland, they found the lake of Geneva and the Rhine not much gare, and Karlsruhe not much restful than Paris, until at last, in desperation, one drifted back to the avenue of the Boye de Boulogne, and like the cuckoo, dropped into the nest of a better citizen. Still must he has its uses. Reynolds hit, transferred to Berlin, abandoned his attic to Adams, and there, for long summers to come, he hid in ignorance and silence. Life at last managed of its own accord to settle itself into a working arrangement. After so many years of effort to find one's drift, the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back with the steady progress oceanwards. Such lessons, as summer taught, winter tested, and one had only to watch the apparent movement of the stars in order to guess one's declination. The process is possible only for men who have exhausted auto-motion. Adams never knew why, knowing nothing of Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday's trick, of seeing lines of force all about him, where he had always seen lines of will. Perhaps the effect of knowing no mathematics is to leave the mind to imagine figures, images, phantoms. One's mind is a watery mirror at best. But once conceived the image became rapidly simple, and the lines of force presented themselves as lines of attraction. Repulsions counted only as battles of attractions. By this path the mind stepped into the mechanical theory of the universe before knowing it, and entered a distinct new phase of education. This was the work of the Dynamo and the Virgin of Shatka, like his masters since thought began he was handicapped by the eternal mystery of force, the sink of all science. For thousands of years in history he found that force had been felt as a cult attraction, love of God, and lost for power in a future life. After 1500 when this attraction began to decline, philosophers fell back on some visatergo, instinct of danger from behind, like Darwin's survival of the fittest, and one of the greatest minds between Descartes and Newton, Pascal, saw the master-motion of man in ennui, which was also scientific. Quote, I have often said that all the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still. Mere restlessness forces action. Quote, so passes the whole of life. We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got the repose is insupportable, for we think either of the troubles we have or of those that threaten us, and even if we felt safe on every side, ennui would, of its own accord, spring up from the depths of the heart where it is rooted by nature, and would fill the mind with its venom. If goodness lead him not, yet weariness may toss him to my breast. Ennui, like natural selection, accounted for change, but failed to account for direction of change. For that, an attractive force was essential, a force from outside shaping influence. While in all the old philosophies called to this outside force God, or Gods. Caring but little for the name and fixing only on tracing the force, Adams had gone straight to the Virgin at Shatra, and asked her to show him God, face to face, as she did for St. Bernard. She repeated, kindly as ever, as though she were still the young mother of today, with a sort of patient pity for masculine dullness. My dear outcast, what is it you seek? This is the Church of Christ. If you seek him through me, you are welcome, sinner or saint, but he and I are one. We are love. We have little or nothing to do with God's other energies, which are infinite, and concern us the less, because our interest is only in man, and the infinite is not knowable to man. Yet if you are troubled by your ignorance, you see how I am surrounded by the masters of the schools. Ask them. The answer sounded singularly like the usual answer of British science, which had repeated since Bacon, that one must not try to know the unknowable, though one was quite powerless to ignore it. But the Virgin carried more conviction, for her feminine lack of interest in all perfections except her own was honester than the formal phrase of science, since nothing was easier than to follow her advice and turn to Thomas Aquinas, who, unlike modern physicists, answered it once and plainly. To me, said St. Thomas, Christ and the mother are one force. Love. Simple, single, and sufficient for all human wants. But love is a human interest which acts even on man so partially, that you and I, as philosophers, need expect no share in it. Therefore we turn to Christ and the schools who represent all other force. We deal with multiplicity and call it God. After the Virgin has redeemed by her personal force as love all that is redeemable in man, the schools embrace the rest and give it form, unity, and motive. This chart of force was more easily studied than any other possible scheme, for one had but to do what the church was always promising to do, abolishing in one flash of lightning not only man, but also the church itself, the earth, the other planets, and the sun, in order to clear the air without affecting medieval science. The student felt warranted in doing what the church threatened, abolishing his solar system altogether in order to look at God as actual, continuous movement, universal cause, and interchangeable force. This was pantheism, but the schools were pantheist, at least as pantheistic as the energetic of the Germans, and their deity was the ultimate energy whose thought and act were one. Rid of man and his mind, the universe of Thomas Aquinas seemed rather more scientific than that of Haeckel or Ernst Mach. Contradiction for contradiction, attraction for attraction, energy for energy, St. Thomas's idea of God had merits. Modern science offered not a vestige of proof or a theory of connection between its forces or any scheme of reconciliation between thought and mechanics, while St. Thomas at least linked together the joints of his machine. As far as a superficial student could follow, the thirteenth century supposed mind to be a mode of force directly derived from the intelligent prime motor, and the cause of all form and sequence in the universe, therefore the only proof of unity. Without thought in the unit there could be no unity, without unity no orderly sequence or ordered society. Thought alone was form, mind and unity flourished or perished together. This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty educations all over the world, for if he were obliged to insist on a universe he seemed driven to the church. Modern science guaranteed no unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all his predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal dragnet of religion. In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways. The first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas. The second is that the church rejects pantheism as worse than atheism, and will have nothing to do with the pantheist at any price. In wandering through the forests of ignorance one necessarily fell upon the old famous bear that scared children at play. But even had the animal shown more logic than its victim, one had learned from socrates to distrust, above all other traps, the trap of logic, the mirror of the mind. Yet the search for a unit of force led into catacombs of thought where hundreds of thousands of educations had found their end. Generation after generation of painful and honest-minded scholars had been content to stay in these labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance and silence, in company with the most famous teachers of all time. Not one of them had ever found a logical high road of escape. Tom's cared little whether he escaped or not, but he felt clear that he could not stop there, even to enjoy the society of Spinoza and Thomas Aquinas. True, the church alone had asserted unity with any conviction, and the historian alone knew what oceans of blood and treasure the assertion had cost, but the only honest alternative to affirming unity was to deny it, and the denial would require a new education. At sixty-five years old a new education promised hardly more than the old. Fortunately the modern legislator, or magistrate, might no longer know enough to treat as the church did, the man who denied unity, unless the denial took the form of a bomb. But no teacher would know how to explain what he thought he meant by denying unity. Society would certainly punish the denial if anyone ever learned enough to understand it. Philosophers as a rule cared little what principles society affirmed or denied, since the philosopher commonly held that though he might sometimes be right by good luck on some point. No complex of individual opinions could possibly be anything but wrong. Yet supposing society to be ignored, the philosopher was no further forward. Nihilism had no bottom. For thousands of years every philosopher had stood on the shore of this sunless sea, diving for pearls and never finding them. All had seen that since they could not find the bottom they must assume it. The church claimed to have found it, but since fourteen-fifty motives for agreeing on some new assumption of unity, deeper and deeper than that of the church, had doubled in force until even the universities and schools, like the church and state, seemed about to be driven into an attempt to educate, though specially forbidden to do it. Like most of his generation, Adams had taken the word of science that the new unit was as good as found. It would not be an intelligence, probably not even a consciousness, but it would serve. He passed sixty years waiting for it, and at the end of that time, on reviewing the ground, he was led to think that the final synthesis of science and its ultimate triumph was the kinetic theory of gases, which seemed to cover all motion in space and to furnish the measure of time. So far as he understood it, the theory asserted that any portion of space is occupied by molecules of gas, flying in right lines at velocities varying up to a mile in a second, and colliding with each other at intervals varying up to seventeen million seven hundred and fifty thousand times in a second. To this analysis, if one understood it right, all matter whatever was reducible, and the only difference of opinion in science regarded the doubt whether a still deeper analysis would reduce the atom of gas to pure motion. Thus, unless one mistook the meaning of motion, which might well be the scientific synthesis commonly called unity, was the scientific analysis commonly called multiplicity. The two things were the same, all forms being shifting phases of motion. Granting this ocean of colliding atoms, the last hope of humanity, what happened if one dropped the sounder into the abyss, let it go, frankly gave up unity altogether? What was unity? Why was one to be forced to affirm it? Here everybody flatly refused help. Science seemed content with its old phrase of larger synthesis, which was well enough for science, but meant chaos for man. One would have been glad to stop and ask no more, but the anarchist bomb made one go on, and the bomb is a powerful persuader. One could not stop even to enjoy the charms of a perfect gas colliding seventeen million times in a second, much like an automobile in Paris. Science itself had been crowded so close to the edge of the abyss that its attempts to escape were as metaphysical as the leap, while an ignorant old man felt no motive for trying to escape, seeing that the only escape possible lay in the form of visatergo, commonly called death. He got out his day-cart again, dipped into his hum and barkly, wrestled anew with his cant, pondered solemnly over his hagel and Schopenhauer and Hartmann, strayed gaily away with his Greeks, all merely to ask what unity meant and what happened when one denied it. Apparently one never denied it. Every philosopher, whether sane or insane, naturally affirmed it. The utmost flight of anarchy seemed to have stopped with the assertion of two principles, and even these fitted into each other like good and evil, light and darkness. Pessimism itself, black as it might be painted, had been content to turn the universe of contradictions into the human thought as one will, and treat it as representation. Metaphysics insisted on treating the universe as one thought or treating thought as one universe, and philosophers agreed, like a kinetic gas, that the universe could be known only as a motion of mind, and therefore as unity. One could know it only as oneself. It was psychology. Of all forms of pessimism the metaphysical form was, for a historian, the least enticing. Of all studies the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heart-rending as introspection, and the more because, as Mephistopheles said of Margarit, he was not the first. Nearly all the highest intelligence known to history had drowned itself in the reflection of its own thought, and the bovine survivors had rudely told the truth about it without affecting the intelligent. One's own time had not been exempt. Even since 1870 friends by scores had fallen victims to it. Within five and twenty years a new library had grown out of it. Harvard College was a focus of the study. France supported hospitals for it. England published magazines of it. Nothing was easier than to take one's mind in one's hand and ask one's psychological friends what they made of it, and the more because it mattered so little to either party since their minds, whatever they were, had pretty nearly ceased to reflect, and let them do what they liked with the smallest remnant they could scarcely do anything very new with it. All one asked was to learn what they hoped to do. Unfortunately the pursuit of ignorance and silence had by this time led the weary pilgrim to such mountains of ignorance that he could no longer see any path whatever, and could not even understand a signpost. He failed to fathom the depths of the new psychology which proved to him that on that side as on the mathematical side his power of thought was atrophied, if indeed it ever existed. Since he could not fathom the science he could only ask the simplest of questions. Did the new psychology hold that the soul or mind was or was not a unit? He gathered from the books that the psychologists had in a few cases distinguished several personalities in the same mind, each conscious and constant, individual and exclusive. The fact seemed scarcely surprising since it had been a habit of mind from earliest recorded time, and equally familiar to that last acquaintance who had taken a drug or caught a fever or eaten a Welsh rare-bit before bed. For surely no one could follow the action of a vivid dream and still need to be told that the actors evoked by his mind were not himself, but quite unknown to all he had ever recognized as self. The new psychology went further and seemed convinced that it had actually split personality not only into dualism but also into complex groups like telephonic centers and systems, that might be isolated and called up at will, and whose physical action might be a cult in the sense of strangeness to any known form of force. Dualism seemed to have become as common as binary stars. Alternating personalities turned up constantly even among one's friends. The facts seemed certain, or at least as certain as other facts. All they needed was explanation. This was not the business of the searcher of ignorance who felt himself in no way responsible for causes. To his mind the compound soul, or mind, took at once the form of a bicycle rider mechanically balancing himself by inhibiting all his inferior personalities, and surely to fall into the subconscious chaos below if one of his inferior personalities got on top. The only absolute truth was the subconscious chaos below, which everyone could feel when he saw it. Whether the psychologists admitted it or not mattered little to the student, who, by the law of his profession, was engaged in studying his own mind. On him the effect was surprising. He woke up with a shudder as though he had himself followed off his bicycle. If his mind were really this sort of magnet mechanically dispersing its lines of force when it went to sleep and mechanically orienting them when it woke up, which was normal, dispersion, or orientation. The mind, like the body, kept its unity unless it happened to lose balance. But the professor of physics who slipped on a pavement and hurt himself knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down, though he did know what the idiot could hardly do, that his normal condition was idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity was unstable artifice. His normal thought was dispersion, sleep, dream, inconsequence, the simultaneous action of different thought centers without central control. His artificial balance was acquired habit. He was an acrobat with a dwarf on his back, crossing a chasm on a slackrope and commonly breaking his neck. By that path of newest science one saw no unity ahead, nothing but a dissolving mind, and the historian felt himself driven back on thought as one continuous force without race, sex, school, country, or church. This had been always the fate of rigorous thinkers, and has always succeeded in making them famous, as it did Gibbon, Buckle, and Auguste Comte. Their method made what progress the science of history knew, which was little enough. But they did, at last, fix the law that if history had ever meant to correct the errors she made in detail, she must agree on a scale for the whole. Every local historian might defy this law till history ended, but its necessity would be the same for man as for space or time or force, and without it the historian would always remain a child in science. Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit, the point in history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe. Until ten years of study had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150 to 1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue except relation. The movement might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task he began a volume which he mentally knew as Mons Samishel and Chatka, a study of 13th century unity. From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself which he could label the education of Henry Adams, a study of 20th century multiplicity. With the help of these two points of relation he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from anyone who should know better. Thereupon he sailed for home. End of Chapter 29