| CHAPTER XXIX
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| THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902)
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| 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 mind 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
Inverlochy for three months, which he summoned his friends to
garrison. Lochaber seldom laughs, except for its children, such
as Camerons, McDonalds, Campbells and other products of the mist;
but in the summer 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 equalled the gloom. Even when the victims fled to
Switzerland, they found the Lake of Geneva and the Rhine not much
gayer, and Carlsruhe no more restful than Paris; until at last,
in desperation, one drifted back to the Avenue of the Bois de
Boulogne, and, like the Cuckoo, dropped into the nest of a better
citizen. Diplomacy has its uses. Reynolds Hitt, transferred to
Berlin, abandoned his attic to Adams, and there, for long summers
to come, he hid in ignorance and silence.
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| 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 a 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 battle 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.
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| This was the work of the dynamo and the Virgin of Chartres.
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 occult attraction -- love of God and lust for power in a
future life. After 1500, when this attraction began to decline,
philosophers fell back on some vis a tergo -- 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-motor of man in ennui, which was also scientific: "I
have often said that all the troubles of man come from his not
knowing how to sit still." Mere restlessness forces action. "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."
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"If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast."
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| 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; a shaping influence. Pascal
and all the old philosophies called this outside force God or
Gods. Caring but little for the name, and fixed only on tracing
the Force, Adams had gone straight to the Virgin at Chartres, and
asked her to show him God, face to face, as she did for St.
Bernard. She replied, kindly as ever, as though she were still
the young mother of to-day, with a sort of patient pity for
masculine dulness: "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!"
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| 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 at 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."
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| 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 -- abolish 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
mediaeval 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 Energetik
of the Germans; and their deity was the ultimate energy, whose
thought and act were one.
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| 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.
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| 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
drag-net of religion.
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| 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 famous old 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 in
silence, in company with the most famous teachers of all time.
Not one of them had ever found a logical highroad of escape.
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| Adams 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.
Possibly 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 ever any one 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 one 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 bottom, they
must assume it. The Church claimed to have found it, but, since
1450, motives for agreeing on some new assumption of Unity,
broader 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.
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| 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 17,750,000 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.
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| 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?
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| 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 bade 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 vis a tergo commonly
called Death. He got out his Descartes again; dipped into his
Hume and Berkeley; wrestled anew with his Kant; pondered solemnly
over his Hegel and Schopenhauer and Hartmann; strayed gaily away
with his Greeks -- all merely to ask what Unity meant, and what
happened when one denied it.
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| 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 motion of
mind, and therefore as unity. One could know it only as one's
self; it was psychology.
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| 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 heartrending as introspection, and the more, because -- as
Mephistopheles said of Marguerite -- 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 small remnant, they could scarcely do anything
very new with it. All one asked was to learn what they hoped to
do.
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| Unfortunately the pursuit of ignorance in silence had, by this
time, led the weary pilgrim into 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 IvXn -- 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 the last
acquaintance who had taken a drug or caught a fever, or eaten a
Welsh rarebit 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 centres and systems, that might be isolated and
called up at will, and whose physical action might be occult 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.
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| This was not the business of the searcher of ignorance, who
felt himself in no way responsible for causes. To his mind, the
compound IvXn took at once the form of a bicycle-rider,
mechanically balancing himself by inhibiting all his inferior
personalities, and sure to fall into the sub-conscious chaos
below, if one of his inferior personalities got on top. The only
absolute truth was the sub-conscious chaos below. which every one
could feel when he sought it.
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| 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 fallen 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, the 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-centres without central control. His artificial balance
was acquired habit. He was an acrobat, with a dwarf on his back,
crossing a chasm on a slack-rope, and commonly breaking his neck.
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| 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 has 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 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.
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| 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 of history when man held the highest idea of
himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of
study had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250,
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 "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a Study of
Thirteenth-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 Twentieth-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 any one who should know better. Thereupon, he sailed for
home.
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