| CHAPTER XXXI
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| THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)
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| OF all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante, this
new exploration along the shores of Multiplicity and Complexity
promised to be the longest, though as yet it had barely touched
two familiar regions -- race and sex. Even within these narrow
seas the navigator lost his bearings and followed the winds as
they blew. By chance it happened that Raphael Pumpelly helped the
winds; for, being in Washington on his way to Central Asia he
fell to talking with Adams about these matters, and said that
Willard Gibbs thought he got most help from a book called the
"Grammar of Science," by Karl Pearson. To Adams's vision, Willard
Gibbs stood on the same plane with the three or four greatest
minds of his century, and the idea that a man so incomparably
superior should find help anywhere filled him with wonder. He
sent for the volume and read it. From the time he sailed for
Europe and reached his den on the Avenue du Bois until he took
his return steamer at Cherbourg on December 26, he did little but
try to kind out what Karl Pearson could have taught Willard
Gibbs.
| 1 | |
| Here came in, more than ever, the fatal handicap of ignorance
in mathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed, as the
right to judge the product of the tool. Ignorant as one was of
the finer values of French or German, and often deceived by the
intricacies of thought hidden in the muddiness of the medium, one
could sometimes catch a tendency to intelligible meaning even in
Kant or Hegel; but one had not the right to a suspicion of error
where the tool of thought was algebra. Adams could see in such
parts of the "Grammar" as he could understand, little more than
an enlargement of Stallo's book already twenty years old. He
never found out what it could have taught a master like Willard
Gibbs. Yet the book had a historical value out of all proportion
to its science. No such stride had any Englishman before taken in
the lines of English thought. The progress of science was
measured by the success of the "Grammar," when, for twenty years
past, Stallo had been deliberately ignored under the usual
conspiracy of silence inevitable to all thought which demands new
thought-machinery. Science needs time to reconstruct its
instruments, to follow a revolution in space; a certain lag is
inevitable; the most active mind cannot instantly swerve from its
path; but such revolutions are portentous, and the fall or rise
of half-a-dozen empires interested a student of history less than
the rise of the "Grammar of Science," the more pressingly
because, under the silent influence of Langley, he was prepared
to expect it.
| 2 | |
| For a number of years Langley had published in his Smithsonian
Reports the revolutionary papers that foretold the overthrow of
nineteenth-century dogma, and among the first was the famous
address of Sir William Crookes on psychical research, followed by
a series of papers on Roentgen and Curie, which had steadily
driven the scientific lawgivers of Unity into the open; but Karl
Pearson was the first to pen them up for slaughter in the
schools. The phrase is not stronger than that with which the
"Grammar of Science" challenged the fight: "Anything more
hopelessly illogical than the statements with regard to Force and
Matter current in elementary textbooks of science, it is
difficult to imagine," opened Mr. Pearson, and the responsible
author of the "elementary textbook," as he went on to explain,
was Lord Kelvin himself. Pearson shut out of science everything
which the nineteenth century had brought into it. He told his
scholars that they must put up with a fraction of the universe,
and a very small fraction at that -- the circle reached by the
senses, where sequence could be taken for granted -- much as the
deep-sea fish takes for granted the circle of light which he
generates. "Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are
characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated
with the mind of man." The assertion, as a broad truth, left
one's mind in some doubt of its bearing, for order and beauty
seemed to be associated also in the mind of a crystal, if one's
senses were to be admitted as judge; but the historian had no
interest in the universal truth of Pearson's or Kelvin's or
Newton's laws; he sought only their relative drift or direction,
and Pearson went on to say that these conceptions must stop:
"Into the chaos beyond sense-impressions we cannot scientifically
project them." We cannot even infer them: "In the chaos behind
sensations, in the 'beyond' of sense-impressions, we cannot infer
necessity, order or routine, for these are concepts formed by the
mind of man on this side of sense-impressions"; but we must infer
chaos: "Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of
the supersensuous." The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of
ultimate chaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature;
Order was the dream of man.
| 3 | |
| No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean,
for words are slippery and thought is viscous; but since Bacon
and Newton, English thought had gone on impatiently protesting
that no one must try to know the unknowable at the same time that
every one went on thinking about it. The result was as chaotic as
kinetic gas; but with the thought a historian had nothing to do.
He sought only its direction. For himself he knew, that, in spite
of all the Englishmen that ever lived, he would be forced to
enter supersensual chaos if he meant to find out what became of
British science -- or indeed of any other science. From
Pythagoras to Herbert Spencer, every one had done it, although
commonly science had explored an ocean which it preferred to
regard as Unity or a Universe, and called Order. Even Hegel, who
taught that every notion included its own negation, used the
negation only to reach a "larger synthesis," till he reached the
universal which thinks itself, contradiction and all. The Church
alone had constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that
Satan was not God, that pantheism was worse than atheism, and
that Unity could not be proved as a contradiction. Karl Pearson
seemed to agree with the Church, but every one else, including
Newton, Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, had sailed gaily into the
supersensual, calling it: --
| 4 | |
"One God, one Law, one Element,
And one far-off, divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."
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| Suddenly, in 1900, science raised its head and denied.
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| Yet, perhaps, after all, the change had not been so sudden as
it seemed. Real and actual, it certainly was, and every newspaper
betrayed it, but sequence could scarcely be denied by one who had
watched its steady approach, thinking the change far more
interesting to history than the thought. When he reflected about
it, he recalled that the flow of tide had shown itself at least
twenty years before; that it had become marked as early as 1893;
and that the man of science must have been sleepy indeed who did
not jump from his chair like a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme.
Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical bomb she called radium.
There remained no hole to hide in. Even metaphysics swept back
over science with the green water of the deep-sea ocean and no
one could longer hope to bar out the unknowable, for the
unknowable was known.
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| The fact was admitted that the uniformitarians of one's youth
had wound about their universe a tangle of contradictions meant
only for temporary support to be merged in "larger synthesis,"
and had waited for the larger synthesis in silence and in vain.
They had refused to hear Stallo. They had betrayed little
interest in Crookes. At last their universe had been wrecked by
rays, and Karl Pearson undertook to cut the wreck loose with an
axe, leaving science adrift on a sensual raft in the midst of a
supersensual chaos. The confusion seemed, to a mere passenger,
worse than that of 1600 when the astronomers upset the world; it
resembled rather the convulsion of 310 when the Civitas Dei cut
itself loose from the Civitas Romae, and the Cross took the place
of the legions; but the historian accepted it all alike; he knew
that his opinion was worthless; only, in this case, he found
himself on the raft, personally and economically concerned in its
drift.
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| English thought had always been chaos and multiplicity itself,
in which the new step of Karl Pearson marked only a consistent
progress; but German thought had affected system, unity, and
abstract truth, to a point that fretted the most patient
foreigner, and to Germany the voyager in strange seas of thought
alone might resort with confident hope of renewing his youth.
Turning his back on Karl Pearson and England, he plunged into
Germany, and had scarcely crossed the Rhine when he fell into
libraries of new works bearing the names of Ostwald, Ernst Mach,
Ernst Haeckel, and others less familiar, among whom Haeckel was
easiest to approach, not only because of being the oldest and
clearest and steadiest spokesman of nineteenth-century mechanical
convictions, but also because in 1902 he had published a vehement
renewal of his faith. The volume contained only one paragraph
that concerned a historian; it was that in which Haeckel sank his
voice almost to a religious whisper in avowing with evident
effort, that the "proper essence of substance appeared to him
more and more marvellous and enigmatic as he penetrated further
into the knowledge of its attributes -- matter and energy -- and
as he learned to know their innumerable phenomena and their
evolution." Since Haeckel seemed to have begun the voyage into
multiplicity that Pearson had forbidden to Englishmen, he should
have been a safe pilot to the point, at least, of a "proper
essence of substance" in its attributes of matter and energy: but
Ernst Mach seemed to go yet one step further, for he rejected
matter altogether, and admitted but two processes in nature --
change of place and interconversion of forms. Matter was Motion
-- Motion was Matter -- the thing moved.
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| A student of history had no need to understand these scientific
ideas of very great men; he sought only the relation with the
ideas of their grandfathers, and their common direction towards
the ideas of their grandsons. He had long ago reached, with
Hegel, the limits of contradiction; and Ernst Mach scarcely added
a shade of variety to the identity of opposites; but both of them
seemed to be in agreement with Karl Pearson on the facts of the
supersensual universe which could be known only as unknowable.
| 10 | |
| With a deep sigh of relief, the traveller turned back to
France. There he felt safe. No Frenchman except Rabelais and
Montaigne had ever taught anarchy other than as path to order.
Chaos would be unity in Paris even if child of the guillotine. To
make this assurance mathematically sure, the highest scientific
authority in France was a great mathematician, M. Poincare of the
Institut, who published in 1902 a small volume called "La Science
et l'Hypothese," which purported to be relatively readable.
Trusting to its external appearance, the traveller timidly bought
it, and greedily devoured it, without understanding a single
consecutive page, but catching here and there a period that
startled him to the depths of his ignorance, for they seemed to
show that M. Poincare was troubled by the same historical
landmarks which guided or deluded Adams himself: "[In science] we
are led," said M. Poincare, " to act as though a simple law, when
other things were equal, must be more probable than a complicated
law. Half a century ago one frankly confessed it, and proclaimed
that nature loves simplicity. She has since given us too often
the lie. To-day this tendency is no longer avowed, and only as
much of it is preserved as is indispensable so that science shall
not become impossible."
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| Here at last was a fixed point beyond the chance of confusion
with self-suggestion. History and mathematics agreed. Had M.
Poincare shown anarchistic tastes, his evidence would have
weighed less heavily; but he seemed to be the only authority in
science who felt what a historian felt so strongly -- the need of
unity in a universe. "Considering everything we have made some
approach towards unity. We have not gone as fast as we hoped
fifty years ago; we have not always taken the intended road; but
definitely we have gained much ground." This was the most clear
and convincing evidence of progress yet offered to the navigator
of ignorance; but suddenly he fell on another view which seemed
to him quite irreconcilable with the first: "Doubtless if our
means of investigation should become more and more penetrating,
we should discover the simple under the complex; then the complex
under the simple; then anew the simple under the complex; and so
on without ever being able to foresee the last term."
| 12 | |
| A mathematical paradise of endless displacement promised
eternal bliss to the mathematician, but turned the historian
green with horror. Made miserable by the thought that he knew no
mathematics, he burned to ask whether M. Poincare knew any
history, since he began by begging the historical question
altogether, and assuming that the past showed alternating phases
of simple and complex -- the precise point that Adams, after
fifty years of effort, found himself forced to surrender; and
then going on to assume alternating phases for the future which,
for the weary Titan of Unity, differed in nothing essential from
the kinetic theory of a perfect gas.
| 13 | |
| Since monkeys first began to chatter in trees, neither man nor
beast had ever denied or doubted Multiplicity, Diversity,
Complexity, Anarchy, Chaos. Always and everywhere the Complex had
been true and the Contradiction had been certain. Thought started
by it. Mathematics itself began by counting one -- two -- three;
then imagining their continuity, which M. Poincare was still
exhausting his wits to explain or defend; and this was his
explanation: "In short, the mind has the faculty of creating
symbols, and it is thus that it has constructed mathematical
continuity which is only a particular system of symbols." With
the same light touch, more destructive in its artistic measure
than the heaviest-handed brutality of Englishmen or Germans, he
went on to upset relative truth itself: "How should I answer the
question whether Euclidian Geometry is true? It has no sense! . .
. Euclidian Geometry is, and will remain, the most convenient."
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| Chaos was a primary fact even in Paris -- especially in Paris
-- as it was in the Book of Genesis; but every thinking being in
Paris or out of it had exhausted thought in the effort to prove
Unity, Continuity, Purpose, Order, Law, Truth, the Universe, God,
after having begun by taking it for granted, and discovering, to
their profound dismay, that some minds denied it. The direction
of mind, as a single force of nature, had been constant since
history began. Its own unity had created a universe the essence
of which was abstract Truth; the Absolute; God! To Thomas
Aquinas, the universe was still a person; to Spinoza, a
substance; to Kant, Truth was the essence of the "I"; an innate
conviction; a categorical imperative; to Poincare, it was a
convenience; and to Karl Pearson, a medium of exchange.
| 15 | |
| The historian never stopped repeating to himself that he knew
nothing about it; that he was a mere instrument of measure, a
barometer, pedometer, radiometer; and that his whole share in the
matter was restricted to the measurement of thought-motion as
marked by the accepted thinkers. He took their facts for granted.
He knew no more than a firefly about rays -- or about race -- or
sex -- or ennui -- or a bar of music -- or a pang of love -- or a
grain of musk -- or of phosphorus -- or conscience -- or duty --
or the force of Euclidian geometry -- or non-Euclidian -- or heat
-- or light -- or osmosis -- or electrolysis -- or the magnet --
or ether -- or vis inertiae -- or gravitation -- or cohesion --
or elasticity -- or surface tension -- or capillary attraction --
or Brownian motion -- or of some scores, or thousands, or
millions of chemical attractions, repulsions or indifferences
which were busy within and without him; or, in brief, of Force
itself, which, he was credibly informed, bore some dozen
definitions in the textbooks, mostly contradictory, and all, as
he was assured, beyond his intelligence; but summed up in the
dictum of the last and highest science, that Motion seems to be
Matter and Matter seems to be Motion, yet "we are probably
incapable of discovering" what either is. History had no need to
ask what either might be; all it needed to know was the admission
of ignorance; the mere fact of multiplicity baffling science.
Even as to the fact, science disputed, but radium happened to
radiate something that seemed to explode the scientific magazine,
bringing thought, for the time, to a standstill; though, in the
line of thought-movement in history, radium was merely the next
position, familiar and inexplicable since Zeno and his arrow:
continuous from the beginning of time, and discontinuous at each
successive point. History set it down on the record -- pricked
its position on the chart -- and waited to be led, or misled,
once more.
| 16 | |
| The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values
his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to
falsify his facts. The laws of history only repeat the lines of
force or thought. Yet though his will be iron, he cannot help now
and then resuming his humanity or simianity in face of a fear.
The motion of thought had the same value as the motion of a
cannon-ball seen approaching the observer on a direct line
through the air. One could watch its curve for five thousand
years. Its first violent acceleration in historical times had
ended in the catastrophe of 310. The next swerve of direction
occurred towards 1500. Galileo and Bacon gave a still newer curve
to it, which altered its values; but all these changes had never
altered the continuity. Only in 1900, the continuity snapped.
| 17 | |
| Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world sometimes dated
it from 1893, by the Roentgen rays, or from 1898, by the Curie's
radium; but in 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of
British science that the human race without exception had lived
and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the
century. The date was convenient, and convenience was truth.
| 18 | |
| The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world
which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine
it, and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a
land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an
accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion
imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the
universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved
itself back into anarchy at last. He could not deny that the law
of the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure,
especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man; the
perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the perpetual
revolt of society against the law it had established; the
perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual
appeal to force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a
higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the
perpetual victory of the principles of freedom, and their
perpetual conversion into principles of power; but the staggering
problem was the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial
order which nature abhorred. The physicists had a phrase for it,
unintelligible to the vulgar: "All that we win is a battle --
lost in advance -- with the irreversible phenomena in the
background of nature."
| 19 | |
| All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He saw
his education complete; and was sorry he ever began it. As a
matter of taste, he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century
education when God was a father and nature a mother, and all was
for the best in a scientific universe. He repudiated all share in
the world as it was to be, and yet he could not detect the point
where his responsibility began or ended.
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| As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had
behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit
its conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that
embodied all its notions of the perfect. Man knew it was true
because he made it, and he loved it for the same reason. He
sacrificed millions of lives to acquire his unity, but he
achieved it, and justly thought it a work of art. The woman
especially did great things, creating her deities on a higher
level than the male, and, in the end, compelling the man to
accept the Virgin as guardian of the man's God. The man's part in
his Universe was secondary, but the woman was at home there, and
sacrificed herself without limit to make it habitable, when man
permitted it, as sometimes happened for brief intervals of war
and famine; but she could not provide protection against forces
of nature. She did not think of her universe as a raft to which
the limpets stuck for life in the surge of a supersensual chaos;
she conceived herself and her family as the centre and flower of
an ordered universe which she knew to be unity because she had
made it after the image of her own fecundity; and this creation
of hers was surrounded by beauties and perfections which she knew
to be real because she herself had imagined them.
| 21 | |
| Even the masculine philosopher admired and loved and celebrated
her triumph, and the greatest of them sang it in the noblest of
his verses: --
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"Alma Venus, coeli subter labentia signa
Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferenteis
Concelebras . . . . . . .
Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas,
Nec sine te quidquam dias in luminis oras
Exoritur, neque fit laetum neque amabile quidquam;
Te sociam studeo!"
| 23 | |
| Neither man nor woman ever wanted to quit this Eden of their
own invention, and could no more have done it of their own accord
than the pearl oyster could quit its shell; but although the
oyster might perhaps assimilate or embalm a grain of sand forced
into its aperture, it could only perish in face of the cyclonic
hurricane or the volcanic upheaval of its bed. Her supersensual
chaos killed her.
| 24 | |
| Such seemed the theory of history to be imposed by science on
the generation born after 1900. For this theory, Adams felt
himself in no way responsible. Even as historian he had made it
his duty always to speak with respect of everything that had ever
been thought respectable -- except an occasional statesman; but
he had submitted to force all his life, and he meant to accept it
for the future as for the past. All his efforts had been turned
only to the search for its channel. He never invented his facts;
they were furnished him by the only authorities he could find. As
for himself, according to Helmholz, Ernst Mach, and Arthur
Balfour, he was henceforth to be a conscious ball of vibrating
motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of
rotation or vibration, rolling at the feet of the Virgin at
Chartres or of M. Poincare in an attic at Paris, a centre of
supersensual chaos. The discovery did not distress him. A
solitary man of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic
cathedral or a Paris apartment, need fret himself little about a
few illusions more or less. He should have learned his lesson
fifty years earlier; the times had long passed when a student
could stop before chaos or order; he had no choice but to march
with his world.
| 25 | |
| Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered
by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human
mind has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the
chaos which caged it; how -- appearing suddenly and inexplicably
out of some unknown and unimaginable void; passing half its known
life in the mental chaos of sleep; victim even when awake, to its
own ill-adjustment, to disease, to age, to external suggestion,
to nature's compulsion; doubting its sensations, and, in the last
resort, trusting only to instruments and averages -- after sixty
or seventy years of growing astonishment, the mind wakes to find
itself looking blankly into the void of death. That it should
profess itself pleased by this performance was all that the
highest rules of good breeding could ask; but that it should
actually be satisfied would prove that it existed only as idiocy.
| 26 | |
| Satisfied, the future generation could scarcely think itself,
for even when the mind existed in a universe of its own creation,
it had never been quite at ease. As far as one ventured to
interpret actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself
by an infinite series of infinitely delicate adjustments forced
on it by the infinite motion of an infinite chaos of motion;
dragged at one moment into the unknowable and unthinkable, then
trying to scramble back within its senses and to bar the chaos
out, but always assimilating bits of it, until at last, in 1900,
a new avalanche of unknown forces had fallen on it, which
required new mental powers to control. If this view was correct,
the mind could gain nothing by flight or by fight; it must merge
in its supersensual multiverse, or succumb to it.
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