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 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.
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.
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."
"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; 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!"
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."
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.
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 drag-net 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.