Chapter XXXIV. A Law of Acceleration (1904)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

IMAGES are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, but the mind
craves them, and, of late more than ever, the keenest experimenters
find twenty images better than one, especially if contradictory;
since the human mind has already learned to deal in
contradictions.

The image needed here is that of a new centre, or preponderating
mass, artificially introduced on earth in the midst of a system of
attractive forces that previously made their own equilibrium, and
constantly induced to accelerate its motion till it shall establish a
new equilibrium. A dynamic theory would begin by assuming that all
history, terrestrial or cosmic, mechanical or intellectual, would be
reducible to this formula if we knew the facts.

For convenience, the most familiar image should come first; and
this is probably that of the comet, or meteoric streams, like the
Leonids and Perseids; a complex of minute mechanical agencies,
reacting within and without, and guided by the sum of forces
attracting or deflecting it. Nothing forbids one to assume that the
man-meteorite might grow, as an acorn does, absorbing light, heat,
electricity -- or thought; for, in recent times, such transference of
energy has become a familiar idea; but the simplest figure, at first,
is that of a perfect comet -- say that of 1843 -- which drops from
space, in a straight line, at the regular acceleration of speed,
directly into the sun, and after wheeling sharply about it, in heat
that ought to dissipate any known substance, turns back unharmed, in
defiance of law, by the path on which it came. The mind, by analogy,
may figure as such a comet, the better because it also defies law.

Motion is the ultimate object of science, and measures of motion
are many; but with thought as with matter, the true measure is mass
in its astronomic sense -- the sum or difference of attractive
forces. Science has quite enough trouble in measuring its material
motions without volunteering help to the historian, but the historian
needs not much help to measure some kinds of social movement; and
especially in the nineteenth century, society by common accord agreed
in measuring its progress by the coal-output. The ratio of increase
in the volume of coal-power may serve as dynamometer.

The coal-output of the world, speaking roughly, doubled every
ten years between 1840 and 1900, in the form of utilized power, for
the ton of coal yielded three or four times as much power in 1900 as
in 1840. Rapid as this rate of acceleration in volume seems, it may
be tested in a thousand ways without greatly reducing it. Perhaps the
ocean steamer is nearest unity and easiest to measure, for any one
might hire, in 1905, for a small sum of money, the use of 30,000
steam-horse-power to cross the ocean, and by halving this figure
every ten years, he got back to 234 horse-power for 1835, which was
accuracy enough for his purposes. In truth, his chief trouble came
not from the ratio in volume of heat, but from the intensity, since
he could get no basis for a ratio there. All ages of history have
known high intensities, like the iron-furnace, the burning-glass, the
blow-pipe; but no society has ever used high intensities on any large
scale till now, nor can a mere bystander decide what range of
temperature is now in common use. Loosely guessing that science
controls habitually the whole range from absolute zero to 3000
degrees Centigrade, one might assume, for convenience, that the
ten-year ratio for volume could be used temporarily for intensity;
and still there remained a ratio to be guessed for other forces than
heat. Since 1800 scores of new forces had been discovered; old forces
had been raised to higher powers, as could be measured in the
navy-gun; great regions of chemistry had been opened up, and
connected with other regions of physics. Within ten years a new
universe of force had been revealed in radiation. Complexity had
extended itself on immense horizons, and arithmetical ratios were
useless for any attempt at accuracy. The force evolved seemed more
like explosion than gravitation, and followed closely the curve of
steam; but, at all events, the ten-year ratio seemed carefully
conservative. Unless the calculator was prepared to be instantly
overwhelmed by physical force and mental complexity, he must stop
there.

Thus, taking the year 1900 as the starting point for carrying
back the series, nothing was easier than to assume a ten-year period
of retardation as far back as 1820, but beyond that point the
statistician failed, and only the mathematician could help. Laplace
would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in
mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, and
himself. Watt could have given in pounds the increase of power
between Newcomen's engines and his own. Volta and Benjamin Franklin
would have stated their progress as absolute creation of power.
Dalton could have measured minutely his advance on Boerhaave.
Napoleon I must have had a distinct notion of his own numerical
relation to Louis XIV. No one in 1789 doubted the progress of force,
least of all those who were to lose their heads by it.

Pending agreement between these authorities, theory may assume
what it likes -- say a fifty, or even a five-and-twenty-year period
of reduplication for the eighteenth century, for the period matters
little until the acceleration itself is admitted. The subject is even
more amusing in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century,
because Galileo and Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, and Isaac Newton took
vast pains to fix the laws of acceleration for moving bodies, while
Lord Bacon and William Harvey were content with showing
experimentally the fact of acceleration in knowledge; but from their
combined results a historian might be tempted to maintain a similar
rate of movement back to 1600, subject to correction from the
historians of mathematics.

The mathematicians might carry their calculations back as far as
the fourteenth century when algebra seems to have become for the
first time the standard measure of mechanical progress in western
Europe; for not only Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, but even artists
like Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Albert Durer worked by
mathematical processes, and their testimony would probably give
results more exact than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare; but, to
save trouble, one might tentatively carry back the same ratio of
acceleration, or retardation, to the year 1400, with the help of
Columbus and Gutenberg, so taking a uniform rate during the whole
four centuries (1400-1800), and leaving to statisticians the task of
correcting it.

Or better, one might, for convenience, use the formula of
squares to serve for a law of mind. Any other formula would do as
well, either of chemical explosion, or electrolysis, or vegetable
growth, or of expansion or contraction in innumerable forms; but this
happens to be simple and convenient. Its force increases in the
direct ratio of its squares. As the human meteoroid approached the
sun or centre of attractive force, the attraction of one century
squared itself to give the measure of attraction in the next.

Behind the year 1400, the process certainly went on, but the
progress became so slight as to be hardly measurable. What was gained
in the east or elsewhere, cannot be known; but forces, called loosely
Greek fire and gunpowder, came into use in the west in the thirteenth
century, as well as instruments like the compass, the blow-pipe,
clocks and spectacles, and materials like paper; Arabic notation and
algebra were introduced, while metaphysics and theology acted as
violent stimulants to mind. An architect might detect a sequence
between the Church of St. Peter's at Rome, the Amiens Cathedral, the
Duomo at Pisa, San Marco at Venice, Sancta Sofia at Constantinople
and the churches at Ravenna. All the historian dares affirm is that a
sequence is manifestly there, and he has a right to carry back his
ratio, to represent the fact, without assuming its numerical
correctness. On the human mind as a moving body, the break in
acceleration in the Middle Ages is only apparent; the attraction
worked through shifting forms of force, as the sun works by light or
heat, electricity, gravitation, or what not, on different organs with
different sensibilities, but with invariable law.

The science of prehistoric man has no value except to prove that
the law went back into indefinite antiquity. A stone arrowhead is as
convincing as a steam-engine. The values were as clear a hundred
thousand years ago as now, and extended equally over the whole world.
The motion at last became infinitely slight, but cannot be proved to
have stopped. The motion of Newton's comet at aphelion may be equally
slight. To evolutionists may be left the processes of evolution; to
historians the single interest is the law of reaction between force
and force -- between mind and nature -- the law of progress.

The great division of history into phases by Turgot and Comte
first affirmed this law in its outlines by asserting the unity of
progress, for a mere phase interrupts no growth, and nature shows
innumerable such phases. The development of coal-power in the
nineteenth century furnished the first means of assigning closer
values to the elements; and the appearance of supersensual forces
towards 1900 made this calculation a pressing necessity; since the
next step became infinitely serious.

A law of acceleration, definite and constant as any law of
mechanics, cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the
convenience of man. No one is likely to suggest a theory that man's
convenience had been consulted by Nature at any time, or that Nature
has consulted the convenience of any of her creations, except perhaps
the Terebratula. In every age man has bitterly and justly complained
that Nature hurried and hustled him, for inertia almost invariably
has ended in tragedy. Resistance is its law, and resistance to
superior mass is futile and fatal.

Fifty years ago, science took for granted that the rate of
acceleration could not last. The world forgets quickly, but even
today the habit remains of founding statistics on the faith that
consumption will continue nearly stationary. Two generations, with
John Stuart Mill, talked of this stationary period, which was to
follow the explosion of new power. All the men who were elderly in
the forties died in this faith, and other men grew old nursing the
same conviction, and happy in it; while science, for fifty years,
permitted, or encouraged, society to think that force would prove to
be limited in supply. This mental inertia of science lasted through
the eighties before showing signs of breaking up; and nothing short
of radium fairly wakened men to the fact, long since evident, that
force was inexhaustible. Even then the scientific authorities
vehemently resisted.

Nothing so revolutionary had happened since the year 300.
Thought had more than once been upset, but never caught and whirled
about in the vortex of infinite forces. Power leaped from every atom,
and enough of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running
to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off.
Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold
of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was very nearly the
exact truth for the purposes of an elderly and timid single gentleman
in Paris, who never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting
an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the
neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a
bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would
double in force and number every ten years.

Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One's life had
fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had
seen four impossibilities made actual -- the ocean-steamer, the
railway, the electric telegraph, and the Daguerreotype; nor could he
ever learn which of the four had most hurried others to come. He had
seen the coal-output of the United States grow from nothing to three
hundred million tons or more. What was far more serious, he had seen
the number of minds, engaged in pursuing force -- the truest measure
of its attraction -- increase from a few scores or hundreds, in 1838,
to many thousands in 1905, trained to sharpness never before reached,
and armed with instruments amounting to new senses of indefinite
power and accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places where
Nature herself had never known it to be, making analyses that
contradicted being, and syntheses that endangered the elements. No
one could say that the social mind now failed to respond to new
force, even when the new force annoyed it horribly. Every day Nature
violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with enormous
destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at man, who
helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single
instant could stop. The railways alone approached the carnage of war;
automobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became
almost a nervous relaxation. An immense volume of force had detached
itself from the unknown universe of energy, while still vaster
reservoirs, supposed to be infinite, steadily revealed themselves,
attracting mankind with more compulsive course than all the Pontic
Seas or Gods or Gold that ever existed, and feeling still less of
retiring ebb.

In 1850, science would have smiled at such a romance as this,
but, in 1900, as far as history could learn, few men of science
thought it a laughing matter. If a perplexed but laborious follower
could venture to guess their drift, it seemed in their minds a
toss-up between anarchy and order. Unless they should be more honest
with themselves in the future than ever they were in the past, they
would be more astonished than their followers when they reached the
end. If Karl Pearson's notions of the universe were sound, men like
Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton should have stopped the
progress of science before 1700, supposing them to have been honest
in the religious convictions they expressed. In 1900 they were
plainly forced back; on faith in a unity unproved and an order they
had themselves disproved. They had reduced their universe to a series
of relations to themselves. They had reduced themselves to motion in
a universe of motions, with an acceleration, in their own case of
vertiginous violence. With the correctness of their science, history
had no right to meddle, since their science now lay in a plane where
scarcely one or two hundred minds in the world could follow its
mathematical processes; but bombs educate vigorously, and even
wireless telegraphy or airships might require the reconstruction of
society. If any analogy whatever existed between the human mind, on
one side, and the laws of motion, on the other, the mind had already
entered a field of attraction so violent that it must immediately
pass beyond, into new equilibrium, like the Comet of Newton, to
suffer dissipation altogether, like meteoroids in the earth's
atmosphere. If it behaved like an explosive, it must rapidly recover
equilibrium; if it behaved like a vegetable, it must reach its limits
of growth; and even if it acted like the earlier creations of energy
-- the saurians and sharks -- it must have nearly reached the limits
of its expansion. If science were to go on doubling or quadrupling
its complexities every ten years, even mathematics would soon
succumb. An average mind had succumbed already in 1850; it could no
longer understand the problem in 1900.

Fortunately, a student of history had no responsibility for the
problem; he took it as science gave it, and waited only to be taught.
With science or with society, he had no quarrel and claimed no share
of authority. He had never been able to acquire knowledge, still less
to impart it; and if he had, at times, felt serious differences with
the American of the nineteenth century, he felt none with the
American of the twentieth. For this new creation, born since 1900, a
historian asked no longer to be teacher or even friend; he asked only
to be a pupil, and promised to be docile, for once, even though
trodden under foot; for he could see that the new American -- the
child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and
radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined -- must
be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature. At the
rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year
2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in
complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with
problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him the
nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth --
equally childlike -- and he would only wonder how both of them,
knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have done so much.
Perhaps even he might go back, in 1964, to sit with Gibbon on the
steps of Ara Coeli.

Meanwhile he was getting education. With that, a teacher who had
failed to educate even the generation of 1870, dared not interfere.
The new forces would educate. History saw few lessons in the past
that would be useful in the future; but one, at least, it did see.
The attempt of the American of 1800 to educate the American of 1900
had not often been surpassed for folly; and since 1800 the forces and
their complications had increased a thousand times or more. The
attempt of the American of 1900 to educate the American of 2000, must
be even blinder than that of the Congressman of 1800, except so far
as he had learned his ignorance. During a million or two of years,
every generation in turn had toiled with endless agony to attain and
apply power, all the while betraying the deepest alarm and horror at
the power they created. The teacher of 1900, if foolhardy, might
stimulate; if foolish, might resist; if intelligent, might balance,
as wise and foolish have often tried to do from the beginning; but
the forces would continue to educate, and the mind would continue to
react. All the teacher could hope was to teach it reaction.

Even there his difficulty was extreme. The most elementary books
of science betrayed the inadequacy of old implements of thought.
Chapter after chapter closed with phrases such as one never met in
older literature: "The cause of this phenomenon is not understood";
"science no longer ventures to explain causes"; "the first step
towards a causal explanation still remains to be taken"; "opinions
are very much divided"; "in spite of the contradictions involved";
"science gets on only by adopting different theories, sometimes
contradictory." Evidently the new American would need to think in
contradictions, and instead of Kant's famous four antinomies, the new
universe would know no law that could not be proved by its
anti-law.

To educate -- one's self to begin with -- had been the effort of
one's life for sixty years; and the difficulties of education had
gone on doubling with the coal-output, until the prospect of waiting
another ten years, in order to face a seventh doubling of
complexities, allured one's imagination but slightly. The law of
acceleration was definite, and did not require ten years more study
except to show whether it held good. No scheme could be suggested to
the new American, and no fault needed to be found, or complaint made;
but the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its
style of education promised to be violently coercive. The movement
from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in
sequence, and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer,
it would require a new social mind. As though thought were common
salt in indefinite solution it must enter a new phase subject to new
laws. Thus far, since five or ten thousand years, the mind had
successfully reacted, and nothing yet proved that it would fail to
react -- but it would need to jump.