Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in the object; but
when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he felt that
he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be
brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a
monkey from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or
Sequence had no more value for him than the idea of none; that
what he valued most was Motion, and that what attracted his mind
was Change.
Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of
education. As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the
grass close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the
grass -- or whatever there was to nibble -- in the Silurian
kingdom of Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution
far more wonderful than that of fishes. He did not like it; he
could not account for it; and he determined to stop it. Never
since the days of his Limulus ancestry had any of his ascendants
thought thus. Their modes of thought might be many, but their
thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of ancestors,
back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and
died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which
had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite
series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not
care whether truth was, or was not, true.
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