He generously let
others doubt what he felt obliged to affirm; and early put into
Adams's hands the "Concepts of Modern Science," a volume by Judge
Stallo, which had been treated for a dozen years by the schools
with a conspiracy of silence such as inevitably meets every
revolutionary work that upsets the stock and machinery of
instruction. Adams read and failed to understand; then he asked
questions and failed to get answers.
Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific
education open to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be
as ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science
meant nothing: he wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not
enough, or was too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion; never
to direction or progress. History had no use for multiplicity; it
needed unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction,
relation. Everything must be made to move together; one must seek
new worlds to measure; and so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once
more, and found himself on May 12 settled in rooms at the very
door of the Trocadero.
CHAPTER XXV
THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)
UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in
November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and
helpless to find it. He would have liked to know how much of it
could have been grasped by the best-informed man in the world.
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