The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly
if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value,
this common value could have no measure but that of their
attraction on his own mind. He must treat them as they had been
felt; as convertible, reversible, interchangeable attractions on
thought. He made up his mind to venture it; he would risk
translating rays into faith. Such a reversible process would
vastly amuse a chemist, but the chemist could not deny that he,
or some of his fellow physicists, could feel the force of both.
When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the place had
probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the
Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or
automobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force
of all, though the rays were unborn and the women were dead.
Here opened another totally new education, which promised to be
by far the most hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which he
must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two
kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction.
They were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing
one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of
the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent
as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value
as force -- at most as sentiment.
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