All the steam in the world could not, like
the Virgin, build Chartres.
Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both
energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on
man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science
measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a
straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no
serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his
convenience, and rejected no symbol, unproved or unproveable,
that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a
compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might
prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their
value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest
force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities
to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or
supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to
follow the track of the energy; to find where it came from and
where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its
values, equivalents, conversions. It could scarcely be more
complex than radium; it could hardly be deflected, diverted,
polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other radiant matter.
Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as a mathematical
problem of influence on human progress, though all were occult,
all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the
Virgin easiest to handle.
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