Historians have got into far too much trouble by following
schools of theology in their efforts to enlarge their synthesis,
that they should willingly repeat the process in science. For
human purposes a point must always be soon reached where larger
synthesis is suicide.
Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of
rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that
the change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing.
Any student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of
his thought, should delight in turning about and trying the
opposite motion, as he delights in the spring which brings even
to a tired and irritated statesman the larger synthesis of
peach-blooms, cherry-blossoms, and dogwood, to prove the folly of
fret. Every schoolboy knows that this sum of all knowledge never
saved him from whipping; mere years help nothing; King and Hay
and Adams could neither of them escape floundering through the
corridors of chaos that opened as they passed to the end; but
they could at least float with the stream if they only knew which
way the current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh with
the Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by
side with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged
and unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it
serve? A seeker of truth -- or illusion -- would be none the less
restless, though a shark!
CHAPTER XXVII
TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)
INEVITABLE Paris beckoned, and resistance became more and more
futile as the store of years grew less; for the world contains no
other spot than Paris where education can be pursued from every
side.
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