Yet the search for a
unit of force led into catacombs of thought where hundreds of
thousands of educations had found their end. Generation after
generation of painful and honest-minded scholars had been content
to stay in these labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance in
silence, in company with the most famous teachers of all time.
Not one of them had ever found a logical highroad of escape.
Adams cared little whether he escaped or not, but he felt clear
that he could not stop there, even to enjoy the society of
Spinoza and Thomas Aquinas. True, the Church alone had asserted
unity with any conviction, and the historian alone knew what
oceans of blood and treasure the assertion had cost; but the only
honest alternative to affirming unity was to deny it; and the
denial would require a new education. At sixty-five years old a
new education promised hardly more than the old.
Possibly the modern legislator or magistrate might no longer know
enough to treat as the Church did the man who denied unity,
unless the denial took the form of a bomb; but no teacher would
know how to explain what he thought he meant by denying unity.
Society would certainly punish the denial if ever any one learned
enough to understand it. Philosophers, as a rule, cared little
what principles society affirmed or denied, since the philosopher
commonly held that though he might sometimes be right by good
luck on some one point, no complex of individual opinions could
possibly be anything but wrong; yet, supposing society to be
ignored, the philosopher was no further forward.
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