This has been always the fate of
rigorous thinkers, and has always succeeded in making them
famous, as it did Gibbon, Buckle, and Auguste Comte. Their method
made what progress the science of history knew, which was little
enough, but they did at last fix the law that, if history ever
meant to correct the errors she made in detail, she must agree on
a scale for the whole. Every local historian might defy this law
till history ended, but its necessity would be the same for man
as for space or time or force, and without it the historian would
always remain a child in science.
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by
motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting
a unit -- the point of history when man held the highest idea of
himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of
study had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250,
expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as
the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time,
without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The
movement might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics.
Setting himself to the task, he began a volume which he mentally
knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a Study of
Thirteenth-Century Unity." From that point he proposed to fix a
position for himself, which he could label: "The Education of
Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.
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