We have not gone as fast as we hoped
fifty years ago; we have not always taken the intended road; but
definitely we have gained much ground." This was the most clear
and convincing evidence of progress yet offered to the navigator
of ignorance; but suddenly he fell on another view which seemed
to him quite irreconcilable with the first: "Doubtless if our
means of investigation should become more and more penetrating,
we should discover the simple under the complex; then the complex
under the simple; then anew the simple under the complex; and so
on without ever being able to foresee the last term."
A mathematical paradise of endless displacement promised
eternal bliss to the mathematician, but turned the historian
green with horror. Made miserable by the thought that he knew no
mathematics, he burned to ask whether M. Poincare knew any
history, since he began by begging the historical question
altogether, and assuming that the past showed alternating phases
of simple and complex -- the precise point that Adams, after
fifty years of effort, found himself forced to surrender; and
then going on to assume alternating phases for the future which,
for the weary Titan of Unity, differed in nothing essential from
the kinetic theory of a perfect gas.
Since monkeys first began to chatter in trees, neither man nor
beast had ever denied or doubted Multiplicity, Diversity,
Complexity, Anarchy, Chaos.
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