Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world sometimes dated
it from 1893, by the Roentgen rays, or from 1898, by the Curie's
radium; but in 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of
British science that the human race without exception had lived
and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the
century. The date was convenient, and convenience was truth.
The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world
which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine
it, and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a
land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an
accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion
imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the
universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved
itself back into anarchy at last. He could not deny that the law
of the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure,
especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man; the
perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the perpetual
revolt of society against the law it had established; the
perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual
appeal to force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a
higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the
perpetual victory of the principles of freedom, and their
perpetual conversion into principles of power; but the staggering
problem was the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial
order which nature abhorred.
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