For this theory, Adams felt
himself in no way responsible. Even as historian he had made it
his duty always to speak with respect of everything that had ever
been thought respectable -- except an occasional statesman; but
he had submitted to force all his life, and he meant to accept it
for the future as for the past. All his efforts had been turned
only to the search for its channel. He never invented his facts;
they were furnished him by the only authorities he could find. As
for himself, according to Helmholz, Ernst Mach, and Arthur
Balfour, he was henceforth to be a conscious ball of vibrating
motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of
rotation or vibration, rolling at the feet of the Virgin at
Chartres or of M. Poincare in an attic at Paris, a centre of
supersensual chaos. The discovery did not distress him. A
solitary man of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic
cathedral or a Paris apartment, need fret himself little about a
few illusions more or less. He should have learned his lesson
fifty years earlier; the times had long passed when a student
could stop before chaos or order; he had no choice but to march
with his world.
Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered
by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human
mind has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the
chaos which caged it; how -- appearing suddenly and inexplicably
out of some unknown and unimaginable void; passing half its known
life in the mental chaos of sleep; victim even when awake, to its
own ill-adjustment, to disease, to age, to external suggestion,
to nature's compulsion; doubting its sensations, and, in the last
resort, trusting only to instruments and averages -- after sixty
or seventy years of growing astonishment, the mind wakes to find
itself looking blankly into the void of death.
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