As long as he could whisper, he
would go on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to meet his creator
with the admission that the creation had taught him nothing
except that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled
triangle might for convenience be taken as equal to something
else. Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if
only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself
somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if
the standard formulas failed. There, whether finished or not,
education stopped. The formula, once made, could be but verified.
The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old
formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after
all, the object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no
absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the
thread of history without breaking it. Among indefinite possible
orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the
observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly
called Henry Adams. As term of a nineteenth-century education,
one sought a common factor for certain definite historical
fractions. Any schoolboy could work out the problem if he were
given the right to state it in his own terms.
Therefore, when the fogs and frosts stopped his slaughter of
the centuries, and shut him up again in his garret, he sat down
as though he were again a boy at school to shape after his own
needs the values of a Dynamic Theory of History.
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