Henry Adams
Presented on: Thursday, May 30, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic America Our Critical Heritage:
James Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Mark Twain
Presentation 9 of 13
Henry Adams:
National Integrity and Historical Rules of Phase in the American Experiment
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, May 30, 1985
Transcript:
The date is May 30th, 1985. This is a ninth lecture had series of lectures by Roger Weir entitled Our Critical Heritage. Tonight's lecture is entitled Henry Adams Individual Integrity, National Integrity and Historical Rules of Phase in the American Experiment.
Perhaps it's time to grab the microphone by the neck and review just for a few minutes what it is that we're doing that is driving so many people away. You know Bertrand Russell, among many observations in his 97 years, remarked men fear thought like the plague. Or thought is a wild card, and no one knows where it's going next. And we may eclipse ourselves.
We have been sketching, just like honorable Andre Matisse used to sketch, without raising the brush from the paper. Single movements. Single strokes. Sinuous lines. For we wish to delineate human character. We wish to present a portrait of the possibilities of ourselves. There is no way to sketch an accurate portrait of humanity by doing it collectively. We have to do it individually. This is what makes it so difficult.
So, we have been taking persons and not ideas. Personages and not eras. And our concern ever and always for almost five years now has been to move from person to person leaving aside any of the ideational constructs, which we are all capable of offering, energizing, understanding, manipulating. We're all capable of this. And the libraries are full of these manipulations. But what is not there, what has not been there since Plutarch is a review of our capacities person by person. And Plutarch was the last to understand the mysteries that somehow in the effectiveness of the augury of our future, we must communicate the message to someone. To ourselves. The understanding, no matter how subtle or complex, must be delivered to us personally for it to be effective. Even bad news must be delivered, or it is no news at all. This was the ancient tradition of augury. That aside from the correct observation and correct interpretation, it must be delivered. Otherwise the augury is ineffective. It never happened. There must be some way to bring the portraiture possibility of ourselves home to us individually.
The only effective procedure, finally, as one sorts through the 17 or 18 centuries since Plutarch. The only effective means is to understand a character, the broad spread of character. And in fact, when we phrase it this way, others begin to emerge. Other humans like ourselves, who wished to understand man in a portraiture mode. In Shakespeares 39 plays we find not one single footnote. Not one single emendation by the author. He carved no graffiti in the text. He presented only character. Many of them. And so, like Plutarch and Shakespeare, that's pretty good company, we have been moving by a person by person. And only limiting ourselves by the range of what we could do in a single stroke. A single thought movement. A conception. But moving, not ideation leap by a structure from the mind, but moving person by person.
And so, each of these courses, these quarters, these seminars, have in fact had did unity that could be designated from the outside. We are currently dealing with something which is entitled, Our critical heritage, Cooper, Lincoln, Adams, and Twain. But if we look closer and we read through. Or those who have been experiencing this through. This is all of a piece. It all fits together in one motion. One person by person thought. And so, to all of the other quarters have been of this quality, of this kind. And we took four years to set the stage by going through the European experience from Homer to Wittgenstein. And we found that without forcing the issue we moved from the articulation of Homer without any emphasis on philosophy, without any emphasis on ideational second guessing, we moved from Homer and his articulate mobility of the human person to Wittgensteins silence.
And we understood after four years that European civilization through its many permutations as represented by the persons who had to live their lives in the various areas, reached in the early 1950s a dead end. An absolute dead end.
Against this tragic mode and the European person, European mind, is a tragic mode. Against this is a different character, the American. Who is not subject to the European mind. Not subject to the European mode. Is not a tragic character. And we speak of both North and South America. The Americans are different. And we have been taking person by person, the Americans now and have moved into almost the halfway point. And we have seen that the disjointedness that has occurred has produced by Henry Adams lifetime, a schism within its own self. That the American character had after Jefferson reverted back to the European mode. Had tried to but with American experience and had produced in fact, by Henry Adams time that mode of approach to life, which can only be characterized as pessimism.
And we will see with Mark Twain that in fact, Twain's great comic outlook is also basically pessimistic. Twain and Adams are both contemporaries. But where Twain would die laughing, Adams would die in silence. But not quite completely silent. And we have to understand him here in this last series, by going to his last major works.
As a prelude I would like to shift over to Adam's letters for just a little while and start in 1891. A letter to a friend of his, a family friend, Elizabeth Cameron. And Adams had been traveling. Usually his traveling companion was John Lafarge, the painter. And in this case, he was with him. And they had spent a long time in Japan and grown weary of things Japanese and had moved on to Ceylon. Sri Lanka was still Ceylon. And they had in fact gone inland on a quest, not quite daring to voice to themselves what their quest really was about. But they found themselves in 1891, 13th of September, at the old Capitol city of Buddhism, Anuradhapura. And Anuradhapura was completely in ruins still at that time. It had been rediscovered by the British, uh, op on the desert plateau in the middle of the Island of Ceylon. And the structures had been in ruins for almost a thousand years. They were completely overgrown much like Angkor Wat. And jackals and monkeys had for a thousand years taken over this capital city. It was a capital city, not in a political mode, but in the religious mode. It was a capital in the sense that Chartres was a capital. It was a religious ceremonial center where human aspiration had come to some apex. And Adams had gone there, secretly to himself, and finally reveals in this letter that he had gone there to seek Nirvana. Hed gone there to see for himself, what has the Buddha to offer me? And in this formulation, we must be careful of our pronouns.
He writes,
The oxcart was funny, but not bad. If one must pass nights in these hot regions. We have come about 80 miles from Kandy and have past portions of two days inspecting this very sacred city. Which is very much out of the world in a burned jungle with perfect roads and excellent government in or rest house. The poorer nature of village, much fever stricken. In fec
infested by jackals. With no whites except government officials in the whole district.
And he says that there are dumped here half a dozen huge domes of solid brick. They were stupas about 100-250 feet high. There eventually were six of them arranged in ceremonial pattern. The city was built as we will see about 300 B.C. by the son. It was developed eventually as a ceremonial center by the son of King Ashoka. Mahinda was his name.
Dumped on this plain are half a dozen huge domes of solid brick overgrown with grass and shrubs. Artificial mounds that have lost their architectural decorations and their plaster covering, but still rise one or 200 feet above the trees and to have a certain grandeur. Each of these dagobas represents an old temple, which had buildings about it. Stone bathing tanks, stone statues of Buddha, chapels, paved platforms decorated with carved or brick elephant heads, humped oxens, lions and horses.
Incidentally, as Adams is writing here, it's not colloquial at all. Adam is deadly serious about his task. He has all of the trained mind that 150 years of Adam's background can give him. And when he mentions these four animals they appear on the cycle of life. In the great Mandala structures of Buddhism there are no Zodiacs or anything like this, but there were the four types. The elephant and then the horse. The lion and then the bull. And these are repeated over and over again. Usually on the perimeter of a circular stone. And these circular stones usually were set down where one would walk, especially they were put at a strategic junctures at the bottom of, of steps as one ceases to descend and starts to go out on the plain. Wherever these archetypal junctures would be, they would be what Europeans used to call moonstones. These carved like Aztec calendar stones. And on the rim are these for animal types, the elephant, the horse, the line, the bull. And so, he's being very specific here.
He writes,
When Buddha flourished here 2000 years ago vast numbers of pilgrims came to worship the relics supposed to be hidden under the dagobas. But still more to pray at the sacred Bo tree, which is the original shoot brought here more than 2000 years ago from the original bo tree under which Buddha attained Nirvana. This then was Anuradhapura, the bo tree, six dagobas with relics, one or two temples more or less from Brahminic. That is rather for Shiva or Vishnu than for Buddha.
The reason for the Shiva and the Vishnu are cultural. Vishnu as the sacred protector of the threshold of divinity. And Shiva is the energized capacity that allows the penetration of that protection. So that these two quote Brahminic auxiliaries to the six to dagobas made it an eight-fold structure that took in the not only the religious vision of Teradata Buddhism, but also the two adjuncts that were necessary to complete the relation to the cultural surroundings at the time. It was a very sophisticated layout.
As long as Buddhism flourished Anuradhapura flourished. And the Kings went on building tanks, both bathing and for irrigation. Some of the irrigation tanks being immense lakes with many miles of embankments. When Buddhism declined the place went gradually to pieces and nothing but what was almost indestructible remains.
And then he looks around and writing to his friend, Elizabeth Cameron. He says,
I have hunted for something to admire. But except the bigness, I am left cold. Not a piece of work big or small have I seen that has a heart to it. The place was a big bizarre of religion made for show and prophet. Any countrys shrine has more feeling in it than this whole city seems to have shown. I am rather glad the jackals and monkeys own it for they at least are not religious formalists. And they give a moral and emotion to the empty doorways and broken thresholds. Of course, we went in at once to the sacred bo tree, which is now only a sickly shoot or two from the original trunk. And under it I sat for half an hour hoping to attain Nirvana. I left the bo tree without attaining Buddhaship. Toward evening we got an oxcart, a real cart with two wheels and two slow meditative humped oxen, which are also sacred cattle and who have the most Buddhist stick expression in their humps and horns that was ever reached by God's creatures. The cart was hooped over with that. And we put two chairs inside and were driven slowly by a naked Tamar as that we were priests or even Hindu deities back.
This is Henry Adams 1891. 53 years old. Unable to find any culmination. It wasn't there.
And as we go through his letters to various individuals, we find that ads through the 1890s goes everywhere and finds nothing there. He goes to Mycenae and he sees that as just a poor charade of a place. Nothing there for him. He goes to Paris. In fact, he would set up his summer home in Paris every year until 1914. It didn't appeal to him. He went everywhere and everywhere he went he devalued the tradition, the place. Because his critical abilities had integrated themselves on his ego. And his critical abilities integrated on his ego were educated enough, sharp enough, cutting enough, so that he was like a razor that wherever he went, he cut through. He had become a modern man. He'd become personalized in the tragic European mode, existential to the point of alienation. Capable of dis-attaching himself from whatever context he found himself in.
This had a recursive effect on Henry Adams because, precisely because, he was not a European, he wasn't an American. And developed around 1900 what he called self-consciousness. He even criticizes finally, in letters to John Hay. His old friend. Lincoln's personal secretary. He says, what is wrong with Jefferson and my family and all the rest of them is that they were not self-conscious. They were naive. They believe that they could do something. They could believe that they could create structures, new structures, to live in. That man when he is self-conscious has no place to call home. There is no place that is satisfactory for him. Because Adams had realized that his critical accumen had outstripped his ability to be at home. He destroyed whatever context he found himself in. And in this Adams is a precursor of the dilemma that 20th century man towards the end now finds himself in. That he is able to disestablish himself from any context whatsoever and be never at home.
He writes to his friend, Elizabeth Cameron in 1899, The 12th century has been active this week. I went to Chartres last Tuesday and passed a long day studying it out, so as to squirt with the books. I passed Wednesday and running out to Chantilly and driving about three or four miles to a beautiful church high on a terrace. And so on.
For Adams the only place that he could find home in was the past. But not the past of anything recent, but the 13th century. It became to him the last place that he could call home. That a man like himself could call home. Because for him the 13th century, early in the 13th century was the building of Chartres, man in his ego structure was in equilibrium with the religious context that supported that ego structure. There was no inflation on either part and they were in equilibrium. And it was this equilibrium that Adams came to prize.
And in fact, to see increasingly that there was a scientific observation that made a great deal of difference to his insight. And that scientific observation was the second law of thermal dynamics. That a structure will seek to reestablish the lost equilibrium by a dispersal of energy. And that the equilibrium newly achieved is at a lower level than the one previously had. This came to be a monumental insight for Henry Adams. And in fact, he began to toy with the idea that recent time showed that some new vast equilibrium was being attempted to be achieved. But that events in fact had been accelerating in history. So that what had taken centuries before to reach a new equilibrium now the equilibriums were being unbalanced aster and faster. And that this produced a very peculiar sense of history.
In a letter November 1903 to Henry James. Henry and William James were lifelong friends of Henry Adams. He writes,
The painful truth is that all my new England generation counting the half century 1820 to 1870 were an actual fact only one mind and nature. The individual was a facet of Boston. We knew each other to the last nervous center and feared each other's knowledge. We looked through each other like microscopes. There was absolutely nothing in us that we did not understand merely by looking in the eye. There was hardly a difference even in depth. For Harvard college in Unitarianism kept us all shallow. We knew nothing. No, but really nothing of the world. One cannot exaggerate the profundity of ignorance. Either in the character and your novel, William, Whitmores story of becoming a sculptor. Or in my father's friend Sumner in becoming a statesman. Or Emerson and becoming a philosopher. Story and Sumner, Emerson and Alcott, Lowell and Longfellow, Motley Prescott, all the rest were of the same mind. And so poor worm am I.
He had discovered that he his own individuality, his ego structure, did not even belong to himself but belong to a type. That he was of the same piece with all the other individuals that he and Henry James knew. And James story reminded him of how poignantly familiar everything was that all of them saw the world in the same way. And that there was no one alive now who saw the world in that way. That conditions had in fact speeded up.
He writes to William James 1908.
It was the old story of an American drama. You can't get your contrasts and backgrounds. So fully do I agree with you and having no use for time that I expect soon to dispense with it all together and try the experiment of timeless space. But I'm curious to know when our psychic friends think of it. Are they bored in space as much as I am in time? Sir Oliver Lodge is less clear on that point than I could wish.
Adams is beginning to carry his egotistical lawnmower, not only to cut the grass of the situations around him, but to go off into the wilderness and start cutting the wildflowers. To denude the very natural basis that permitted his mind to operate.
He writes in 1909 to Theodore Roosevelt, who was just ending his life as presidency. He says,
So, we were talking last night. And if you were talking as president, I have nothing to say. Whatever the president says goes. The authorities used to say that parliament had the power to do everything except make a man of a woman. Someday we will put that into the constitution as an executive power, not requiring confirmation by the Senate. In regard to most of us elderly people I admit that there is little or no difference between an old woman and an old man, even when Senator. But after March 4th you should allude to my bronze figure, the Adams Memorial, will you try to do the justice to the remark that his figure was beyond sex. The figure is sexless. And such is life. And when you are 1 trillion, 235 billion years old like me, you will repent too.
He was beginning to bring himself to a very peculiar situation. He was beginning to apply in his own mind a very curious set of conditions. And to begin to measure himself in a way which had not been done since Plotinus. He began to write that there were evidently phases in the material universe. And that in this progress there seem to be seven stages. The first phase was with solids. Second phase with fluids. The third with vapors or gases. The fourth with electricity. The fifth with the ether. And the sixth with space. And he writes here,
Space only as a concept of extension. A thought. A mathematical field of speculation. And yet almost the only concrete certainty of man's consciousness. Space can be conceived as a phase of potential strains or disturbances of equilibrium. But whether studied the static substance or substance of motion, it must be endowed with an infinite possibility of stain. It must hold infinite tension. That which is infinitely formless must produce form. That which is only intelligible as a thought, must have a power of self-induction or disturbance that can generate motion. Leading to the last phase. The seventh phase. Finally, the last phase conceivable is that which lies beyond motion altogether. As hyperspace known only as hyper thought or pure mathematics. Which whether a subjective idea or an objective theme is the only phase that man can certainly know and about what he can be sure. Whether he can know it from more than one side or otherwise than his own self-consciousness. Or whether he can ever reach higher phases by developing higher powers is a pa
a matter for mathematicians to decide. But even after reducing it to pure negation, it must still possess in the abstractions of the ultimate and infinite equilibrium, the capacity for self-disturbance. It cannot be absolutely dead.
And then he enters into a transposition of these rules of phase. And says the first individual to understand that history moves in phrases was the French enlightenment philosopher Turgot. In fact, he alludes to Franklin and Turgot as being in 1750 in a very advantageous position. Their minds were still clear. They were still not inundated by this egotistical self-consciousness, which becomes a deception, a distorting deception. And that, for instance, as Franklin understood electricity in its primal sense, its primal nature, Turgot understood history in its primal sense. And that this wedding of historical phases with the phase structure of reality lent him the idea to apply the rule of phase to history. And he finds here in the transposition,
History so far is it recounts progress deals only with such induction or direction. And therefore, in history only the attractive or inductive mass as thought helps to construct. Thought is the only constructor in the universe and moves by an attractive force, which is analogous to what pressure is in physics. Thus, attraction is equivalent to pressure and takes its place when the rule of phase is applied to history. In physics, the second important variable is temperature always a certain temperature must coincide with a certain pressure before the critical point of change in phase can be reached. In history and possibly wherever the movement is one of translation in a medium, the temperature is a result of acceleration or its equivalent.
So, acceleration takes the place of temperature. So then in history now, the attraction generated by thought and the acceleration of events combined to produce with one other factor the real mechanics as it were, of man's reality. The third important variable in the physio chemical phase is volume. And it reappears in the historical phase unchanged.
Under the rule of phase therefore a man's thought considered as a single substance passing through a series of historical phases is assumed to follow the analogy of water. And to pass from one phase to another through a series of critical points, which are determined by the three factors of attraction, acceleration, and volume for each change of equilibrium.
And he goes on then to locate in terms of historical experience, the changes from various phases and locates that the final phase, the movement from space to this seventh level, this hyperspace level, would be reached in 1917. And he says this rule of phase applied to history to just too few friends and published it in 1909. And as far as he was concerned this acquitted him of any responsibility toward his fellow man. Except that the moral issue of having understood something profound bothered him.
And the next year in 1910 Adams sent a long letter, 123-page letter to teachers, American teachers of history. And he felt that this was a necessary. And in his letter to teachers, American teachers of history, we have to be specific about that. Not teachers of American history, but American teachers of history. He tells them that there was a major change in human nature coming about. And that they have the responsibility in this country as teachers of history to prepare a generation for a new world because the old world, the European world, is going to come to a halt. He uses the term halt. By virtue of its transcending, its own basis of operation. Not from catastrophe. He predicts the Wars. He sees the inevitable, but it's not the Wars that he's concerned with. It is the transcendental capacity of the human mind that finally frees itself from its own working basis. So that there is no longer any connection. No purposiveness left in the process. And that somehow Americans as a civilization are immune to this termination, to this halt. And so, he writes,
Unless the questions which this letter raises or suggests to you seem personal as to need action. You have probably no other personal interest than that of avoiding the discussion altogether. Few of us are required to look 10 or 20 years or a whole generation ahead in order to realize what will then be the relation of history to physics or physiology. And even if we make the attempt, we are met at the outset by the difficulty of allowing for our personal error, which is in so delicate a calculation an element of the first importance.
Now here's a very profound insight on Henry Adams part. Commonly our personal error takes the form of inertia and is more or less constant and calculable. The ego in its mental structure when it enters into the process of reality, history making if you wish, largely comes in as an inertia and is constant as a value and as calculable. So that one could take the equations physics and apply them to history, but one has to take in the fact that inertia in physics is the personal element of human beings in this process. And that this is constant all the way through.
This is the preface to his letter, which is in two parts. One the problem and then the solution. And in the problem, he locates
The mechanical theory of the universe governed physical science for 300 years directly succeeding the theological scheme of a universe existing as a unity by the will of an infinite and eternal creator. It affirmed or assumed the unity and indestructibility of force or energy as a scientific dogma or law, which was called the law of the conservation of energy.
This is development and we'll take a break in a moment. This is development was seen by Adams as initiating
END OF SIDE ONE
a new critical phase. That is the phase moved out of an architecturally expressive reality of solids, fluids, vapors into one of electricity, one of, of energy. And that it was this phase that happened when the birth of science came about. And in fact, that this phase, quickly in terms of the development before, generated from its own inception the next phase, the ether phase. Which generated a tremendous metaphysic for man. And that this metaphysic generated in recent time, they sixth phase or pure space, this pure self-consciousness. And that that was where man in 1908, 1909 was rushing and increased acceleration. That was almost asymptotic by that time in his calculations toward this dead end, this halt, this transcendent point.
Well, let's take a break for a few minutes. Then we'll come back and I'll try and lighten this up a little bit by some of his letters.
Atmosphere you know.
You want atmosphere? Sure.
I have many roads of office. It's the first 10,000 lines that are the hardest. After that, they're easy. I guess we'll start off again, Bill.
We have to understand the context here. The last half of the 19th century intellectually was dominated by Darwin. Dominated by the idea of evolution. Survival of the fittest. Adams is talking about something more profound, which is contrary to this. Now he uses the term degradation. This book was collected by his brother Brooks Adams in 1919, The Degradation of the Dogmatic of the Democratic Dogma. He doesn't mean degradation in the sense of evil. He means degradation in the sense of entropy.
**inaudible comment/question from the room**
Entropy is a physics term. It means that the universe runs down. That the energy becomes dispersed and tends, according to the laws of thermodynamics to finally be completely dispersed in an ultimate equilibrium. Now it's interesting, at the first law of thermal dynamics, which was just at this time becoming conscious as an energized viewpoint. Just in the late 19th century, 1880s. A hundred years ago. The reason why it was becoming identified was that generations of pain, painstaking observation had laid an empirical basis for a revolution in thought that was generated largely by James Clerk Maxwell, who formulated a complete view of electromagnetism. And two huge volumes that are still in print, Dover paperbacks. And it is Maxwell's work, which takes from Faraday and his experiments and Franklin and his experiments and a dozen others. Along with a mathematical of vocabulary, which had been painstakingly developed logically during the 19th century and put together a new view of the universe.
Adams is extremely sensitive to this. It was intelligible to him. But also feeding into Adams, which we haven't gotten to yet, is the tremendous development of psychological insight centering around the personage of William James. And we will get to James in the next series because William James is extremely formative. Without understanding William James, the 20th century is not comprehensive. He is that important. And at the same time as Henry Adams is writing the rule of phase applied to history, William James is delivering a series of lectures, which will be published as The Pluralistic Universe. And all of this is happening about the time that Einstein is doing his relativity work.
Adams is a mystical genius. We have to understand that he's not talking metaphysics, but he's talking as a mystic would talk, as a profound mystic. He understands that the phases are blocks. They're stages. And that what passes through these phases, these blocks, is not subject to the laws of those blocks, of those phases. There's a wind that blows through history called consciousness. Called thought. And it does not take any of its characteristics from any of the stages through which it manifests itself. This is mystical.
He writes, Geologically it can be followed back perhaps a hundred million years. But however long the time the origin of consciousness is lost in the rocks before we reach more than a fraction of its career. This is a powerful state. A hundred years later, Tyra Chardon would be sent to the Gobi desert for saying something similar. He would say the rocks are not dead, they're pre-life. They are integral structure of consciousness.
Now what is so really tremendously formative here for Adams, and he didn't want to publish this. This was sent out and private, a little correspondence. It was not for the public. He wrote to William James he said, there are not a hundred people who wouldve understand what I'm talking about today. But he says, I'm talking about it because in the future in 50 years, everyone will have to know this because it will be a crisis of consciousness, which will be upon them. And knowing man and knowing society they will be naive and ill prepared. And they will not even know what is happening to them. That the destructions, the destructive complexities of the ego and its socio-cultural wrappings will have so bamboozled the human race by that time that they won't even consider that there are solutions. That its all intelligible. That it has structure. It can be computed. Add that the moving dominant element in this is consciousness, which is not the same to say he has the mind. But the movement in its expressive structural form is mental. It is thought.
He writes then,
In this long, and for our purposes, infinite stretch of time, the substance called thought has like the substance called water or gas passed through a variety of phases or changes. Or States of equilibrium with which we are all more or less now familiar. We live in a world of phases so much more astonishing than the explosion of rockets that we cannot, unless we are Gibbs or Watts, stop every moment to ask what becomes of the salt we put in our soup. Or the water we boil on our teapot. And we are apt to remain stupidly stolid when a bulb burst into a **inaudible word**. Or a worm turns into a butterfly. No phase compares in wonder with the mere fact of our own existence. And this wonder has so completely exhausted the powers of thought that mankind, except in a few laboratories, has ceased to wonder or even think about it. The Egyptians had infinite reason to bow down before a beetle. We have as much reason as they for we know no more about it. But we have learned to accept our beetle phase and to recognize that everything animate or inanimate, spiritual or material, exists in phase. That it all is equilibrium more or less unstable. And that our whole vision is limited to the bare possibility of calculating in mathematical form the degree of a given in stability. It's the instability of the physical world that provides men with the key to the structural mobility of the career of thought. And it is only by tracing yet in its complete cycle that we become aware that consciousness is something different. It's not limited by that at all. Yes, it expresses itself in those ways. No, it is not that. **inaudible word or two**. Thus, results the plain assurance that the future of thought and therefore of history lies in the hands of the physicists. And that the future historian must seek his education in the world of mathematical physics. Nothing can be expected from further study on the old lines.
Why is that? Why is that so? Because the old lines, those old phases, matured in 1917. And produced a, a crop, the cream of those who are able to transcend even the space consciousness. And now there's a new world. And that starts off all over again and the threshold of that world is the, the mathematical mind in physics. It's the beginning. And back to understanding the solid universe. Were back to the first phase.
If we carry over our ignorance from before, if we regress, if we refuse to mature, we are not going to be at home. If we insist upon it the only thing that grows is the inflation of the ego. The arrogance of the ignorant self. And this, he says, is why the teachers of history must be fore warned and become conscious. He says, in here,
A new generation must be brought up to think by new methods. And if our historical department in the universities cannot enter this next phase, the physical department will have to assume the task alone. The scientists are going to have to become the teachers of the mysteries. Meanwhile, though quite without the necessary education the historical inquirer or experimenter may be permitted to guess for a moment, really for the amusement of guessing, what may perhaps turn out to be a possible term of the problem as the physicist will take it up. He may assume as his starting point that thought is a historical substance analogous to an electric current. Which has obeyed the laws, whatever they are of phase. The hypothesis is not extravagant. As a fact, we know only too well that our historical thought has obeyed and still obeys some law of inertia since it has habitually and absently resisted deflection by new forces or motives. We know even that it acts as though it felt friction from resistance, since it is constantly stopped by all sorts of obstacles. We can apply to it letter for letter one of the capital laws of physical chemistry. That where an equilibrium is subjected to conditions which tend to change it reacts internally in ways that tend to resist the external constraint and to preserve its established balance. Often it is visibly set in motion by sympathetic forces, which act upon it as a magnet acts on soft iron, by induction. The commonest school history takes for granted that it has shown periods of unquestioned acceleration. If society then has in so many ways, obeyed the ordinary laws of attraction and inertia, nothing can be more natural than to inquire whether it obeys them in all respects. And whether the rules that have been applied to fluids and gases in general, also apply to society as a current of thought. Such as speculative inquiry is the source of almost all that is known of magnetism, electricity and either and all other possible immaterial substances. But in history the inquiry has the vast advantage that a law of phase has been long established for the stages of human thought.
And he goes into this develops by diagram again and again, in various ways and comes up with the date of 1917. And that the acceleration of thought has produced this last stage. And he ends and he signs this January 1st, 1909, Washington DC.
In any case, the theory will have to assume that the mind has always figured its motives as reflections of itself. And that this is as true in its conception of electricity as in its instinctive imitation of a God. Always in everywhere the mind creates its own universe and pursues its own Phantoms. But the force behind the image is always a reality. The attractions occult power, if values can be given to these attractions, a physical theory of history is a mere matter of physical formula. And no more complicated than the formulas of Willard Gibbs or Clerk Maxwell.
Willard Gibbs was the first one in physics to be able to quantify mathematically the concept of a free energy. In fact, it's called Gibbs free energy and usually in mathematical equations it's given a designation G. G not for gravity but for the Gibbs free energy. When you're dealing with thermal dynamics you have to always include it in your calculations.
But the task of framing the formula and assigning the values belongs to the physicist, not to the historian. And if one such arrangement fails to accord with the facts, it is for him to try another. To assign new values to his variables and to verify the results. The variables themselves can hardly suffer much change.
And notice now that the key for the conception to apply an intelligible language like calculus to this phenomenon. The key to it resides in understanding the variables and taking them into account. As long as the equation is complete and all the variables have been taken into account, then we have the possibility for intelligibility. This is why William James will insist at the end of his life, that we must have a pluralistic universe in order to understand that unity as a reality does not exist in the material universe. That the focus is beyond. Is outside. This is the only way to understand this. To make an intelligible. If the focus is anywhere on a material plain or on a mental plain, the equation will not work. The intelligibility will not be there. But the desire the will, the amperage, to make it be there operates just the same. And that's what inflates the ego. And makes this cosmic arrogance of man worse and worse and worse. He is not the focus.
So, he writes,
If the physicist historian is satisfied with neither, the no laws of mass astronomical or electric, and cannot arrange his variables in any combination that will conform with the phase sequence. No resource seems to remain but that of waiting until his physical problems shall be solved. And he shall be able to explain what force is. And yet he knows almost as little of material as of immaterial substance. He is as perplexed before the phenomenon of heat, light, magnetism, electricity, gravity pressure, the whole schedule of names use to indicate unknown elements as before the common infinitely familiar fluctuations of his own thought. Whose action is so astounding on the direction of his energies. Probably the solution of any one of the problems will give the solution for them all.
So, Adam's concluded this and sent this letter out. His work fell on deaf ears then. It still falls on deaf ears today. It seemed again comprehensive. But what is amazing in the story is the way in which in just four generations, one moves from John Adams to Henry Adams in the development of that line of thought, that consciousness. He makes a point in here that no family known to him has devoted more integrity and continuous service to the doctrine of democracy. And that democracy is ignorantly unknowing of the physical laws of reality. And that has fallen prey to this kind of inflated egotism. That has run rampant and has refused to be real. And that instead of having a new kind of a man, a new kind of a civilization, we have only regression. We have only the egotistical regression.
His brother Brooks Adams had published in 1896. The book called The Law of Civilization in Decay. Individuals at this time in this circle were publishing incredible insights all around the same issue. If you read Henry James, The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove are extraordinarily apt to this. Or if you can't read long novels anymore, The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, an extremely fine 30-page story. All of it is about seeing in the pattern of this world. The infinite possibilities of remaining here if we do not transform. And that to transform means to re-establish ourselves in some other equilibrium, some other phase.
Well, this was also the time of, the great heyday of Mark Twain. And we'll go next week and spend a little time or Twain. And it will be interesting because we start from a completely different place. Instead of starting from Beacon Hill in Boston, we start from Hannibal, Missouri on the Mississippi River. And it will seem almost impossible to us to arrive at the same point. Could Mark Twain have thought in these terms? Oh, brother, wait to see.
And well spend a month on Twain now.
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