The Education of Henry Adams

Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150 1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The movement might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task, he began a volume which he mentally knew as 'Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: a Study of Thirteenth Century Unity. ' From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: 'The Education of Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth Century Multiplicity. ' With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should know better. " The "Chartres" was finished and privately printed in 1904. The "Education" proved to be more difficult. The point on which the author failed to please himself, and could get no light from readers or friends, was the usual one of literary form. Probably he saw it in advance, for he used to say, half in jest, that his great ambition was to complete St. Augustine's "Confessions," but that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to multiplicity. The scheme became unmanageable as he approached his end. Probably he was, in fact, trying only to work into it his favorite theory of history, which now fills the last three or four chapters of the "Education," and he could not satisfy himself with his workmanship.