Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/388

 why, knowing nothing of Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday's trick of seeing lines of force all about him, where he had always seen lines of will. Perhaps the effect of knowing no mathematics is to leave the mind to imagine figures,—images,—phantoms; one's mind is a watery mirror at best; but, once conceived, the image became rapidly simple, and the lines of force presented themselves as lines of attraction. Repulsions counted only as battle of attractions. By this path, the mind stepped into the mechanical theory of the universe before knowing it, and entered a distinct new phase of education.

This was the work of the dynamo and the Virgin of Chartres. Like his masters, since thought began, he was handicapped by the eternal mystery of Force,—the sink of all science. For thousands of years in history, he found that Force had been felt as occult attraction,—love of God and lust for power in a future life. After 1500, when this attraction began to decline, philosophers fell back on some vis a tergo,—instinct of danger from behind, like Darwin's survival of the fittest;—and one of the greatest minds, between Descartes and Newton,—Pascal,—saw the master-motor of man in ennui, which was also scientific:—"I have often said that all the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still." Mere restlessness forces action. "So passes the whole of life. We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable; for we think either of the troubles we have, or of those that threaten us; and even if we felt safe on every side, ennui would of its own accord spring up from the depths of the heart where it is rooted by nature, and would fill the mind with its venom."

Ennui, like Natural Selection, accounted for change but failed to account for direction of change. For that, an attractive force was absolutely essential; a force from outside; a shaping influence. Pascal and all the old philosophies called this outside force God or Gods. Caring but little for the name, and fixed only on tracing the Force, Adams had gone straight to the Virgin at Chartres, and asked her