Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/408

 already twenty years old. As usual, he was struck chiefly by the familiar, crying faults of the English mind, chaotic and fragmentary by essence. He never found out what it could have taught a great master like Wolcott Gibbs, and for practical results he saw no moral except the general English commandment: "Thou shalt experiment!" Yet the book had a historical value out of all proportion to its science. No such stride had any Englishman ever before taken in the lines of English thought. The progress of science was measured by the success of the "Grammar," when, for twenty years past, Stallo had been deliberately ignored, and Wolcott Gibbs himself smothered under the usual conspiracy of silence inevitable to all thought which demands new thought-machinery. Science needs time to reconstruct its instruments, to follow a revolution in space; a certain lag is inevitable; the most active mind cannot instantly swerve from its path; but such revolutions are portentous, and the fall or rise of half-a-dozen empires interested a student of history less than the rise of the "Grammar of Science," the more pressingly because, under the silent influence of Langley, he was prepared to expect it.

For a number of years Langley had published in his Smithsonian Reports the revolutionary papers that foretold the overthrow of nineteenth-century dogma, and among the first was the famous address of Sir William Crookes on psychical research, followed by a series of papers on Roentgen and Curie, which had steadily driven the scientific lawgivers of Unity into the open; but Karl Pearson was the first to pen them up for slaughter in the schools. The phrase is not stronger than that with which the "Grammar of Science" challenged the fight:—"Anything more hopelessly illogical than the statements with regard to Force and Matter current in elementary text-books of science, it is difficult to imagine," opened Mr. Pearson, and the responsible author of the "elementary text-book," as he went on to explain, was Lord Kelvin himself. Pearson shut out of science everything which the nineteenth-centurynineteenth century [sic] had brought into it. He told his scholars that they must put up with a fraction of the universe, and a very small fraction at that,—the circle reached by the senses, where sequence could be taken for granted,—much as the deep-sea fish takes for granted the circle of light at the end of his own nose. "Order and reason, beauty and benevolence,