Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/430

 an affair of other science than history, and matters nothing to dynamics. The individual or the race has been educated on the same lines of illusion, which, according to Arthur Balfour, had not varied down to the year 1900.

To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine, and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a word which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force whether in detail or mass. Unable to define Force as a unity, man symbolised it and pursued it, both in himself, and in the infinite, as philosophy and theology, creating a science which had the singular value of lifting his education, at the start, to the highest, finest, subtlest and broadest training both in analysis and synthesis, so that, if language is a test, he must have reached his highest powers early in his history; while the mere motive remained as simple an appetite for power as the tribal greed which led him to trap an elephant. Hunger, whether for food or for the infinite, sets in motion multiplicity and infinity of thought, and the certainty of gaining a share of infinite power in eternal life, would lift most minds to effort.

He had reached this completeness five thousand years ago, and added nothing to his stock of known forces for a very long time. The mass of nature exercised on him so feeble an attraction that one can scarcely account for his apparent motion. Only a historian of very exceptional knowledge would venture to say at what date between 3000 B. C. and 1000 A. D., the mass and momentum of Europe were greatest; but such progress as was made consisted in economies rather than in development of energy; it was proved in mathematics, measured by names like Archimedes, Aristarchus, Ptolemy and Euclid; or in Civil Law, measured by a number of names which Adams had begun life by failing to learn; or in coinage, which was most beautiful near its beginning, and most barbarous at its close; or it was shown in roads, or the size of ships, or harbors; or by the use of metals, instruments and writing;—all of them economies of force, sometimes more forceful than the forces they helped; but the roads were still travelled by the horse, the ass, the camel or the slave; the ships were still propelled by sails or oars; the lever, the spring and the screw bounded the region of applied mechanics. Even the metals were old.

Much the same thing could be said of religious or supernatural