History Lesson - Part V

"The historian never stopped repeating to himself that he knew nothing about it; that he was a mere instrument of measure, a barometer, pedometer, radiometer; and that his whole share in the matter was restricted to the measurement of thought-motion as marked by the accepted thinkers. He took their facts for granted.

He knew no more than a firefly about rays—or about race—or sex—or ennui—or a bar of music—or a pang of love—or a grain of musk—or of phosphorus—or conscience—or duty—or the force of Euclidian geometry—or non-Euclidian—or heat—or light—or osmosis—or electrolysis—or the magnet—or ether—or vis inertiae—or gravitation—or cohesion—or elasticity—or surface tension—or capillary attraction—or Brownian motion—or of some scores, or thousands, or millions of chemical attractions, repulsions or indifferences which were busy within and without him; or, in brief, of Force itself, which, he was credibly informed, bore some dozen definitions in the textbooks, mostly contradictory, and all, as he was assured, beyond his intelligence; but summed up in the dictum of the last and highest science, that Motion seems to be Matter and Matter seems to be Motion, yet “we are probably incapable of discovering” what either is.

History had no need to ask what either might be; all it needed to know was the admission of ignorance; the mere fact of multiplicity baffling science. Even as to the fact, science disputed, but radium happened to radiate something that seemed to explode the scientific magazine, bringing thought, for the time, to a standstill; though, in the line of thought-movement in history, radium was merely the next position, familiar and inexplicable since Zeno and his arrow: continuous from the beginning of time, and discontinuous at each successive point.

History set it down on the record — pricked its position on the chart — and waited to be led, or misled, once more."

- Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, pg. 456-7