Part 25 (1/2)

Fifty years ago, science took for granted that the rate of acceleration could not last The world forgets quickly, but even today the habit re statistics on the faith that consuenerations, with John Stuart Mill, talked of this stationary period, which was to follow the explosion of neer All the men ere elderly in the forties died in this faith, and otherthe same conviction, and happy in it; while science, for fifty years, pered, society to think that force would prove to be lih the eighties before showing signs of breaking up; and nothing short of radiu since evident, that force was inexhaustible Even then the scientific authorities vehe so revolutionary had happened since the year 300

Thought had ht and whirled about in the vortex of infinite forces Power leaped froh of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of rasped his wrists and flung hih he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth for the purposes of an elderly and tientleman in Paris, who never drove down the Cha an accident, and cohborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a boood, these bombs would double in force and nuer stood in the way One's life had fattened on impossibilities Before the boy was six years old, he had seen four impossibilities made actual--the ocean-steauerreotype; nor could he ever learn which of the four had most hurried others to corow fro to three hundred million tons or more What was far ed in pursuing force--the truest measure of its attraction--increase from a few scores or hundreds, in 1838, to many thousands in 1905, trained to sharpness never before reached, and ar to new senses of indefinite power and accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places where Nature herself had never known it to be, , and syntheses that endangered the elements No one could say that the social mind now failed to respond to new force, even when the new force annoyed it horribly Every day Nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with enor at roaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single instant could stop The railways alone approached the carnage of war; autoed society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation An immense volume of force had detached itself froy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to be infinite, steadily revealed the mankind with more compulsive course than all the Pontic Seas or Gods or Gold that ever existed, and feeling still less of retiring ebb

In 1850, science would have smiled at such a romance as this, but, in 1900, as far as history could learn, fewmatter If a perplexed but laborious follower could venture to guess their drift, it seemed in their minds a toss-up between anarchy and order Unless they should be more honest with themselves in the future than ever they were in the past, they would be more astonished than their follohen they reached the end If Karl Pearson's notions of the universe were sound, men like Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton should have stopped the progress of science before 1700, supposing theious convictions they expressed In 1900 they were plainly forced back; on faith in a unity unproved and an order they had themselves disproved They had reduced their universe to a series of relations to themselves They had reduced themselves to motion in a universe of inous violence With the correctness of their science, history had no right to meddle, since their science now lay in a plane where scarcely one or two hundred minds in the world could follow its orously, and even wireless telegraphy or airshi+ps y whatever existed between the human mind, on one side, and the laws of motion, on the other, the mind had already entered a field of attraction so violent that it must immediately pass beyond, into new equilibriuether, like meteoroids in the earth's atmosphere If it behaved like an explosive, it etable, it rowth; and even if it acted like the earlier creations of energy--the saurians and sharks--it must have nearly reached the li or quadrupling its complexities every ten years, even e er understand the problem in 1900

Fortunately, a student of history had no responsibility for the probleht

With science or with society, he had no quarrel and claimed no share of authority He had never been able to acquire knowledge, still less to impart it; and if he had, at times, felt serious differences with the American of the nineteenth century, he felt none with the American of the twentieth For this new creation, born since 1900, a historian asked no longer to be teacher or even friend; he asked only to be a pupil, and proh trodden under foot; for he could see that the new American--the child of incalculable coal-power, chey, as well as of new forces yet undetermined--must be a sort of God coress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would kno to control unliinable to an earlier e of earlier society To him the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth--equally childlike--and he would only wonder how both of the so little, and so weak in force, should have done so o back, in 1964, to sit with Gibbon on the steps of Ara Coeli

Meanwhile he was getting education With that, a teacher who had failed to educate even the generation of 1870, dared not interfere

The new forces would educate History sa lessons in the past that would be useful in the future; but one, at least, it did see The attempt of the American of 1800 to educate the American of 1900 had not often been surpassed for folly; and since 1800 the forces and their complications had increased a thousand times or more The attempt of the American of 1900 to educate the Aressnorance During a eneration in turn had toiled with endless agony to attain and apply power, all the while betraying the deepest alarm and horror at the power they created The teacher of 1900, if foolhardy, ht balance, as wise and foolish have often tried to do fro; but the forces would continue to educate, and the mind would continue to react All the teacher could hope was to teach it reaction

Even there his difficulty was extreme The most elementary books of science betrayed the inadequacy of old iht

Chapter after chapter closed with phrases such as one never met in older literature: ”The cause of this phenoer ventures to explain causes”; ”the first step towards a causal explanation still remains to be taken”; ”opinions are very much divided”; ”in spite of the contradictions involved”; ”science gets on only by adopting different theories, sometimes contradictory”

Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions, and instead of Kant's famous four antinomies, the new universe would know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law

To educate--one's self to begin with--had been the effort of one's life for sixty years; and the difficulties of education had gone on doubling with the coal-output, until the prospect of waiting another ten years, in order to face a seventh doubling of cohtly The law of acceleration was definite, and did not require ten years ood No scheested to the new American, and no fault needed to be found, or coreat influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently coercive The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social ht were common salt in indefinite solution it must enter a new phase subject to nes Thus far, since five or ten thousand years, theyet proved that it would fail to react--but it would need to jump

CHAPTER xxxV

NUNC AGE (1905)

NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary landed at New York with the ex-Ministers Ada caravan stretching out towards the plains As he caain, November 5, 1904, an older man than either his father or Motley in 1868, he found the approachhe had ever much cared to see The outline of the city beca that defied rown its servitude and to have asserted its freedoreat ainst the sky The city had the air and , in every accent of anger and alarht under control