University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXXI
THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)

OF all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante,
this new exploration along the shores of Multiplicity and
Complexity promised to be the longest, though as yet it
had barely touched two familiar regions—race and sex. Even
within these narrow seas the navigator lost his bearings and followed
the winds as they blew. By chance it happened that
Raphael Pumpelly helped the winds; for, being in Washington on
his way to Central Asia he fell to talking with Adams about these
matters, and said that Willard Gibbs thought he got most help
from a book called the "Grammar of Science," by Karl Pearson.
To Adams's vision, Willard Gibbs stood on the same plane with
the three or four greatest minds of his century, and the idea that a
man so incomparably superior should find help anywhere filled
him with wonder. He sent for the volume and read it. From the
time he sailed for Europe and reached his den on the Avenue du
Bois until he took his return steamer at Cherbourg on December 26,
he did little but try to find out what Karl Pearson could have
taught Willard Gibbs.

Here came in, more than ever, the fatal handicap of ignorance
in mathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed, as the
right to judge the product of the tool. Ignorant as one was of the
finer values of French or German, and often deceived by the intricacies
of thought hidden in the muddiness of the medium, one could
sometimes catch a tendency to intelligible meaning even in Kant
or Hegel; but one had not the right to a suspicion of error where
the tool of thought was algebra. Adams could see in such parts of
the "Grammar" as he could understand, little more than an
enlargement of Stallo's book already twenty years old. He never
found out what it could have taught a master like Willard Gibbs.

Yet the book had a historical value out of all proportion to its
science. No such stride had any Englishman 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 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 textbooks of science, it is difficult to imagine," opened
Mr. Pearson, and the responsible author of the "elementary textbook,"
as he went on to explain, was Lord Kelvin himself. Pearson
shut out of science everything which the nineteenth century 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 which he generates. "Order and reason, beauty and
benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find
solely associated with the mind of man." The assertion, as a broad

truth, left one's mind in some doubt of its bearing, for order and
beauty seemed to be associated also in the mind of a crystal, if
one's senses were to be admitted as judge; but the historian had no
interest in the universal truth of Pearson's or Kelvin's or Newton's
laws; he sought only their relative drift or direction, and Pearson
went on to say that these conceptions must stop: "Into the chaos
beyond sense-impressions we cannot scientifically project them."
We cannot even infer them: "In the chaos behind sensations, in
the 'beyond' of sense-impressions, we cannot infer necessity, order
or routine, for these are concepts formed by the mind of man on
this side of sense-impressions"; but we must infer chaos: "Briefly
chaos is all that science can logically assert of the supersensuous."
The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos. In
plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream
of man.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean,
for words are slippery and thought is viscous; but since Bacon
and Newton, English thought had gone on impatiently protesting
that no one must try to know the unknowable at the same time
that every one went on thinking about it. The result was as
chaotic as kinetic gas; but with the thought a historian had nothing
to do. He sought only its direction. For himself he knew, that, in
spite of all the Englishmen that ever lived, he would be forced to
enter supersensual chaos if he meant to find out what became of
British science—or indeed of any other science. From Pythagoras
to Herbert Spencer, every one had done it, although commonly
science had explored an ocean which it preferred to regard as
Unity or a Universe, and called Order. Even Hegel, who taught
that every notion included its own negation, used the negation
only to reach a "larger synthesis," till he reached the universal
which thinks itself, contradiction and all. The Church alone had
constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was
not God, that pantheism was worse than atheism, and that Unity
could not be proved as a contradiction. Karl Pearson seemed to

agree with the Church, but every one else, including Newton,
Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, had sailed gaily into the supersensual,
calling it:—

Suddenly, in 1900, science raised its head and denied.

Yet, perhaps, after all, the change had not been so sudden as it
seemed. Real and actual, it certainly was, and every newspaper
betrayed it, but sequence could scarcely be denied by one who had
watched its steady approach, thinking the change far more interesting
to history than the thought. When he reflected about it,
he recalled that the flow of tide had shown itself at least twenty
years before; that it had become marked as early as 1893; and that
the man of science must have been sleepy indeed who did not jump
from his chair like a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw
on his desk the metaphysical bomb she called radium. There remained
no hole to hide in. Even metaphysics swept back over
science with the green water of the deep-sea ocean and no one could
longer hope to bar out the unknowable, for the unknowable was
known.

The fact was admitted that the uniformitarians of one's youth
had wound about their universe a tangle of contradictions meant
only for temporary support to be merged in "larger synthesis,"
and had waited for the larger synthesis in silence and in vain. They
had refused to hear Stallo. They had betrayed little interest in
Crookes. At last their universe had been wrecked by rays, and
Karl Pearson undertook to cut the wreck loose with an axe, leaving
science adrift on a sensual raft in the midst of a supersensual
chaos. the confusion seemed, to a mere passenger, worse than
that of 1600 when the astronomers upset the world; it resembled
rather the convulsion of 310 when the Civitas Dei cut itself loose
from the' Civitas Romae, and the Cross took the place of the legions;
but the historian accepted it all alike; he knew that his opinion

was worthless; only, in this case, he found himself on the raft,
personally and economically concerned in its drift.

English thought had always been chaos and multiplicity itself,
in which the new step of Karl Pearson marked only a consistent
progress; but German thought had affected system, unity, and
abstract truth, to a point that fretted the most patient foreigner,
and to Germany the voyager in strange seas of thought alone might
resort with confident hope of renewing his youth. Turning his
back on Karl Pearson and England, he plunged into Germany,
and had scarcely crossed the Rhine when he fell into libraries
of new works bearing the names of Ostwald, Ernst Mach, Ernst
Haeckel, and others less familiar, among whom Haeckel was
easiest to approach, not only because of being the oldest and
clearest and steadiest spokesman of nineteenth-century mechanical
convictions, but also because in 1902 he had published a vehement
renewal of his faith. The volume contained only one paragraph
that concerned a historian; it was that in which Haeckel
sank his voice almost to a religious whisper in avowing with
evident effort, that the "proper essence of substance appeared to
him more and more marvellous and enigmatic as he penetrated
further into the knowledge of its attributes—matter and energy
—and as he learned to know their innumerable phenomena and
their evolution." Since Haeckel seemed to have begun the voyage
into multiplicity that Pearson had forbidden to Englishmen, he
should have been a safe pilot to the point, at least, of a "proper
essence of substance" in its attributes of matter and energy; but
Ernst Mach seemed to go yet one step further, for he rejected
matter altogether, and admitted but two processes in nature—
change of place and interconversion of forms. Matter was Motion
—Motion was Matter—the thing moved.

A student of history had no need to understand these scientific
ideas of very great men; he sought only the relation with the ideas
of their grandfathers, and their common direction towards the
ideas of their grandsons. He had long ago reached, with Hegel,

the limits of contradiction; and Ernst Mach scarcely added a
shade of variety to the identity of opposites; but both of them
seemed to be in agreement with Karl Pearson on the facts of the
supersensual universe which could be known only as unknowable.

With a deep sigh of relief, the traveller turned back to France.
There he felt safe. No Frenchman except Rabelais and Montaigne
had ever taught anarchy other than as path to order. Chaos
would be unity in Paris even if child of the guillotine. To make this
assurance mathematically sure, the highest scientific authority
in France was a great mathematician, M. Poincaré of the Institut,
who published in 1902 a small volume called "La Science
et l'Hypothèse," which purported to be relatively readable.
Trusting to its external appearance, the traveller timidly bought
it, and greedily devoured it, without understanding a single
consecutive page, but catching here and there a period that
startled him to the depths of his ignorance, for they seemed to show
that M. Poincaré was troubled by the same historical landmarks
which guided or, deluded Adams himself: "[In science] we are led,"
said M. Poincaré, "to act as though a simple law, when other things
were equal, must be more probable than a complicated law. Half
a century ago one frankly confessed it, and proclaimed that nature
loves simplicity. She has since given us too often the lie. To-day
this tendency is no longer avowed, and only as much of it is preserved
as is indispensable so that science shall not become impossible."

Here at last was a fixed point beyond the chance of confusion
with self-suggestion. History and mathematics agreed. Had M.
Poincaré shown anarchistic tastes, his evidence would have weghed
less heavily; but he seemed to be the only authority in science
who felt what a historian felt so strongly—the need of unity in a
universe. "Considering everything we have made some approach
towards unity. We have not gone as fast as we hoped fifty years
ago; we have not always taken the intended road; but definitely
we have gained much ground." This was the most clear and convincing

evidence of progress yet offered to the navigator of ignorance;
but suddenly he fell on another view which seemed to him
quite irreconcilable with the first: "Doubtless if our means of investigation
should become more and more penetrating, we should
discover the simple under the complex; then the complex under
the simple; then anew the simple under the complex; and so on
without ever being able to foresee the last term."

A mathematical paradise of endless displacement promised eternal
bliss to the mathematician, but turned the historian green
with horror. Made miserable by the thought that he knew no
mathematics, he burned to ask whether M. Poincaré knew any
history, since he began by begging the historical question altogether,
and assuming that the past showed alternating phases of
simple and complex—the precise point that Adams, after fifty
years of effort, found himself forced to surrender; and then going
on to assume alternating phases for the future which, for the weary
Titan of Unity, differed in nothing essential from the kinetic
theory of a perfect gas.

Since monkeys first began to chatter in trees, neither man nor
beast had ever denied or doubted Multiplicity, Diversity, Complexity,
Anarchy, Chaos. Always and everywhere the Complex had
been true and the Contradiction had been certain. Thought started
by it. Mathematics itself began by counting one—two—three;
then imagining their continuity, which M. Poincaré was still exhausting
his wits to explain or defend; and this was his explanation:
"In short, the mind has the faculty of creating symbols, and it is
thus that it has constructed mathematical continuity which is
only a particular system of symbols." With the same light touch,
more destructive in its artistic measure than the heaviest-handed
brutality of Englishmen or Germans, he went on to upset relative
truth itself: "How should I answer the question whether Euclidian
Geometry is true? It has no sense! . . . Euclidian Geometry is, and
will remain, the most convenient."

Chaos was a primary fact even in Paris—especially in Paris—

as it was in the Book of Genesis; but every thinking being in Paris
or out of it had exhausted thought in the effort to prove Unity,
Continuity, Purpose, Order, Law, Truth, the Universe, God,
after having begun by taking it for granted, and discovering, to
their profound dismay, that some minds denied it. The direction
of mind, as a single force of nature, had been constant since history
began. Its own unity had created a universe the essence of which
was abstract Truth; the Absolute; God! To Thomas Aquinas,
the universe was still a person; to Spinoza, a substance; to Kant,
Truth was the essence of the "I"; an innate conviction; a categorical
imperative; to Poincaré, it was a convenience; and to Karl
Pearson, a medium of exchange.

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.

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values
his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify
his facts. The laws of history only repeat the lines of force or
thought. Yet though his will be iron, he cannot help now and
then resuming his humanity or simianity in face of a fear. The
motion of thought had the same value as the motion of a cannonball
seen approaching the observer on a direct line through the
air. One could watch its curve for five thousand years. Its first
violent acceleration in historical times had ended in the catastrophe
of 310. The next swerve of direction occurred towards 1500.
Galileo and Bacon gave a still newer curve to it, which altered its
values; but all these changes had never altered the continuity.
Only in 1900, the continuity snapped.

Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world sometimes dated
it from 1893, by the Roentgen rays, or from 1898, by the Curie's
radium; but in 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of
British science that the human race without exception had lived
and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the century.
The date was convenient, and convenience was truth.

The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world
which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine
it, and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a
land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was
an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion
imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the universe

revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself
back into anarchy at last. He could not deny that the law of
the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure,
especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man;
the perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the perpetual
revolt of society against the law it had established; the perpetual
building up of authority by force, and the perpetual appeal to
force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a higher law,
and the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the perpetual victory of
the principles of freedom, and their perpetual conversion into principles
of power; but the staggering problem was the outlook ahead
into the despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred. The
physicists had a phrase for it, unintelligible to the vulgar: "All that
we win is a battle—lost in advance—with the irreversible phenomena
in the background of nature."

All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He
saw his education complete, and was sorry he ever began it. As
a matter of taste, he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century
education when God was a father and nature a mother, and all
was for the best in a scientific universe. He repudiated all share
in the world as it was to be, and yet he could not detect the point
where his responsibility began or ended.

As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had
behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit
its conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that embodied
all its notions of the perfect. Man knew it was true because he
made it, and he loved it for the same reason. He sacrificed millions
of lives to acquire his unity, but he achieved it, and justly thought
it a work of art. The woman especially did great things, creating
her deities on a higher level than the male, and, in the end, compelling
the man to accept the Virgin as guardian of the man's God.
The man's part in his Universe was secondary, but the woman
was at home there, and sacrificed herself without limit to make
it habitable, when man permitted it, as sometimes happened for

brief intervals of war and famine; but she could not provide
protection against forces of nature. She did not think of her
universe as a raft to which the limpets stuck for life in the surge
of a supersensual chaos; she conceived herself and her family as
the centre and flower of an ordered universe which she knew to
be unity because she had made it after the image of her own
fecundity; and this creation of hers was surrounded by beauties
and perfections which she knew to be real because she herself had
imagined them.

Even the masculine philosopher admired and loved and celebrated
her triumph, and the greatest of them sang it in the noblest
of his verses:—

Neither man nor woman ever wanted to quit this Eden of their
own invention, and could no more have done it of their own
accord than the pearl oyster could quit its shell; but although the
oyster might perhaps assimilate or embalm a grain of sand forced
into its aperture, it could only perish in face of the cyclonic hurricane
or the volcanic upheaval of its bed. Her supersensual chaos
killed her.

Such seemed the theory of history to be imposed by science on
the generation born after 1900. For this theory, Adams felt himself
in no way responsible. Even as historian he had made it his
duty always to speak with respect of everything that had ever
been thought respectable—except an occasional statesman; but
he had submitted to force all his life, and he meant to accept it
for the future as for the past. All his efforts had been turned only
to the search for its channel. He never invented his facts; they

were furnished him by the only authorities he could find. As for
himself, according to Helmholz, Ernst Mach, and Arthur Balfour,
he was henceforth to be a conscious ball of vibrating motions,
traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotation or
vibration, rolling at the feet of the Virgin at Chartres or of M.
Poincaré in an attic at Paris, a centre of supersensual chaos.
The discovery did not distress him. A solitary man of sixty-five
years or more, alone in a Gothic cathedral or a Paris apartment,
need fret himself little about a few illusions more or less. He should
have learned his lesson fifty years earlier; the times had long passed
when a student could stop before chaos or order; he had no choice
but to march with his world.

Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered
by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human
mind has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the
chaos which caged it; how—appearing suddenly and inexplicably
out of some unknown and unimaginable void; passing half its known
life in the mental chaos of sleep; victim even when awake, to its
own ill-adjustment, to disease, to age, to external suggestion, to
nature's compulsion; doubting its sensations, and, in the last resort,
trusting only to instruments and averages—after sixty
or seventy years of growing astonishment, the mind wakes to find
itself looking blankly into the void of death. That it should profess
itself pleased by this performance was all that the highest
rules of good breeding could ask; but that it should actually be
satisfied would prove that it existed only as idiocy.

Satisfied, the future generation could scarcely think itself, for
even when the mind existed in a universe of its own creation, it
had never been quite at ease. As far as one ventured to interpret
actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself by an infinite
series of infinitely delicate adjustments forced on it by the infinite
motion of an infinite chaos of motion; dragged at one moment
into the unknowable and unthinkable, then trying to scramble
back within its senses and to bar the chaos out, but always assimilating

bits of it, until at last, in 1900, a new avalanche of
unknown forces had fallen on it, which required new mental powers
to control. If this view was correct, the mind could gain nothing
by flight or by fight; it must merge in its supersensual multiverse,
or succumb to it.