April 12, 2022

Four pages in which you analyze texts through close reading, and demonstrate an understanding of the texts historical, social, po

Four pages in which you analyze texts through close reading, and demonstrate an understanding of the texts’ historical, social, political, and cultural contexts (when relevant), in order to come up with an original thesis statement and a well-elaborated defense of your argument. The thesis should identify the question to be addressed, explain what is at stake and why it is important, and take a stand on the question. The specific topic is up to you, with the requirement that you focus on a particular aspect of Mary in modernity, have a clear thesis statement, and make a distinct, well organized, and well-demonstrated argument.

CHAPTER XXV

the dynamo and the virgin (1900)

Until the Great Exposition of 1900* closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to find it.

He would have liked to know how much of it could have been grasped

by the best-informed man in the world. While he was thus meditating

chaos, Langley came by, and showed it to him. At Langley’s behest, the

Exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin,

for Langley knew what to study, and why, and how; while Adams

might as well have stood outside in the night, staring at the Milky Way.

Yet Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one might not

have learned from Lord Bacon,* three hundred years before; but though one should have known the “Advancement of Science” as well

as one knew the “Comedy of Errors,”* the literary knowledge counted for nothing until some teacher should show how to apply it. Bacon

took a vast deal of trouble in teaching King James I and his subjects,

American or other, towards the year 1620, that true science was the de- velopment or economy of forces; yet an elderly American in 1900 knew neither the formula nor the forces; or even so much as to say to himself

that his historical business in the Exposition concerned only the

economies or developments of force since 1893, when he began the study at Chicago.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it

accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had looked at most of the

accumulations of art in the storehouses called Art Museums; yet he

did not know how to look at the art exhibits of 1900. He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound attention, yet he

could not apply them at Paris. Langley, with the ease of a great master

of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a

new application of force, and naturally threw out, to begin with, al-

most the whole art exhibit. Equally, he ignored almost the whole

industrial exhibit. He led his pupil directly to the forces. His chief in-

terest was in new motors to make his airship feasible, and he taught

Adams the astonishing complexities of the new Daimler* motor, and of the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour, almost as destructive as the electric tram

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams : Education of Henry Adams, edited by Ira Nadel, Oxford University Press USA – OSO, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/southernmethodist/detail.action?docID=737338. Created from southernmethodist on 2021-12-14 02:39:12.

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which was only ten years older; and threatening to become as terrible

as the locomotive steam-engine itself, which was almost exactly

Adams’s own age.

Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos,* and ex- plained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind, even

of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable volume,

but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more, at any time, for

all the certainty he felt in it. To him, the dynamo itself was but an in-

genious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons

of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight;

but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew ac-

customed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-

foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the

Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned,

deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, re-

volving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely

murmuring—scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-

breadth further for respect of power—while it would not wake the

baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray

to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before

silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate

energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most

expressive.

Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most familiar of

exhibits. For Adams’s objects its value lay chiefly in its occult mechan-

ism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-

house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal fracture

for a historian’s objects. No more relation could he discover between

the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the

cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he

could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley could not help him. Indeed, Langley seemed to be worried by the same

trouble, for he constantly repeated that the new forces were anarchical,

and especially that he was not responsible for the new rays, that were

little short of parricidal in their wicked spirit towards science. His own

rays,* with which he had doubled the solar spectrum, were altogether harmless and beneficent; but Radium denied its God—or, what was to

Langley the same thing, denied the truths of his Science. The force

was wholly new.

318 The Education of Henry Adams

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A historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as Langley

or Kelvin,* made rapid progress under this teaching, and mixed him- self up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of Paradise of

ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped himself

in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged

Marconi* and Branly* had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo; while he lost his arithmetic in trying to figure out the equation between

the discoveries and the economies of force. The economies, like the

discoveries, were absolute, supersensual, occult; incapable of expres-

sion in horse-power. What mathematical equivalent could he suggest

as the value of a Branly coherer? Frozen air, or the electric furnace, had

some scale of measurement, no doubt, if somebody could invent a

thermometer adequate to the purpose; but X-rays* had played no part whatever in man’s consciousness, and the atom itself had figured only

as a fiction of thought. In these seven years man had translated himself

into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with

the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could meas-

ure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible

to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but per-

ceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale.

Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable

number of universes interfused—physics stark mad in metaphysics.

Historians undertake to arrange sequences,—called stories, or

histories—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These as-

sumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astound-

ing, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any

captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably

reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves re-

quired to know what they were talking about. Adams, for one, had

toiled in vain to find out what he meant. He had even published a

dozen volumes of American history for no other purpose than to sat-

isfy himself whether, by the severest process of stating, with the least

possible comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed

rigorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary

sequence of human movement. The result had satisfied him as little as

at Harvard College. Where he saw sequence, other men saw something

quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure. He cared

little about his experiments and less about his statesmen, who seemed

to him quite as ignorant as himself and, as a rule, no more honest; but

The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900) 319

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he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by one

method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that

the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their soci-

ety could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was arti-

ficial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the

sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit,

he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great

Exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken by the sudden ir- ruption of forces totally new.

Since no one else showed much concern, an elderly person without

other cares had no need to betray alarm. The year 1900 was not the first to upset schoolmasters. Copernicus* and Galileo* had broken many professorial necks about 1600; Columbus had stood the world on its head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine* set up the Cross. The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, were occult,

supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy

like that of the Cross; they were what, in terms of mediaeval science,

were called immediate modes of the divine substance.

The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly if he

was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this common

value could have no measure but that of their attraction on his own

mind. He must treat them as they had been felt; as convertible, re-

versible, interchangeable attractions on thought. He made up his mind

to venture it; he would risk translating rays into faith. Such a reversible

process would vastly amuse a chemist, but the chemist could not deny

that he, or some of his fellow physicists, could feel the force of both.

When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the place had

probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal,* or of the Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or auto-

mobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force of all,

though the rays were unborn and the women were dead.

Here opened another totally new education, which promised to be

by far the most hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which he must

crawl, like Sir Lancelot* in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction. They were as

different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a

magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still felt

at Lourdes,* and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America

320 The Education of Henry Adams

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neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force—at most as senti-

ment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either.

This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American his-

torian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed

potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she un-

known in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and

she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-

leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was

ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American

female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam.

The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up

among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was

strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Everyone, even among

Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians* nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess

because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduc-

tion—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed

was to be fecund. Singularly enough, not one of Adams’s many schools

of education had ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of

Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature,

where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin:—

“Quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas.”*

The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the

Schools:—

“Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,

Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,

Sua disianza vuol volar senz’ ali.”*

All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The

true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feel-

ings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historical

chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from

the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On one

side, at the Louvre and at Chartres,* as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever

known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising

vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines

and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the

The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900) 321

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American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an

American Venus would never dare exist.

The question, which to any plain American of the nineteenth cen-

tury seemed as remote as it did to Adams, drew him almost violently to

study, once it was posed; and on this point Langleys were as useless as

though they were Herbert Spencers* or dynamos. The idea survived only as art. There one turned as naturally as though the artist were

himself a woman. Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he

knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex,

as every classic had always done; but he could think only of Walt

Whitman;* Bret Harte, as far as the magazines would let him venture; and one or two painters, for the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex

for sentiment, never for force; to them, Eve was a tender flower, and

Herodias an unfeminine horror. American art, like the American lan-

guage and American education, was as far as possible sexless.* Society regarded this victory over sex as its greatest triumph, and the historian

readily admitted it, since the moral issue, for the moment, did not

concern one who was studying the relations of unmoral force. He

cared nothing for the sex of the dynamo until he could measure its

energy.

Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit, and, in

his stroll, stopped almost every day before St. Gaudens’s General

Sherman,* which had been given the central post of honor. St. Gaudens himself was in Paris, putting on the work his usual intermin-

able last touches, and listening to the usual contradictory suggestions

of brother sculptors. Of all the American artists who gave to American

art whatever life it breathed in the seventies, St. Gaudens was perhaps

the most sympathetic, but certainly the most inarticulate. General

Grant or Don Cameron had scarcely less instinct of rhetoric than he.

All the others—the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge, Stanford

White—were exuberant; only St. Gaudens could never discuss or di-

late on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to his work

the forms that he felt. He never laid down the law, or affected the

despot, or became brutalized like Whistler by the brutalities of his

world. He required no incense; he was no egoist; his simplicity of

thought was excessive; he could not imitate, or give any form but his

own to the creations of his hand. No one felt more strongly than he the

strength of other men, but the idea that they could affect him never

stirred an image in his mind.

322 The Education of Henry Adams

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This summer his health was poor and his spirits were low. For such

a temper, Adams was not the best companion, since his own gaiety was

not folle,* but he risked going now and then to the studio on Mont Parnasse to draw him out for a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne, or dinner

as pleased his moods, and in return St. Gaudens sometimes let Adams

go about in his company.

Once St. Gaudens took him down to Amiens, with a party of

Frenchmen, to see the cathedral. Not until they found themselves ac-

tually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it dawn on

Adams’s mind that, for his purposes, St. Gaudens on that spot had

more interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great men before great

monuments express great truths, provided they are not taken too

solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the supreme phrase of his idol

Gibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals: “I darted a contemptuous look

on the stately monuments of superstition.”* Even in the footnotes of his history, Gibbon had never inserted a bit of humor more human

than this, and one would have paid largely for a photograph of the fat

little historian, on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to

persuade his readers—perhaps himself—that he was darting a con-

temptuous look on the stately monument, for which he felt in fact the

respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always feels

before objects worthy of it; but besides the humor, one felt also the re-

lation. Gibbon ignored the Virgin, because in 1789 religious monu- ments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark sounded fresh and simple as the green fields to ears that had heard a hundred years of

other remarks, mostly no more fresh and certainly less simple.

Without malice, one might find it more instructive than a whole lec-

ture of Ruskin. One sees what one brings, and at that moment Gibbon

brought the French Revolution. Ruskin brought reaction against the

Revolution. St. Gaudens had passed beyond all. He liked the stately

monuments much more than he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved

their dignity; their unity; their scale; their lines; their lights and

shadows; their decorative sculpture; but he was even less conscious

than they of the force that created it all—the Virgin, the Woman—by

whose genius “the stately monuments of superstition” were built,

through which she was expressed. He would have seen more meaning

in Isis* with the cow’s horns, at Edfoo, who expressed the same thought. The art remained, but the energy was lost even upon the

artist.

The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900) 323

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Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500’s; he bore the stamp of the Renaissance, and should have carried an image of

the Virgin round his neck, or stuck in his hat, like Louis XI.* In mere time he was a lost soul that had strayed by chance into the twentieth

century, and forgotten where it came from. He writhed and cursed at

his ignorance, much as Adams did at his own, but in the opposite sense.

St. Gaudens was a child of Benvenuto Cellini,* smothered in an American cradle. Adams was a quintessence of Boston, devoured by

curiosity to think like Benvenuto. St. Gaudens’s art was starved from

birth, and Adams’s instinct was blighted from babyhood. Each had but

half of a nature, and when they came together before the Virgin of

Amiens they ought both to have felt in her the force that made them

one; but it was not so. To Adams she became more than ever a channel

of force; to St. Gaudens she remained as before a channel of taste.

For a symbol of power, St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the

horse, as was plain in his horse and Victory of the Sherman monu-

ment. Doubtless Sherman also felt it so. The attitude was so American

that, for at least forty years, Adams had never realized that any other

could be in sound taste. How many years had he taken to admit a no-

tion of what Michael Angelo and Rubens were driving at? He could

not say; but he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres—

perhaps at Lourdes—possibly at Cnidos* if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles—but otherwise one must

look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out

long ago in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was

hardly less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew

Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse.* Neither of them felt goddesses as power—only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity,

taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power; yet

they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power em-

bodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam

in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both en-

ergies acted as interchangeable forces on man, and by action on man all

known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured

force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was the

shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician cared

to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no symbol,

324 The Education of Henry Adams

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unproved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work. The

symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the

mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ig-

noring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the great-

est force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to

herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural,

had ever done; the historian’s business was to follow the track of the

energy; to find where it came from and where it went to; its complex

source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions. It

could scarcely be more complex than radium; it could hardly be de-

flected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other

radiant matter. Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as a math-

ematical problem of influence on human progress, though all were oc-

cult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the Virgin

easiest to handle.

The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last into

the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno* to Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas,* Montaigne,* and Pascal,* one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair could one force one’s self into this old

thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed at a score of entrances

more promising and more popular. Thus far, no path had led any-

where, unless perhaps to an exceedingly modest living. Forty-five

years of study had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power;

one controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of force controlled by society had enormously increased. The

secret of education still hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and

one fumbled over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff is a

force almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of

blind-man’s dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen

works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material

over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never ar-

bitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows

too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and shape-

lessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to return on

its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The result of a year’s

work depends more on what is struck out than on what is left in; on the

sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their play or variety.

Compelled once more to lean heavily on this support, Adams covered

The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900) 325

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more thousands of pages* with figures as formal as though they were algebra, laboriously striking out, altering, burning, experimenting,

until the year had expired, the Exposition had long been closed, and

winter drawing to its end, before he sailed from Cherbourg, on January

19, 1901, for home.

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JOHN DUNS SCOTUS (d. 1308)

The famous Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus has passed into history under the title "Doctor of the Immaculate Conception", and deservedly so. For, by opposing the teaching of the majority of the theologians of his time, he opened the way to a positive understanding of this Marian privilege. Five and a half c

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Four pages in which you analyze texts through close reading, and demonstrate an understanding of the texts historical, social, po

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