ANCESTORS IN THOUGHT

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 16, 2012

REFERENCE

Author and friend, William L. Livingston III, wrote, “Sir James: You resonated with Le Bon. Attached is a piece by Henry Adams, one of the Adams’ brothers. He is your direct ancestor in thought. He has been added to the mentors list. Regards, Bill.”

Henry Adams was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, and the great grandson of President John Adams.  He was a prolific author, as well as a journalist, academic and historian.  He is best known for his “The Education of Henry Adams.” 

Several years ago, I read J. C. Levenson’s “The Mind and Art of Henry Adams” (1957) in which the author quotes generously from “The Education.”

“A Letter to American Teachers of History” (1910) was not published until after his death in 1918 at the age of 80.  It is a short but cerebral document of his “theory of history” based on the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of entropy.  The principle states that all energy dissipates, order becomes disorder, and everything dies when a state of equilibrium is reached. 

Scientists challenged Adams in his day, as he still is in our day, for wharfing science -- physics and mathematics -- with history and sociology.  He was an artist intrigued with science and could see connection with his work.  He was also an advocate of natural law.  His prescience is apparent in this piece, which happened to be at the dawn of the twentieth century.

QUOTATIONS FROM “A LETTER TO AMERICAN TEACHERS OF HISTORY” (1910)

As you read these excerpts, think of them in terms of today and the long road covered in the past hundred years.  Have we made great progress or are we stuck in forward inertia? 

Henry Adams was a student of science as well as of humanities.

The essential (cycle of energy) is that the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) rules biology with an authority fully as despotic as it asserts in physics.

For human purposes, whatever does work is a form of energy, and since historians exist only to recount and sum up the work that society has done, either as State, or as Church, as civil or as military, as intellectual or physical, organisms, they will, if they obey the physical law, hold that society does work by degrading its energies.

An infinite series of imperceptible steps, continuous under uniform conditions since the earliest races of organic life, and always tending upwards to higher intensities, tensions, potentials, according to the growing complexity of the organism, had already taken the place of religious dogma, and bridges the gap between two phases of thought.  With a sense of vase relief, the generation which began life in 1850, embraced the new creed, not so much because it was proved, as because it was convenient.

We recognize from this point of view as from others, that the world was once young, then adolescent; that it has even passed the age of maturity; man has come late, when a beginning of physical decadence had struck the globe, his domain.

As Newton said that he was never a Newtonian, so Darwin might perhaps have said that he was never a Darwinian.

It is perfectly exact to say that the number and extent of variations diminishes as the specialization advances.  Man has certainly advanced by leaps, and that his progress seems to be irreversible, seeks at once to know whether he shows signs of reaching its limits.

The weight of the brain is not asserted to be a gauge of its energy.  Neither instinct nor reason is supposed to have any relation to the weight of the brain; on the contrary, in a list of seventeen brains, the heaviest known, going from 1729 to 2020 grams, there are seven lunatics and only three men of science.

Increase in intellectual power often goes with a narrowing of the jaw and an early loss of the teeth, and the hair, and in women with an inability to suckle their children.

The evolution of life on earth had ceased to be progressive some millions of years ago, and had passed through its stationary period into regression before man ever appeared.

Society has been born of man, and has been built on sand, often with only materials of convention.  The individual for whom it is created is always its worst enemy; but will not bend to its necessities. 

Compared with the superficial and self-complacent optimism which seems to veneer the surface of society, the frequent and tragic outbursts of physicists, astronomers, geologists, biologists, and sociological socialists announcing the end of the world, surpass all that could be conceived as a natural product of the time.  The note of warning verges on the grotesque; it is hysterically solemn; a little more, and it would sound like that of the Salvation Army; a small natural shock might easily turn it to a panic.

When the earth becomes as barren as the moon:

Here lies the entire humanity of a world which has lived!  Here lie all the dreams of ambition, all the conquests of military glory, all the resounding affairs of finance, all the systems of an imperfect science, and also all the oaths of mortals’ love!  Here lie all the beauties of earth!  But no mortuary stone will mark the spot where the poor planet shall have rendered its last sigh!

The soul freed from the bonds of matter seems to require no education unless in the passive consciousness of pure mathematics and logic, which has hitherto been the weakest side of the American student, who is averse even to the ingenuous simplicity of logarithms and vectors.

It was a time when society was going from rural to industrial, the time of Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau and the James brothers, William and Henry.

Society has the air of taking for granted its indefinite progress towards perfection with more confidence, and sometimes with more dogmatism than in 1830.  

Granting that the intended effect of intellectual education is, as Bacon, Descartes and Kant began by insisting, a habit of doubt, it is only in a very secondary sense a habit of timidity or despair.  To a certain point, the more education, the more hesitation; but beyond that point, confidence should begin.  Keeping Europe still in view for illustration and assuming for the moment that America does not exist, every reader of the French or German papers knows that not a day passes without producing some uneasy discussion of supposed social decrepitude; falling off of the birth rate; decline of rural population; lowering of army standards; multiplication of suicides; increase of insanity; of cancer; of tuberculosis; signs of nervous exhaustion; enfeebled vitality; habits of alcoholism and drugs; failure of eye sight in the young, and so on, without and coupled with suggestions for correcting these evils.

The great city of today, of which Berlin is the most significant type, exhibits a constantly diminishing vitality.

The medical profession is singularly shy of pledges.  The poets are pessimists to a man and to a woman.  The legislators pass half their time, in Germany, France and England, framing social legislation, of which a large part rests on the right and duty of society to protect it from itself.

Adams suggests an American professor should begin his course:

By announcing to his class that their year’s work would be devoted to showing in American history a universal tendency to the dissipation of energy and degradation of thought, which would soon end in making America improper for the habitation of man as he is now constructed.

The dilemma is real; it may become serious; in any case it needs to be understood.  The battle of Evolution has never been wholly won; the chances at this moment favor the fear that it may yet be wholly lost.  The Darwinist no longer talks of Evolution; he uses the word Transformation.

Man is a Primate and must eternally, by his body, be subject to the second law of thermodynamics.  Escape is impossible.  Science has shut and barred every known exit. 

Man can detect no outlet except through the loophole called Mind, and even to avail himself of this, he must follow Lapparent’s advice, become a disembodied sprit and seek a confederate among such physicists or physiologists as are willing to admit that man, as an animal, has no importance; that his evolution or degradation as an organism is immaterial; that his physical force or condition has nothing to do with the subject; that the old ascetics were correct in suppressing the body; and that his consciousness is sufficient proof of his right to regard Reason as the highest potential of Vital Energy.

Reason can be only another phase of the energy earlier known as instinct or intuition, and if this be admitted as the stem history of the Mind as far back as the Eocene lemur, it must be admitted for all forms of Vital Energy back to the vegetables and perhaps even to the crystals.  In the absence of any definite break in the series, all must be treated as endowed with energy equivalent to will.

Physically the gap between the brain of man and the brain of an anthropoid ape is too insignificant to count; but their difference as beings corresponds to the distance of the earth from the nearest fixed star.

The Will shows organic evolution from first to last, and shows in this respect no differences from other bodily functions.  It is a product of organic nature, and, at least in its broadest sense, bears that stamp.

The force that Thomson calls supernatural Will, and Flechsig calls an organic function, and Loeb calls a physico-chemical relation, is the force which I call Vital Energy.

Will is another name for the same primitive, elementary, unexplained energy which gave odor to a molecule of copper, or made the magnolia burst into flower with more than animal sensuality and perfection of form, color, scent, and line; or the caterpillar suddenly soar into the air with the amazing, inconceivable sensual properties of the butterfly; but the mere brain-mechanism you talk about is, in physics, far less extraordinary, as Will, than what went before it, creations always growing higher in tension as you go backward, like the eye, or the innumerable varieties or transformations of the shapes which vital energy has taken in every province of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, while all are still subordinate and even trivial when compared with the primary creation of energy itself, about which no one knows anything except its name, Nature.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau said: The man who thinks is a depraved animal.  As far as he is animal, the thinker is a bad animal; eating badly, digesting badly; often dying without posterity.

Thought is an organic growth which has the faculty of determining its own action within certain limits.  Thought comes as the result of helplessness.  Thought is the refraining from speech or action.  The truth is, therefore, that action comes first; the idea is an act which tends to accomplish itself, and which when stopped by some obstacle before its realization, finds a new form of reality in that stoppage.

Consciousness in many is chiefly intelligence, it might have been, it seems as thought it ought to have been, intuition too.  Another evolution might have led to a humanity either still more intelligent, or more intuitive, in reality, in the humanity of which we make part; intuition is almost completely sacrificed to intelligence.  Intuition is still there, but vague and especially discontinuous.

Not instinct but Intellect is the highest power of a supernatural Will.

Intellect should bear the same relation to instinct that the sun bears to a gaseous nebula, and hitherto in human history it has asserted this relation without a doubt of its self-evident truth.  The assertion has led to physical violence and intellectual extravagance without limit, so that history shows man as alternately insane with his own pride of intellect, and shuddering with horror at its bloody consequences.

Evolution, again, is troublesome, and has already yielded to the less compromising figure of transformation . . . In strictness, no doubt, water which falls and dynamite which expands, are equally degraded energies, but the mind is repelled by the idea of degradation, while it is pleased by the figure of expansion.  Because an energy is diffused like table salt in water, it is not rendered less useful; on the contrary, it can only by that process be made useful at all to an animal like man whose life is shut within narrow limits of intensity.

Notoriously civilization and education enfeeble personal energy; emollit mores: they aim especially at extending the forces of society at cost of the intensity of individual forces.  “Thou shalt not,’ is the beginning of law.  The individual, like the crystal of salt, is absorbed in the solution, but the solution does work which the individual could not do.

Adams is concerned with the limitations of science itself:

Science has thus far penetrated only the grosser operations of nature, and cannot deny that further knowledge may, and probably will, overthrow much of the experience of physics. 

Adams bemoans man’s waste.  Were he alive today the mourning might turn to outrage. 

Man does more to dissipate and waste nature’s economies than all the rest of the animal or vegetable life has ever done to save them. 

Already, one may hear the physicists aver, man dissipates every year all the heat stored in a thousand million tons of coal which nature herself cannot now replace, and he does this only in order to convert some ten or fifteen percent of it into mechanical energy immediately wasted on his transient and commonly purposeless objects. 

He draws great reservoirs of coal-oil and gas out of the earth, which he consumes like the coal.  He is digging out even the peat-bogs in order to consume them as heat.  He has largely deforested the planet, and hastened its desiccation.  He seizes all the zinc and whatever other minerals he can burn, or which he can convert into other forms of energy, and dissipate into space.  

What is still more curious, his chief pleasures, so far as they are his own invention, consist in gratifying the same unintelligent passion for dissipating or degrading energy, as in drinking alcohol, or burning fireworks, or firing cannon, or illuminating cities, or deafening them by senseless noises.

Adams penetrates man’s hubris:

A watch spring stores elasticity better than the mind stores thought.  Any chance bit of obsidian or crystal can set forests afire without calling itself intelligent.  A fall of one degree in temperature gives form to an icicle without claiming to be divine.

Paleontologists talk only of specialization, as though the more elaborate type were the higher intensity.  The opposite is more likely to be true.

We grant that we cannot explain why, in man or in molecule, the primitive energies of nature took directions which imply, in our limited experience, a reasoning forethought. 

Cause is a transcendental product beyond our grasp.  We no longer venture even to assert that we know the creative forces at all. We say only that in the world which we do know, we can see nothing supernatural in action. Infinite complication, we admit, but no ultimate contradiction.

The claim that Reason must be classed as an energy of the highest intensity is itself unreasonable.  On the contrary, Reason is the last in time, and therefore the lowest in tension. According to our western standards, the most intense phase of human Energy occurred in the form of religious and artistic emotion, perhaps in the Crusades and Gothic Churches; but since then, though vastly increased in apparent mass, human energy has lost intensity and continues to lose it with accelerated rapidity as the Church proves.

Organized in society, as a volume, it becomes a multiplied number of enfeebled units, on which, like the eye in insects, reason acts as an enormously multiplied lens, converging nature’s lines of will, and taking direction from them, but adding nothing of its own.

Man has, indeed, or had, in a few of his stems, some faculty for artistic expression, not nearly so strong as that of some plants, or some butterflies, or some birds, but more varied

This instinct he probably inherited from an earlier, more gifted animal; but as a creative energy he inherited next to nothing.  The coral polyp is a giant beside him.

Reason does not work, it is only a mechanism; nature’s energy, which we have agreed to call Will, that lies behind reason, does the work, and degrades the energy in doing it.

Man refuses to be degraded in self-esteem, of which he has never had enough to save him from bitter self-reproaches. He yearns for flattery, and he needs it.  The contradiction between science and instinct is so radical that, though science should prove twenty times over by every method of demonstration known to it, that man is a thermodynamic mechanism, instinct would reject the proof, and whenever it should be convinced, it would have to die.

Adams is not happy about the disposition of universities.

Universities of today hesitate to insert with confidence the old conviction of spiritual authority, showing in this respect a distinct decline in energy; while technical instruction has reached, or seems on the verge of reaching, the point where it must insist on the universal application of its thermodynamic law.

The most ardent lover of paradox, the most inveterate humorist, would hardly think it worth his while to follow a train of reasoning which would surely immolate physics and metaphysics together … Neither historians nor sociologists can afford to let themselves be driven into admitting that every gain of power, from gunpowder to steam, from the dynamo to the Daimler motor, has been made at the cost of man’s and woman’s vitality.  The mischiefs thus charged upon reason would not end there.

Metaphysics as well as mathematics would measure enfeeblement, philosophy as well as mechanics would mark degradation, the Universities as well as the technical schools would alike close their doors without waiting for the sun to grow cold.  Direct conflict, therefore, seems to be as barren as compromise.

For Adams, no discipline is one-dimensional.

If the teacher of history cares to contest the ground with the teacher of physics, he must become a physicist himself, and learn to use laboratory methods.  He needs the technical tools.

Physical science is more or less chaotic; the conclusion is only what he needs to reach before he can begin to deal with vital science which is all chaos.

We see the middle and the end series of the phylogenetic series, that we do not see the beginning is self-evident since it was built up in a period of the earth’s history which is for us transcendental.  We could not understand it if we did see it.

If the physicist cannot make mind the master, as the metaphysician would like, he can at least abstain from making it the slave.

This mental need of unity is also a weakness, which gives the degradationist an artificial and altogether unfair advantage. 

Simplicity may not be evidence of truth, and unity is perhaps the most deceptive of all the innumerable illusions of mind, but both are primary instincts in man, and have an attraction on the mind akin to that of gravitation on matter.

Perhaps the feature of the scheme that was most repulsive to instinct was most seductive to science, its fatal facility in accounting for Reason.

 After 1500, the Church very slowly lost its control of education.

Men are taught to believe with delight that society down to the present day is an unnatural abortion sustained by perverted illusions and destined to immediate suicide.

Adams quotes one of my favorites, Gustave Le Bon, and his book “Physiologic des Foules” (1895), or “Anatomy of the Crowd”:

That which formed a people, a unity, a block, ends by becoming an agglomeration of individuals without cohesion, still held together for a time by its traditions and institutions.  This is the phase when men, divided by their interests and aspirations, but no longer knowing how to govern themselves, ask to be directed in their smallest acts, and when the State exercises its absorbing influence.  With the definitive loss of the old ideal, the race ends by entirely losing its soul; it becomes nothing more than a dust of isolated individuals, and returns to what it was at the start, a crowd.

Adams continues:

Under the thinnest veil of analogy the physicist-historian, with scientific calmness, condemns our actual society as he condemns the sun, for the crowd which  Gustave Le Bon declares to be the end of social evolutionists is not at all the same crowd that made its beginning, and is wholly incapable of doing useful work.

The preceding remarks give the key to the apparent juxtaposition which exists between the doctrine of Evolution and the principle of Degradation of energy.  Physical science presents to us a world which is increasingly wearing itself out.

The words of Adams resonate one hundred years after his reflections.  Yet, irony of ironies, we still believe progress is our most important product because:

The degradationist can so far ameliorate the immediate rigor of his law as to admit that degradation of energy may create, or convey an impression of progress and gain; but if the evolutionist presses the inquiry further, and asks where the proposed compromise will lead him as a teacher of young men, what future really lies behind the impression of progress, what amount of illusion is to be reckoned as an independent variable in the formula of gain, the degradationist replies, quite candidly, and honestly, that this impression of gain is derived from an impression of Order due to the leveling of energies, but that the impression of Order is an illusion consequent on the dissolution of the higher Order which had supplied by lowering its inequalities, all the useful energies that caused progress.

*     *     *

FINAL THOUGHT

My sense is that modern man is not open to such in-your-face discourse.  It was why I brought Kierkegaard to these pages.  Nobody thinks much less writes so passionately or candidly.  Where is the profit, the celebrity?  They weren’t interested in selling books but in changing lives.  They are missed.