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resonant with accumulated power over "the occult, the mysterious,
the unknowable ." But Blackmur sometimes sounds as though he
thinks that Adams aimed, by his own symbolic language, to recover
some portion of that power for the modern age, including the power
to imply, to validate, the supernatural. He takes too literally
Adams's declaration that both the Virgin and the Dynamo represent
"occult" forces when what Adams means is that they both represent
what cannot be translated into the language of direct experience yet
is held to be true . The direction of religious emotion and the control
of physical power equally, of course, account for the nature of civili–
zations . We must remember the objective historian in Adams .
Comte, as Adams himself described, got him early, and his
skepticism never really left him . Darwinism certainly did its usual
job on his inherited ideas of inherent order, though he tended to be
skeptical of
all
systems which stitch together a cosmos of contin–
gency. Indeed, Darwinism itself struck him as having merely
provided, in the place of the Maker, "a safe, conservative, practical,
thoroughly commonlaw deity," and Adams appears the ultimate
deconstructionist, recognizing all systems as games of the mind:
"Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to admit to himself
that he really did not care whether truth was or was not true. He did
not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process was
new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun."
Although he came before relativity and the uncertainty prin–
ciple, Adams suspected that science would eventually confirm his
suspicion of universal disorder. He seized upon the statement of
Karl Pearson that "order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are
characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with
the mind of man," and that "chaos is all that science can logically
assert of the supersensuous." The kinetic theory of gas is "an
assertion of ultimate chaos," Adams concluded, and then
generalized, "Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of
man." Blackmur sees this acceptance of the death of metaphysics,
however, as a sign, somehow, that Adams felt that metaphysics was
more necessary, that the mind of man "would always try to know the
unknowable, and 'would be forced to enter supersensual chaos' from
which Pearson meant to exclude him" - a conclusion I do not find
justified by Adams's own pages.
Skepticism lies behind Adams's half-serious attempt to create a
theory of history. He did not so much hope to run order through
