1

Falling Between Two Paradigms: Henry Adams at the ParisExposition--

A Rhetorical Approach to the Problem of Incommensurability1

In a chapter that might equally be described as the climax

or the anticlimax of his autobiographical work, The Education of

Henry Adams, the writer pictures himself intellectually prostrate,

“his historical neck broken” (381), before the forty-foot dynamos

on display at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. The scene

is climactic because it concretely enforces Adams’s half-

humourous claim, repeated many times throughout the book, that

his education—indeed, his life—has been a failure. Not only is he

ill-equipped as an interpreter of the past; here is

incontrovertible evidence that he is at an even greater loss to

understand the present or to make conjectures about the future.

But the scene is also anticlimactic because, in spite of the

efforts described in the chapters that come immediately after

“The Dynamo and the Virgin,” Adams is seemingly unable even to

confirm the categories of thought in which the symbolic portent

of the Dynamo might be juxtaposed with the image of the Virgin—a

figure who represents a reverential, unified, and creative

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worldview, as well as the latent vitality that inspired the

cathedrals of the high Middle Ages. Unlike the dynamo whose

utility is popularly acknowledged, the Virgin is recognized as a

practical force in his day (and ours) remotely, if at all: “this

energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would

never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist”

(385).

Philosophically and rhetorically, the confrontation that

Adams contrives here is over-determined: it is a confluence of

many streams of thought, many historical tendencies, among which

the ostensible conflict between science (or technology) and

religion occupies only the topmost layer. More importantly, the

symbolic clash of the Virgin with the Dynamo is also a

startlingly early identification of the principle known as

incommensurability, the intellectual paradox most often associated

with the thought of Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,

1962) and Paul Feyerabend (Against Method, 1975). In anticipation

of these later thinkers, Adams struggles to account for the

incompatibility of the worlds that are revealed according as to

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whether one accepts the Dynamo or the Virgin as the primary

motive force in human affairs.

The great irony of Adams’s moment of humiliation can be

glimpsed in the previous sentence, however, for his education

cannot have been a failure, nor his tools faulty, if they have

enabled him to apprehend, diagnose, and theorize about what is

arguably the most significant epistemological problem of the past

century. Incommensurability, according to Randy Allen Harris,

results from the “lack of a common standard for taking the

measure of two systems with respect to each other” (3). In

virtually any field of knowledge, the discovery of

incommensurability produces profound doubtfulness, intellectual

crisis, and aporia (literally, “pathlessness”). These sensations

in turn produce a need either to reconcile the systems somehow,

or to choose between them.

Outcomes fall into various patterns. In science, when rival

theories are found to be incommensurable, the result is often

what Kuhn famously called a “paradigm shift,”2 where the

suppositions of one system are “all at once” (149) superseded by

the frame of reference provided by a newer one. As older

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suppositions prove inadequate, practitioners are either reasoned

into adopting the newer model, or they are so outnumbered as to

gradually fade from view (151; 157-8). In the realms of religion,

ethics, and politics, perceived incompatibilities may be subsumed

in a pluralism that recognizes the merits of all moral

aspirations that are compatible with free will, though they may

be incompatible with one another.3 Alternatively, rival systems

(like Islam and Western capitalism, for example) may continue to

coexist with or without mutual tolerance. Postmodernist thinkers

such as Jean-Paul Lyotard and Richard Rorty, as Harris points

out, have embraced a fourth possibility, perceiving in the very

notion of incommensurability an assurance of the unreliability of

all totalizing systems (77). Stanley Fish, himself something of

an apologist for the postmodern point of view, illustrates the

dynamic that underlies problems of incommensurability quite

graphically. In a seminal article that considers the longstanding

rivalry between another pair of incommensurable systems--rhetoric

and philosophy—Fish posits a perpetual oscillation: “Which of

these views of human nature is the correct one? The question can

be answered only from within one or the other, and the evidence

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of one party will be regarded by the other either as illusory or

as grist for its own mill… And so it would go on, with no

prospect of ever reaching accord, an endless round of accusation

and counteraccusation in which truth, honesty, and linguistic

responsibility are claimed by everyone” (208-209).

These ways of describing incommensurability and its

consequences are historically useful, and would have interested

Adams. But for various reasons, his perplexity over the

incommensurability between the Virgin and the Dynamo leads him to

an outcome that does not perfectly resemble any familiar pattern.

As I will argue, the case of the Virgin and the Dynamo is an

instance of what Harris terms “brick-wall incommensurability,” a

rare, particularly intractable (because “absolute”) brand of

incommensurability, “in which there are no points of contact

between the two items held in that relation” (116). In other

words, Adams, writing in 1902 or thereabouts,4 has taken the

vital signs of modernity and found no etiology in earlier times

by which to account for them. Extravagantly, he claims that

“between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-

house outside5, the break of continuity amounted to an abysmal

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fracture for a historian’s objects.” And if one such fracture can

occur, so, of course, can others. Consequently, the “irruption of

forces totally new” represented by the dynamo calls all

continuity into question. It is no longer credible, says Adams,

for historians to “undertake to arrange sequences—called stories

or histories—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect.”

Rather, historical causality is now revealed to be illusory, or

at best, a mere generic convention: “Where he saw sequence,

other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same

unit of measure” (382). The moment is thus represented as

nothing short of an intellectual watershed, the kind of crisis

(as Kuhn was later to say) that precedes the replacement of one

paradigm by another.

By way of heightening the rhetorical force of his

observation, Adams alludes (380-381) to some of the innovations

that, in his lifetime—and especially within the recent past—have

altered human experience. His examples include obvious candidates

like the steam engine (patented by Newcomen in 1705, improved by

Watt in 1769 and 1782, and superseded by the uniflow engine of

T.J. Todd in 1885); the electric tram (which came into commercial

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use between 1883 and 1888); the Daimler motor (essentially the

first internal combustion petroleum engine, patented in 1877);

and refrigeration (Adams calls it “frozen air”), which came into

its own as a commercial proposition when the first hermetically

sealed cooling unit was patented in 1894. Adams also mentions

discoveries of a more purely scientific character: the Branly

coherer, which enabled the reception of radio waves (1890); the

x-ray (discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895); the “atom,” whose

composition began to be understood when J. J. Thomson discovered

the electron in 1897; Pierre and Marie Curie’s identification of

radium (1898); and Marconi’s wireless telegraph (1899). Certainly

all these developments in physics contributed to the gradual

demise, towards the end of the century, of the “mechanical view”—

otherwise known as classical physics.6 Although Adams is not

quite yet in a position to issue a death certificate, he does

come close: “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 measure nothing except by

chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his senses” (381-

2). He is less able to foresee the profound socio-economic

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blessings and curses that the automobile will presently bestow on

Europe and North America, nor to guess at the potential of

nuclear energy—a likelier candidate than the dynamo, surely—to

open a new chapter in history. These understandable limitations

notwithstanding, the reader will search Adams’s catalogue

uneasily for the specific difference that singles out the dynamo

as the straw that broke the paradigm’s back. As Ernest Samuels

dryly remarks in his biography of Adams, “feeling a new epoch

open in his thinking, he assumed a new epoch opening in the

movement of the world” (Henry Adams: The Major Phase, 232).

And yet it is for the dynamo that Adams reserves his

mysterious adulation: when standing by its side, “the planet

itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate,

annual, or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving

within an 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” (380). In short, it is

rhetorically rather than scientifically that we are directed to

apprehend a difference in kind—not of degree, not of complexity—

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that grandly ignores the claims of empirical observation. As

Adams will have it, the dynamo is not mechanical but mystical. It

alone in the modern age is transformative and generative. He will

allow that it belongs to the category of machines that convert

one form of energy into another, but he maintains that the dynamo

is unique: “Among a thousand symbols of ultimate energy, [it]

was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive” (380).

If in the context of at least superficially similar scientific

novelties, the dynamo stands alone, how much more intellectually

intractable will it prove when juxtaposed with its archaic

opposite—the Virgin? Adams is aiming at an antithesis of the

sharpest variety, and the inference can only be that he is less

interested in the scientific, technological, or practical

applications of the dynamo than he is captivated by the problem

of incommensurability itself. The dynamo is a striking but

arbitrary symbol; the focus of inquiry is his own aporia.

Oddly, in spite of his hyperbole, Adams’s great moment of

reckoning in the Palais d’Electricité was not sudden at all. He had

spent the previous four years intermittently touring the

cathedrals of France in preparation for his study of medieval

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iconography, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.7 In that work (privately

published in 1904) Adams comes to terms with a civilization be

believes wholly informed by the concept of unity. Again and again

he insists upon the interdependency of all aspects of twelfth-

century thought, belief, and behaviour to which its cathedrals

testified. Taken as a whole, Mont-Saint-Michel, for example,

“expressed the unity of Church and State, God and Man, Peace and

War, Life and Death, Good and Bad; it solved the whole problem of

the universe. The priest and the soldier were both at home here…

the politician was not outside of it; the sinner was welcome; the

poet was made happy in his own spirit, with a sympathy, almost an

affection, that suggests a habit of verse in the Abbot as well as

in the architect” (44-45). Returning to Paris about a month after

the opening of the Exposition in April of 1900, Adams’s mind

might well be especially receptive to the “shock of the new.” Yet

writing on May 27th to Lady Curzon, he expresses his initial

indifference to the spectacle: “The truth is that Paris is

nothing but a permanent Fair, and people who are much here prefer

the streets to the Exposition. I fly to the remotest corner of

the Quartier” (Letters V, 122). In spite of having toured the

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Exposition several times in the spring and summer, it is not

until October that he makes mention of the electricity exhibits.

Writing to his brother Brooks, he complains of seeing “no one to

give me an idea of the whole field, and of course no single

corner of it has value without the rest.” This is somewhat out of

keeping with his subsequent elevation of the dynamos to godlike

stature. However, he dryly speculates that “since 1840,

electricity must altogether have altered economical conditions.

Looking forward fifty years more, I should say that superiority

in electric energy was going to decide the next development of

competition” (Letters V, 152). Later in the month, we can see the

rhetorical possibilities of the Exposition gradually take shape

in his mind: “I have tried my best [he writes to George Cabot

Lodge] to study the show completely, not for archistic but for

anarchistic reasons, to test my formula that the world must break

its own neck within thirty years” (Letters V, 157).

At last, in November, just as the Exposition is closing, the

structural elements of Adams’s antithetical vision begin to fall

into place, and his diction waxes figurative. As he explains to

John Hay, he has seen things in Paris “which run close to the day

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of judgment. It is a new century, and what we used to call

electricity is its God.” Specifically, the new form of energy has

made the science of the nineteenth century obsolete—“as

antiquated as the Ptolemaic system”—and has spread “the mustiness

of decay” over the whole period of Hay’s and Adams’s youth. More

generally, it has imposed a great gulf between the unity and

stability of an earlier civilization and the rapid pace of change

to be observed in the present. He then portrays himself as a

baffled emissary from an earlier age: “You are free to deride my

sentimentality if you like, but I assure you that I—a monk of St.

Dominic, absorbed in the Beatitudes of the Virgin Mother—go down

to the Champ de Mars and sit by the hour over the great dynamos,

watching them run as smoothly and noiselessly as planets, and

asking them—with infinite courtesy—where in Hell they are going”

(Letters V, 169). Nevertheless, conspicuous by its absence in

Adams’s privately recorded impressions of the Exposition is any

truly scientific appraisal; presumably he senses the inadequacy

of his own expertise. Indeed, in the letter to Brooks Adams cited

above, he specifically laments his gentleman’s education: “We

should both have gained by knowing a little mathematics. That

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deficiency…has destroyed half the working value of our minds as

trustworthy machines” (Letters V, 152).

The rhetorical orientation of Adams’s thinking on the

problem of incommensurability was undoubtedly assisted by the

overall shape of the Exposition itself. The evidence of Alexander

C.T. Geppert makes it clear that both in purpose and appearance

the fair was explicitly metonymic. With the objective of

presenting “on an unprecedented scale…a synthesis of the entire

nineteenth century while inaugurating the twentieth” (64), the

area occupied by the exhibitions was tantamount to a city

inserted within a city, “an increasingly integral part of the

urban fabric into which it was inscribed and re-inscribed,” to

the extent that “visitors found it difficult to distinguish

between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’” (74). The internal organization

of the Exposition was also designed to draw attention to the

interplay between part and whole. Though vast in scope, the

Exposition grounds were ostensibly united by the River Seine,

along which pavilions were strategically grouped in five distinct

sites, plus an external annexe (74-6). The continuity provided by

the Seine was supplemented by a moving sidewalk (“troittoir

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roulant”), a device that further enhanced the spectator’s

appreciation of the sequence of interlocking parts. As Geppert

notes, “In a state of almost sublime contemplation, [an] observer

reported how he had felt—travelling through time and space

simultaneously, gazing at all the other passengers passing by—as

if encountering a representative sampling of humankind.” In this

frame of mind, others appeared to him “not just [as] visitors to

the exposition,” but as symbols of “the whole of humanity as it

passes through time” (79-82). The overall relationship of part

to part (and part to whole) was also graphically demonstrated on

a grand scale in stereoscopic souvenir maps of the Exposition,

which revealed “how three distinct yet related spatial fabrics…

are superimposed on one another, and…literally and reciprocally

inscribed on each other…often referring back and forth from one

layer to the next” (84).

Like many visitors to the Exposition, Adams participated in

the pastime of working out the clou to each pavilion or exhibit,8

a rhetorical exercise encouraged—or at least anticipated—by the

planners themselves. This was a more sophisticated enterprise

than merely identifying the main attractions to which the others

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were subordinated. Rather, it involved the analysis of a very

complicated syntax. As Geppert explains, “a clou had to give a

clue to make the internal, spatial functioning of the site

comprehensible….The ideal clou was designed to transcend the

respective exhibition’s present and reach out into the future—

thereby negating the two fundamental exhibition principles of

transience and comprehensiveness” (95). Thus combining the

exigencies of space (or perspective) and time (or historical

unfolding), the game of cherchez le clou involves the spectator in

the spectacle in a way that draws attention to the rhetorical

situation. Not surprisingly, the exhibits on display in and

around the Palais d’Electricité were identified by many as the

centerpiece—the clou among clous—to the Exhibition as a whole

(Geppert 96). The imposing dynamos, the illuminated waterfall,

and even the individual incandescent light bulbs--9 these

installations like no others satisfied the criteria of drawing

the spectator in, directing attention to past scientific

discoveries (of which they were the apotheosis), and

prognosticating future advances (of which they were the token).

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As we have seen, Adams has added only one element of his own

to this popular (albeit intellectual) interpretive game. And yet

his antithesis of the Dynamo with the Virgin supplies a dimension

to the analysis that transcends the immediate rhetorical

situation, and that moves beyond considerations of time and

place. By juxtaposing the clou of the modern era with that of the

medieval, he fashions a model for historical interpretation that

does not merely combine the synchronic with the diachronic—but

that appears to enable the comparison of fully articulated

systems of thought. It is itself an ingenious sort of machine

that, like the dynamo, has the potential to transform, not

energy, but meaning.

Adams’s attempt at reconciling the Virgin with the Dynamo

takes two distinct forms in the Education—distinct, but

intertwined. On the one hand he thinks as a historical idealist;

on the other, he employs the assumptions of materialist accounts

of history. In both approaches, the problem of incommensurability

is uppermost in his mind. First, Adams defines the problem in

idealist terms: “Clearly if he was bound to reduce all these

forces to a common value, this common value could have no measure

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but that of their attraction to his own mind. He must treat them

as they had been felt; as convertible, reversible,

interchangeable attractions on thought.” He then promptly

reformulates his task in the idiom of the historical materialist.

It will be a case of “translating rays into faith,” a process he

likens to an experiment in chemistry or physics. “The knife-edge

along which he must crawl…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” (383). In his first guise, it will be

incumbent upon Adams to show that the Virgin and the Dynamo have

conditioned consciousness in commensurate ways. In his second,

still using a common unit of measurement, he will need to assess

their relative impact upon events, physical structures, and the

ways in which energy has been deployed throughout history. Of

course, Adams’s facility with both these movements of mind can be

surmised from the authorial stance that gives The Education its

peculiar character as autobiography.10 As the assessing eye (or

“I”), Adams has portrayed himself throughout the book as both

subject and object, both the slightly detached creator of his

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history and its somewhat hapless victim. The third-person subject

who has lived the life that is recorded becomes, in other words,

an object of study for the recording consciousness.

Adams’s initial unfolding of the idealist strand in his

thinking begins and ends with the admission that it is impossible

to maintain a membership in the world of the Virgin while

simultaneously acknowledging the power of the Dynamo. The attempt

to do so serves only to degrade the principles of nature,

femininity, fertility, and creativity that the Virgin (and her

pagan counterparts, Diana and Venus) at one time embodied. While

once a “force” to be worshipped, the semi-divine fecundity of the

Virgin translates into the modern lexicon only by way of a

debased admiration for feminine beauty, further refracted through

a Puritanical distaste for female sexuality: “In any previous

age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Every

one, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the

Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshipped for

her beauty. She was a goddess because of her force; she was the

animated dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most

mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund”

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(384).11 Contemporary ways of conceptualizing the primal force

once associated with the Virgin fail to bridge the “historical

chasm” because they are oblivious to her power to inspire—to

encourage traits in humanity, that is to say, which she herself

embodies. In the medieval mind, the Virgin was the creative

principle, and humankind her instrument. Not only has the modern

mind refused to consider itself an instrument of the divine, it

has also forgotten the roots of that relationship and sees only

its products. In his perplexity, Adams invokes the testimony of

Christian Europe: “On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres…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 American mind….The

idea survived only as art” (384-5). On the other side, though

Adams does not spell this out, the Dynamo has no power to

inspire, no human traits with which to identify. Thus: “he cared

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

energy” (385).

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Lest the reader suspect that Adams’s individual

consciousness is at fault in its failure to reconcile the Dynamo

with the Virgin, he turns to the experience of comparably

situated observers. The American scientist Samuel Pierpont

Langley, Adams’s informal guide to the technological side of the

Exposition, gets a passing mention (his point of view on the arts

is “useless” (385)), as does Edward Gibbon, whose contempt for

what he called “the stately monuments of superstition” is put

down to his ardent endorsement of Enlightenment rationality (“one

sees what one brings” (387)). Augustus St. Gaudens, Adams’s

younger contemporary and fellow-artist, is given more leeway as a

test-case for the continued appreciation of the Virgin as life-

force. But even in the sculptor, whose style was reminiscent of

Renaissance flamboyance, there is no trace of true affinity: his

“art was starved from birth,” and to him, the Virgin “remained as

before a channel of taste” (387). The strong suggestion is that

historical consciousness crumbles at the prospect of entertaining

the coexistence of these two opposed worldviews: “The idea [of

the Virgin as a form of power] died out long ago in the German

and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less

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sensitive to the force of female energy than Matthew Arnold at

the Grand Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power—

only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity,

taste, scarcely even as sympathy” (388). It follows that when a

living reality is thus reduced—especially among artists—to a

theoretical proposition, we are in the presence of profound

incommensurability.

Adams does not explain why the attempt to hold Virgin and

Dynamo together in one act of consciousness is fated to fail. He

is operating rather like the Gestalt psychologist who simply

points to the impossibility of perceiving the same drawing as a

hare and as a duck simultaneously.12 But the implications of his

statements have been thoughtfully considered by Christopher

Perricone whose argument goes some distance toward bringing the

two figures into a commensurate relationship. (Even though it too

ultimately fails, the failure is an instructive one.) The Virgin

and the Dynamo belong to the same conceptual category, says

Perricone, because of their mutual participation in the

transformation of physical form. In all ages, the artist’s

reliance on physical form is a given: what distinguishes the

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medieval artist from the modern is the perceived agency of the

Virgin. She functions as an emblem of artistic effort in her

half-human, half-divine power to bring something transformative

into the world. Analogously, “in art, there results a bringing to

life of inert matter and insignificant form. This ‘bringing to

life’ is a metaphorical way of saying that through art experience

some of us construct and others of us reconstruct meaning out of

otherwise meaningless stuff” (258). Metaphor is at the foundation

of this creativity but, as Perricone goes on to explain, it is

metaphor understood in the deepest sense of the word: “the poet

works hard to find the right words to make the right metaphors

for what he wants to say; but his ambition is not merely for

metaphor… No, the poet seeks through metaphor, a new reality. The

metaphor is a means, a power, not just an end” (269). The dynamo

is also transformative and, up to a point, one can grant its

power to generate new things. But the analogy breaks down when we

consider its contribution to the construction of meaning. In a

revealing formulation, Perricone places the dynamo in the

category of product, not process: “Like the dynamo, the work of

art is made out of something, sometimes something of iron or

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clay, other times of words or tones. Quite simply, art works are

embodied in a material and are in this respect a power in the

minimal sense that they produce sense experience” (258).

In these two sentences, the gestalt has shifted before our

very eyes. The medieval work of art has its source of meaning in

the Virgin and derives its transformative power from a

supernatural or ideal act of creativity. It plays a role in a

vertical process; it is the echo of a prior act. The modern work

of art, by contrast, is a product like the dynamo. (Conversely, the

dynamo, like the work of art, is a product.) The two are on the same

conceptual level; one product is not a metaphor or emblem of the

other; the power of the work of art is no more supernatural than

that of the dynamo; and both come into existence through a purely

human facility for transforming the physical materials of nature

into more-or-less meaningful objects. Perricone admits the

existence of a profound gap between an understanding of art that

derives its meaning from the Virgin, and that which explains

itself in terms of technical making. Indeed, he laments a loss:

“When art loses its magical power, then we have the sort of

situation Adams describes in reference to the Virgin…. Magical

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power is the power that binds together the ideal and the real; it

is the means by which the ideal is continually fed by the real.

As soon as the magic fails, as soon as the image is mere

representation, and we know it, we are no longer seduced; the

Virgin dies” (270). But underlying this rupture, as one artistic

vision is exchanged for another, is something more fundamental:

here, in fact, is the conceptual brick wall that Adams comes up

against. It consists in the recognition that the symbols by which

each system anchors itself in consciousness are not merely

antithetical, but categorically different. The one cannot be

converted into the other, nor can either one encompass or

synthesize its rhetorical counterpart. The Virgin is metaphor;

the Dynamo can only be metonymy.

When Adams picks up the tools of the historical materialist,

his task initially appears more straightforward. His own thinking

on the forces that facilitate material production has already

included the Virgin as a real entity. As he is soon to declare in

print, the hard physical labour of quarrying stone for the

building of Chartres Cathedral took place under the spiritual

supervision of the Virgin: “Without the conviction of her

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personal presence, men would not have been inspired… Every day,

as the work went on, the Virgin was present, directing the

architects, and it is this direction we are going to study”

(Mont-Saint Michel, 105). By the same token, in the Education, he

begins the job of translating “rays into faith” with the

plainspoken assertion that the pragmatic effects of inspiration

are all that matter in this calculus: “in mechanics…both energies

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

known force may be measured…. Symbol or energy, the Virgin has

acted as the greatest 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” (388). All that is

required, then, is an algorithm for the conversion of one form of

energy into the other: “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” (389). A conversion, of course, implies

a common unit of measurement; but the confident assertion that

such a thing must exist is not the same as discovering it. In

short order, Adams finds himself in conceptual difficulties that

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will impel him inevitably into the scientific study of energy. As

both the year 1900 and the Exposition come to a close, he

pictures himself covering “thousands of pages with figures as

formal as though they were algebra, laboriously striking out,

altering, burning, experimenting” (390). Several years will pass

before these endeavours can be articulated.

Before examining Adams’s continuing attempts to accommodate

thermodynamics in a theory of history, it is important to

acknowledge a certain ambiguity in his initial characterization

of the project. Paul J. Hamill Jr. is partly correct in saying

that Adams’s approach is “based on puns: on a literalization of

metaphors of power, force, momentum….It was a literary game,

played with metaphors” (8-9). There is merit, too, in his

observation that while the state of scientific knowledge in 1900

was such that a figurative understanding of physical processes

might still be considered a viable tool, its days were numbered:

“Even as Adams was formulating his images, the scientific ideas

he based them on were changing… Physics was about to enter those

mysteries of relativity and probability which have at last

removed it as a source of literary imagery” (10). But Hamill

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surely underestimates Adams in his suggestion that the “figures”

with which he anxiously covered those “thousands of pages” were

“figures of rhetoric, not numbers” (9). While Samuels’s gloss on

this passage concedes the hyperbole in the word “thousands,” he

reports that Adams’s “chief calculations related to foreign

trade, international balance of payments, and the international

production of coal and iron from tables of statistics” (655, n.

44). And as many references in the Education make clear, Adams was

no stranger to the use of numerical computation as a means toward

the understanding of physical (as well as biological and

economic) processes. He has read Darwin, has digested Comte, has

come to terms with Marx (224-5). Moreover, even as a political

historian, he has acknowledged the importance of quantitative

data. As Gary Wills reminds us, Adams’s History of the United States of

America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and his History of the

United States During the Administration of James Madison open and close with

chapters that provide a detailed picture of the material

conditions of the republic before and after the period in

question (3-4)13. In short, despite his self-deprecating humour,

28

it is a mistake to patronize Adams as a dilettante in the world

of the physical sciences.

Be that as it may, the chapter titled “A Dynamic Theory of

History,” which represents Adams’s 1904 return to the problem of

incommensurability, does not so much confront the difficulty as

make it disappear—into his own distinctive (and ironic) version

of a “night in which all cows are black.”14 Conceived as “the

development and economy of forces,” history becomes the study of

“anything that does, or helps to do work” (474). It is understood

that human actions are explicable in a schema that describes all

action as the result of the attraction of physical forces: “The

sum of forces attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called man is

attracted; he suffers education or growth; he is the sum of the

forces that attract him” (474). This is not determinism; rather,

it is an admission—commonplace from Locke onwards, at least—that

humans are physical organisms reliant upon their senses for

survival, growth, and the acquisition of knowledge. On this

latter form of activity Adams places special emphasis: “Fire

taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running

water probably taught him even more, especially in his first

29

lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him… the

grasses and grains were academies of study. With little or no

effort on his part, all these forces formed his thought, induced

his action, and even shaped his figure” (474-5). The accumulation

of sensory experience has the natural effect of building an image

of cosmic unity in the human mind, an image that is reinforced by

a record of success in cooperating with natural forces. Thus,

human progress becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy and

entails a tendency toward higher and higher levels of

unification: “Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest

genius; selection between them is the highest science; their mass

is the highest educator” (475). This is the sense in which

history is “dynamic.”

The moment in history when humans bestow the name of God

upon the highest unity they know does not detract from the

supremacy of “force;” it merely introduces a new, albeit

temporary, nomenclature: “to the highest attractive energy, man

gave the name divine, and for its control he invented the science

called Religion” (476). Stripped of any metaphysical properties,

the divine (or the Virgin) is thus no more and no less than

30

consolidated energy by another name; and the motive for this

symbolic displacement of allegiances is, by the same token, “as

simple an appetite for power as the tribal greed which led [man]

to trap an elephant” (476). The ruse (though Adams does not call

it that) is seemingly a good one, for the advancement of

humanity’s control of natural forces proceeds apace. Between 3000

BC and 1000 AD the European world makes strides in “economies of

energy,” in which are included mathematics, civil law, coinage,

road-building and ship-building, the use of tools and

instruments, and writing (476-7). The forward motion of energy

(which humans have harnessed, or to which they are harnessed—it

scarcely matters) appears inevitable.

Adams is aware, of course, that this seamless version of

history-as-progress cannot account for failure, disintegration,

and collapse. As a strong—though somewhat arbitrary—example of

how the forward surge of consolidation has been interrupted or

reversed, Adams offers the abdication of the emperor Diocletian

in 305. This moment of dissolution in the midst of consolidation

is a “scandalous failure of civilization at the moment it had

achieved complete success” (477); more problematically, the

31

ensuing fragmentation of the Roman Empire cannot be attributed to

its loss of control over physical forces. On the contrary, “the

trouble seemed to be rather that the empire developed too much

energy and too fast” (478). So this historical anomaly is

overcome by positing a second, countervailing force. The Edict of

Milan in 313 is thus read as an attempt to redirect the motion of

disintegration by encouraging allegiance to a higher locus of

energy, an almost parodic colonizing of the territory of heaven

under the banners of Rome (478). For a time, the Church will

serve as a credible repository of physical energy: “The emperors

used it like gunpowder in politics; the physicians used it like

rays in medicine; the dying clung to it as the quintessence of

force, to protect them from the forces of evil on their road to

the next life” (479).

But as Adams attempts to apply his dynamic theory to the

transition between the ancient world and the modern, he resorts

more and more frequently to shoehorning and sleight of hand.

There are spirals within spirals, as we observe in the fall of

Rome: “the economic needs of a violently centralizing society

forced the empire to enlarge its slave-system until the slave-

32

system consumed itself and the empire too” (480). There are

trade-offs on a cosmic scale, as Augustine attempts to justify

the loss of imperial power by urging a corresponding gain in

faith (480-81). And there are occult forces at work, as evidenced

by the prospect of “sharing infinite power in eternal life” that

inspired the medieval mind to feats of “Romanesque and Gothic

archictecture, glass windows and mosaic walls, sculpture and

poetry” (481)—the very phenomena, in short, that Adams has been

attempting to assimilate to the physical energies of nature.

There is no escaping the inference that even as the objects of

history are held resolutely in view, and even as we insist upon

their common identity as forms of power, the ground shifts under

our feet.

Not surprisingly, it is the function of the Scientific

Revolution (the precursor, it should be noted, to the cluster of

scientific discoveries made in and around 1900) to expose the

real relation between forms of energy that has been in play all

along. Despite the efficacy of religion as the apotheosis of

physical force, an improved understanding of matter in motion

(around 1600) reveals the assimilation of physical and spiritual

33

energies to be an error, a species of “thought-inertia” (484), or

—one cannot help but add—a metaphor: “Except as reflected in

himself, man has no reason for assuming unity in the universe, or

an ultimate substance, or a prime-motor” (484). In returning to a

straightforward empiricism, the new science insists upon the

primacy of physics over metaphysics. Francis Bacon, says Adams,

“urged society to lay aside the idea of evolving the universe

from a thought, and to try evolving thought from the universe.

The mind should observe and register forces—take them apart and

put them together—without assuming unity at all…. The mind was

thenceforth to follow the movement of matter, and unity must be

left to shift for itself (484). At a single stroke, then, the

dynamic theory of history collapses into itself. The doctrine of

the unity of all forces is revealed to be a superfluous, idealist

stowaway on the raft of material conditions that has all along

supported human interactions with nature.

At the end of the chapter, the Dynamic Theory reaches a

crescendo of frustration in Adams’s evocation of the inevitable

failure, collapse, or blurring of categories witnessed by more

recent interpreters of history. Far from yielding a more serene

34

view of humanity’s engagement with energy, early modern science

has simply bestowed new conflicts, clashes, and quarrels upon a

divided world: “Europe saw itself violently resisting, wrenched

into false positions, drawn along new lines as a fish that is

caught on a hook; but unable to understand by what force it was

controlled” (485). With a final fillip to the beautiful inutility

of Adams’s theory, the science of his own day confirms the

irrelevance of human comprehension of the forces by which it is

conditioned. In a pair of sentences that imitate the

“vertiginous” spin of the dynamo itself, Adams consigns his

ruminations to eternity:

Science has proved that forces, sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract, without stop; that man’s senses are conscious of few, and only in a partial degree; but that, from the beginning of organic existence his consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained in the lines of his sensitiveness; and that the riseof his faculties from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to the function of assimilating or storing outside force or forces. There is nothing unscientific in the idea that, beyond the lines of force felt by the senses, the universe may be—as it has always been—either a supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly attracts, and is either life or death to penetrate. (487)

35

As the author of a magnificent theory that explains very

little, Adams might have been wiser to let well enough alone, but

he makes a last attempt in the penultimate chapter of the

Education to pull the Dynamo and the Virgin together in a unified

framework. “A Law of Acceleration” renews his quest for a common

unit of measurement that will resolve their contradictions. A

unit of measurement is, by definition, metonymic. Whether it

represents manpower, coal-power, steam-power, electricity, or

nuclear energy, the numerical notation by which force is captured

can be none other than a part that stands in for a greater whole.

Adams, however, appears determined to extract a transcending

metaphor from the self-contained system that is measurement—he is

in pursuit of the measure of all measures, so to speak, a single,

rarified algorithm to which “all history, terrestrial or cosmic,

mechanical or intellectual, would be reducible” (489). There can

be no doubt that this “dynamometer” will be applied to both

concrete and abstract kinds of energy: “with thought as with

matter, the true measure is mass in its astronomic sense—the sum

or difference of attractive forces” (489-90). As a test-case

Adams proposes the rate of American coal production between 1840

36

and 1900 as an index of material and social progress. Allowing

for economies of scale, it is a rate that has doubled every

decade; conversely, the dollar value of the energy harnessed over

the same period has been cut in half (490). Promising as this

might seem as a model, Adams is forced to admit that arithmetical

calculations cannot convey the varying degrees of intensity of

energy produced by coal, let alone the “scores of new forces”

discovered in the nineteenth century, or the ways in which “old

forces had been raised to higher powers” (490). Torn between the

scientist’s need for accuracy in computation and the historian’s

desire for an elegant summation of composite patterns of

behaviour, Adams allows his dynamic theory to break down in a

lengthy but fruitless discussion of the inadequacy of various

mathematical approaches to the production and consumption of

energy. Along with these quibbles go any assurance of resolving

the incommensurability of the physical and the spiritual forms of

energy: “If any analogy whatever existed between the human mind…

and the laws of motion…the mind had already entered a field of

attraction so violent that it must immediately pass beyond…to

37

suffer dissipation altogether, like meteoroids in the earth’s

atmosphere” (496).

We should not underestimate Henry Adams, philosophically or

rhetorically. His autobiography, in the words of James M. Cox,

offers “an unforgettable encounter with the forces—political,

social, scientific, artistic, and historical—of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (140). It is also a

masterpiece of dubitatio, the rhetorical figure that asserts real

or presumptive doubt—and that by doing so validates the

rationality of doubting facts or one’s perception of them. Born

two decades before the American Civil War, and alive and alert in

1900, Adams represents the first generation to come to terms with

the coercive powers of modern technology. He uses his doubts to

reveal the fissure between the ways of life and habits of thought

that still sharply separates the modern or postmodern mind from

the hundreds of generations of humans who existed before the age

of automation. Even to have identified this drastic

reconfiguration of perceptions as a historical problem is an

achievement; to have couched it in terms that enable discussion

38

of the underlying principle of incommensurability between

cultures and within disciplines is an intellectual feat.

But Adams’s search for solutions is hobbled by the fact that

science, at the turn of the twentieth century, really is in one

of those crises that augur an upheaval in its basic assumptions.

At the very moment that Adams is cudgelling his brain in Paris,

five hundred kilometres away in Zurich, Albert Einstein is about

to enter his annus mirabilis; 1905 will see the publication of his

theory of special relativity and three other revolutionary

papers. The ways in which the scientific worldview will presently

be transformed could not have been anticipated by Adams, but he

is astute enough to see that prominent current theories have

reached an impasse. The evidence for this judgement is contained

in his Letter to American Teachers of History (1910), a work which begins

by acknowledging the futility of his previous attempts to

reconcile the categories of human and mechanical energy. The

purpose of this somewhat turgid piece of scholarship is to alert

historians to a widening gap between their modes of thinking and

those of scientists in various fields, physics in particular.

Adams’s admission that “the energy with which history had to deal

39

could not be reduced directly to a mechanical or physiochemical

process” (11) is not meant to imply that historians and

scientists should resign themselves to mutual incomprehension.

The state of science at the time of writing is, however, obscure—

not merely impenetrable by those trained in the arts, but

seemingly also by scientists themselves. The problem is

compounded, says Adams, by the proliferation of non-negotiable

oppositions between rival schools of thought. So, for example, as

can be observed in the discipline of applied mechanics, “schools…

are apt to get into trouble by using contradictory methods.” Such

rivalries are normally sorted out by the weaker theory giving way

to the stronger but, as Adams correctly notes, it is a sign of

crisis that “in this instance, the difficulty of naming the

weaker was extreme” (28-29).

On the grand scale as well, science appears to have lost

both direction and momentum. To reduce Adams’s general claim to

its essentials, while Darwinian biologists posit an overall trend

toward the improvement of all species through natural selection,

physicists who have grasped the second law of thermodynamics

foresee the general degradation of nature through entropy.

40

Historians and other non-scientists are called to embrace one

tendency or the other; they cannot accept both. As in the

Education, Adams is at a loss to discover common ground—either

among rival scientific theories, or between historians and

scientists. Which will best describe the fate of humanity:

degradation through inevitable physical processes, or elevation

through genetic mutation? Adams scrutinizes the work of

contemporary scientists and mathematicians—most of whose names

were to become irrelevant once the principles of relativity and

quantum mechanics had gained the ascendancy. In the end, he can

only exhort students of human (or “vital”) energy and those who

wrestle mentally with energy in its physical forms to explore

their mutual interests. Any future cooperation must be

predicated, however, on a systemic accord within the scientific

world. Adams’s concluding sentences emphasize the intractability

of the problem and the calibre of mind that will be required to

solve it: “If the physicists and physico-chemists can at last

find their way to an arrangement that would satisfy the

sociologists and historians, the problem would be wholly solved.

Such a complete solution seems not impossible; but at present,

41

for the moment as the stream runs, it also seems, to an impartial

bystander, to call for the aid of another Newton” (205-6).

As is so often the case with Adams, the remark is prescient.

In addition to anticipating Einstein’s radical reconfiguration of

the physical sciences, Adams might almost be credited with the

blueprint of the subsequent “synthesis of facts and theories” (1)

by which Ernest Schrödinger imaginatively bridged the gap between

physics and biology. In a series of lectures delivered in Dublin

in 1943 (published under the title What is Life?), Schrödinger

tackles a version of the question that had so perplexed Adams:

“how can events in space and time which take place within the

spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics

and chemistry?” (3). More particularly, Schrödinger focuses on

the puzzling fact that living things, in apparent defiance of the

second law of thermodynamics, do not succumb to entropy.

Schrödinger sidesteps the brick wall that had blocked Adams’s

investigations, not by “reducing” the behaviour of living

organisms to the laws of inert matter, but by showing that the

former are (by their very nature) an exception to the latter.

Animate objects differ from inanimate ones in the sense that they

42

counteract their own ultimately inevitable tendency toward

disorder (or entropy) by metabolizing order (or “negative entropy”).

“The essential thing in metabolism,” says Schrödinger, “is that

the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it

cannot help producing while alive” (76). It does so quite

literally by absorbing “the extremely well-ordered state of

matter in more or less complicated compounds” and by expelling

their remains “in a very much degraded form” (79). “Negative

entropy,” the stuff of life itself, has its origins in the

physical world—ultimately it is solar energy—yet, like the

gravity-defying monuments of the Christian Middle Ages (as Adams

might say), it rises above and resists the statistical tendency

of matter towards decay and death. With the benefits of such

later refinements in scientific thinking, we can now surmise that

Adams has been guilty of nothing more complicated than a category

mistake. Entropy alone cannot account for all the propensities of

physical energy; where he has seen only one tendency, there are

in fact two.

Twentieth-century developments in structural linguistics

and rhetoric seem also to consign Adams’s thinking on the Dynamo

43

and the Virgin to the realm of the category mistake. And they do

so for comparable reasons. In particular, Roman Jakobson’s

important distinction between the paradigmatic and the

syntagmatic axes of language (or between metaphoric and metonymic

operations) goes a long way toward accounting for the

incommensurability that Adams has discovered. Jakobson’s

investigation of the speech patterns of aphasiacs led him to

identify two separate disorders, one that affected the ability to

find words on the basis of their similarity, the other a

deficiency in perceiving the contiguity of word with word. His

influential essay, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of

Aphasiac Disorders” (1956) extrapolates from therapeutic case

studies so as to establish metaphor and metonymy not only as

“polar figures of speech” (125), but as the “gravitational poles”

(131) within both verbal and non-verbal systems of signs.

Metaphor is based upon similarity, and involves the speaker in a

selection from a storehouse of words that are somehow synonymous.

Thus, “wheat,” “corn,” and “grain” might equally stand in for

“bread.” Metonymy, by contrast, depends upon a principle of

combination: the speaker must make use of syntax rather than

44

paradigm to bind units of speech in a meaningful relationship.

“Fork,” “spoon,” and “plate” are thus metonymies for “eating.”15

Metaphor is “substitutive” where metonymy is “predicative” (129);

in other words, whereas metaphor creates identity (a = b),

metonymy forms sequence (a + b). In normal speech these two

operations are performed in tandem: but, as the existence of two

types of aphasia would indicate, they are in fact distinct; and

even fully competent speakers will be disposed towards one pole

or the other. As Jakobson notes, “under the influence of a

cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preference is

given to one of the two processes over the other” (129).

Jakobson locates the “primal significance” (131) of his

observations in the way they enable us to categorize systems of

signs that are vastly more sophisticated than the utterances of

individuals simply by attending to the “interaction of these two

elements.” Thus, for example, lyrics are rich in metaphor, while

“heroic epics” are more metonymic. At a higher level of

complexity, Romanticism and Symbolism exhibit the “primacy of the

metaphoric process,” while Realism accentuates metonymy and

synecdoche. The same binary distinction can be observed in the

45

visual arts: Jakobson contrasts the “manifestly metonymic

orientation of Cubism” with the “patently metaphoric attitude” of

the Surrealist school (130). And so on, in wider and wider arcs,

Jakobson illustrates the dichotomy with regard to a variety of

cultural systems, hinting that it may in fact have consequences

for “human behaviour in general” (131).

Certainly, with hindsight, its consequences for Adams’s

antithesis between the Virgin and the Dynamo are plain to see. In

the first place, if Jakobson is correct that metaphor and

metonymy are mutually exclusive linguistic acts, and if the

Virgin is metaphor and the Dynamo metonymy, it follows that there

can be no means of reconciling the one with the other. They are

not like words in different languages (which might be substituted

for one another), but components in different semantic

operations. One might as well attempt to reconcile nouns with

verbs, or see subjects as predicates, as compare the Virgin to

the Dynamo. To make this point graphically, in Jakobson’s model,

the intersection of the axis of selection with the axis of

combination is quite simply a point—that is, an abstraction, a

thing without dimension. The aporia that Adams experiences in

46

attempting to see the Dynamo in terms of the Virgin (or vice versa)

is thus a literal “pathlessness,” for no path exists. The cultural

paradigm that the Virgin sums up in her being cannot be brought

into alignment with the syntax of parts—or the stages in a

process of production--epitomized by the Dynamo.

But in the second place, more significantly, Adams’s failure

to find the common measure of his two tropes may not be a failure

after all. Very possibly, he has put his finger on the very trait

that distinguishes modern technological thinking from all that

has gone before. Where the medieval mind was steeped in metaphor,

the offspring of the age of automation are oriented towards

metonymy. Where the builders of the great cathedrals strove for

similarity, analogy, and unity, the modern mind prefers

structure, contiguity, and the functionality of the parts within

the whole. Of course, taken to an extreme, a predilection for

metonymy creates the very reverse of unity. As Jakobson points

out, an excess of metonymy leaves a listener “crushed by the

multiplicity of detail that is unloaded on him in a limited

verbal space… [and] physically unable to grasp the whole, so that

the portrait is often lost” (132). This seems to agree well with

47

Adams’s depiction of the confusion that reigned in science circa

1900.

A crushing multiplicity of detail happens as well to be the

source of Adams’s dissatisfaction with the shape of his

autobiography as a whole. In his specious “Editor’s Preface,”

(written by himself, but attributed to Henry Cabot Lodge) Adams

compares himself unfavourably to the “great artist” St. Augustine

whose moment in history conferred on him the privilege of working

“from multiplicity to unity.” As a modern writer, Adams himself

has been forced to “reverse the method and work back from unity

to multiplicity.” This scheme, he concedes, “became unmanageable

as he approached his end” (xxvii-xxviii). Nevertheless, Adams

makes a valiant effort to encompass the two opposed

predilections; he continually strives to keep a foot in both the

modern and the medieval world and to regard each with sympathy

and amusement. Even as he struggles with an intellectual

dichotomy beyond his power to resolve, he playfully pictures

himself travelling to the French cathedrals he so much admired by

means of his newly purchased Mercedes-Benz. Writing to Anne

Palmer Fell in June of 1904, he remarks ironically, “I buy it

48

that I may live at peace in the twelfth century, and go to church

regularly in a Romanesque cathedral every Sunday, and on the

Virgin’s fêtes. To get to Chartres, or from it, without a miracle

would do no one any good. I am sure the Virgin would like to be

with me. It’s just the sort of thing she most enjoyed” (Letters V,

591). This is not a solution to the problem of incommensurability

in the large sense, but it is probably as close as anyone can

come to thinking metonymically and metaphorically at the same

time.

49

Notes

1 This essay is in part a response to the contention of Randy Allen

Harris in his Rhetoric and Incommensurability that “if incommensurability

is a syndrome, then rhetoric—the search for ways to adjust ideas to

people, people to ideas—is the cure” (94).

2 Listing Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, and Einstein as having

initiated “major turning points in scientific development,” Kuhn

states that the discoveries of each “necessitated the community’s

rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favour of another

incompatible with it. Each produced a consequent shift in the

problems available for scientific scrutiny and in the standards by

which the profession determined what should count as an admissible

problem… And each transformed the scientific imagination in ways that

we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world

within which scientific work was done. Such changes, together with

the controversies that almost always accompany them, are the defining

characteristics of scientific revolutions” (6).

3 This is the contention of Isaiah Berlin, whose influential essay

“Two Concepts of Liberty” defined political liberty precisely as a

system capable of encompassing incommensurable moral goals. Pluralism

is thus “a truer and more human ideal than the goals of those who

seek in the great, disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of

‘positive’ self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of

mankind. It is truer because it does at least recognize the fact that

human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual

rivalry with one another.” Four Essays on Liberty (1969), 171. Harris

briefly discusses Berlin’s contributions to the incommensurability

debate (70-71).

4 Ernest Samuels notes that the exact date at which Adams began to

write The Education is impossible to ascertain. Henry Adams: The Major

Phase (311). Edward Chalfant dates Adams’s decision to write the work

“conjecturally” in September 1892. Improvement of the World: A Biography of

Henry Adams: His Last Life, 1891-1918 (2001), 26.

5 According to T.J. Jackson Lears, the engine-house was powered by

steam. “In Defense of Henry Adams.” The Wilson Quarterly 7:4 (Autumn,

1983), 92.

6 For a detailed account of this transition, see the section entitled

“The Decline of the Mechanical View” in Albert Einstein and Leopold

Infield, The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta (1966),

69-122.

7 Samuels dates Adams’s renewed interest in the creative spirit of

the Middle Ages to the summer of 1895 when he first toured Chartres

Cathedral in the company of George Cabot Lodge. Henry Adams: The Major

Phase, 208

8 The practice made an impression on Adams, for four years later he

searches again for the clou to the World’s Fair in St. Louis. Writing

to Elizabeth Cameron, he declares “the clou is the electric

illumination which must be the finest thing ever done” (Letters V,

587).

9 Geppert cites Lessing and Malkowsky as noticing the unique

character of the electrical exhibits (96).

10 Several commentators on The Education of Henry Adams have probed the

dual perspectives of the narration. See, for example James Goodwin,

“The Education of Henry Adams: A Non-Person in History” Biography 6:2

(Spring 1983): 117-135; Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, Chapter V,

“The Self” in ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1989): 71-83;

Joseph Parkhurst, “The Manikin and the Memorial Bronze: The Figure of

Defacement in The Education of Henry Adams.” Biography 17:2 (Spring

1994): 144-160; Andrew West, “The Education of Henry Adams: A

Bildungsroman.” South Central Review 25:2 (Summer, 2008): 91-108.

11 For an in-depth study of Adams’s “highly idiosyncratic conception”

of the Virgin, see Daniel L. Manheim, “Motives of his Own: Henry

Adams and the Genealogy of the Virgin” New England Quarterly 63:4 (Dec.

1990): 601-623.

12 Kuhn makes mention of the same example in connection with the

paradigm shift: “The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that

his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and

forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in

his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he

directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit)

but to the lines on the paper he is looking at.” Kuhn insists,

however, that this model is not a good illustration of what happens

during scientific revolutions: “The scientist can have no recourse

above or beyond what he sees with his eyes and instruments. If there

were some higher authority by recourse to which his vision might be

shown to have shifted, then that authority would itself become the

source of his data, and the behavior of his vision would become a

source of problems (114).

13 Wills attributes the many misunderstandings to which Adams has been

subjected to the distorting effect of The Education: “It is the one

Adams book regularly taught in the schools. It is taught by English

professors, who dwell on its stylistic ironies and eschatological

myths. Adams has become a wholly owned subsidiary of English

departments, while he is neglected by history departments. The

principal work on Adams was written by an English professor… Ernest

Samuels, whose three-volume biography traces a rising arc to the

summit of a ‘Major Phase’ in the final volume. All else is

preparatory to that. All else is read backward from that” (6).

14 Some have found echoes of a Hegelian dialectic in Adams’s

historical theories, but in my view these are faint indeed. Adams

never identifies an overall purposiveness in the patterns of history,

and he lacks a concept of “negation of the negation.” But see Joseph

G. Kronick, “The Limits of Contradiction: Irony and History in Hegel

and Henry Adams” Clio 15:4 (1986) 391-410.

15 My examples parallel Jakobson’s, but compress and simplify his wide

spectrum of case studies. For more detailed information, see his

investigations of the “similarity disorder” and the “contiguity

disorder” (120-128).

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Ed. Ernest Samuels. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Print.

------. A Letter to American Teachers of History. Washington, 1910. University

of Toronto Libraries. PDF file. Web.

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