In hmolscience, Charles Gaskell (1842-1919) (CR:23) was an English author, lawyer, and politician, a member of parliament from 1885-1892, noted for being one of the closest intellectual friends of American historian Henry Adams.
Overview
On 27 Apr 1863, Gaskell met Henry Adams, at Cambridge, after which the two were among each other’s “closest friends”. [2]
In 1866, amid his fallout with his older brother Charles Adams, Jr., Henry Adams switched to writing to Gaskell, instead of his older brother, as he formerly had done, as his new main intellectual correspondent. [7]
Quotes
The following are related quotes:
“Everything in this universe has its regular waves and tides. Electricity, sound, the wind, and I believe every part of organic nature will be brought someday within this law. The laws which govern animated beings will be ultimately found to be at bottom the same with those which rule inanimate nature, and as I entertain a profound conviction of the littleness of our kind, and of the curious enormity of creation, I am quite ready to receive with pleasure any basis for a systematic conception of it all. I look for regular tides in the affairs of man, and, of course, in our own affairs. In ever progression, somehow or other, the nations move by the same process which has never been explained but is evident in the oceans and the air. On this theory I should expect at about this time, a turn which would carry us backward.”
— Henry Adams (1863), “Letter to Charles Gaskell” (Oct) [1]
“Altogether, we go on with placidity unequalled, and the only question is what we live for. Nothing seems to come of it?”
— Henry Adams (1878), “Letter to Charles Gaskell” (Aug 21) [4]
“Gentle mathematicians and physicists still cling to their laws of thermodynamics, and are almost epileptic in their convulsive assurances that they have reached a generalization which will hold good. Perhaps it will. Who cares?”
— Henry Adams (1903), “Letter to Charles Gaskell” (Jun 14) [5]
“On the physico-chemical law of development and dynamics, our society has reached what is called the critical point where it is near a new phase or equilibrium.”
— Henry Adams (1908), “Letter to Charles Gaskell” (Sep 27) [6]
“The solution of mind is certainly in the magnet.”
— Henry Adams (1908), “Letter to Charles Gaskell” (Sep 27) [6]
“I have been studying science for ten years past, with keen interest, noting down my phrases of mind each year; and every new scientific method I try, shortens my view of the future. The last—thermodynamics—fetches me out on sea-level within ten years. I’m sorry Lord Kelvin is dead. I would travel a few thousand-million miles to discuss with him the thermodynamics of socialistic society. His law is awful in its rigidity and intensity of result.”
— Henry Adams (1909), “Letter to Charles Gaskell” (May 2) [4]
References
1. (a) Adams, Henry. (1909). “Letter to Charles Milnes Gaskell”, May 02.
(b) Adams, Henry, Samuels, Ernest. (1992). Henry Adams, Selected Letters (thermodynamics, pgs. 438, 466, 517). Harvard University Press.
2. Jordy, William H. (1952). Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (pg. 88). Yale University Press.
3. (a) Adams, Henry. (1863). “Letter to Charles Gaskell”, Oct.
(b) Adams, Henry. (1982). The Letters of Henry Adams, Volume 1: 1858-1868 (editor: Jacob Levenson) (pgs. 395-96). Harvard University Press.
(c) Stevenson, Elizabeth. (1997). Henry Adams: a Biography (pg. 69). Transaction Publishers.
(d) Taylor, Matthew A. (2008). Universes Without Selves: Cosmologies of the Non-Human in American Literature (pg. 108), PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University. ProQuest, 2009.
4. (a) Adams, Henry. (1878). “Letter to Charles Gaskell”, Aug.
(b) Adams, Henry. (1992). Henry Adams: Selected Letters (editor: Ernest Samuels) (pg. 150). Harvard University Press.
(c) Eder, Richard. (1992). “Henry Adams: Privileged Kibitzer: Henry Adams: Selected Letters, Edited by Ernest Samuels” (Ѻ), La Times, Mar 08.
5. (a) Adams, Henry. (1903). “Letter to Charles Gaskell”, Jun 14.
(b) Adams, Henry. (1992). Henry Adams: Selected Letters (editor: Ernest Samuels) (pgs. 437-39). Harvard University Press.
6. (a) Adams, Henry. (1908). “Letter to Charles Gaskell”, Sep 27.
(b) Adams, Henry. (1992). Henry Adams: Selected Letters (editor: Ernest Samuels) (pg. 504-06). Harvard University Press.
7. Jacobson, Joanne. (1992). Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams (pgs. 28-29; §:The Economy of Comradeship: Henry Adam’s Early Letters to Charles Milnes Gaskell, pgs. 29-38). University of Wisconsin Press.
8. Adams, Henry. (1907). The Education of Henry Adams (edited with Introduction and Notes: Ira Nadel) (Charles Gaskell, pgs. 199; meeting, pg. 174; James Gaskell, pgs. 174, 239, 244, 267; described 176, Mrs. 176, 239; Note: Charles Milnes Gaskell, pg. 451). Oxford University Press, 2008.
External links
● Charles George Milnes Gaskell – Wikipedia.
