“Nothing is to be gained by preaching this lesson as a form of energy. It would act as a dissipator of energy. Therefore I have taught it, or tried teaching it, only to the few men who could profit by it to economise their scholar’s energies,—to save them from wasting it on past processes. Economy is all I can see now, as true scientific object for education to pursue. Certain branches of education may soon be lopped off, to advantage.”
See main: Adams familyHenry Adams was born fourth of seven siblings to American historical editor, politician and diplomat Charles Francis Adams, Sr. (1807-1886) (Ѻ) — himself son of 6th American President John Quincy Adams and grandson of 2nd President John Adams (1735-1826) — and Abigail Brown Brooks (1808-1889) (Ѻ) — herself daughter of Boston insurance company millionaire Peter Chardon Brooks (1767-1849) (Ѻ); the seven offspring produced therefrom listed as follows:
1. Louisa Catherine Adams (1831-1870)
2. John Quincy Adams II (1833-1894)
3. Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835-1915)
4. Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
5. Arthur Adams (1841–1846)
6. Mary Gardiner Adams (1845-1928)
7. Peter Chardon Brooks Adams (1848-1927)
A 1921 cartoon reel (Ѻ) of Adams’ Education. |
“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.”
A depiction of the so-called "Henry Adams love triangle", in 1885, wherein, seemingly, the introduction of molecule B (Elizabeth Cameron), into the reaction system of Henry Adams, seems to have worked to precipitate the dissolution or detachment of molecule A (Clover Adams) from the AC marriage bond (Henry-Clover relationship), via the action of suicide, on 6 Dec 1885. [13] |
“I shall dedicate my next poem to you. I shall have you carved over the arch of my stone doorway. I shall publish your volume of extracts with your portrait on the title page. None of these methods can fully express the extent to which I am yours.”
“Social chemistry—the mutual attraction of equivalent human molecules—is a science yet to be created, for the fact is my daily study and only satisfaction in life.”
“I am not prepared to deny or assert any proposition which concerns myself; but certainly this solitary struggle with platitudinous atoms, called men and women by courtesy, leads me to wish for my wife again. How did I ever hit on the only woman in the world who fits my cravings and never sounds hollow anywhere? Social chemistry—the mutual attraction of equivalent human molecules—is a science yet to be created, for the fact is my daily study and only satisfaction in life.”
Adams nine-volume History of the United States of America, covering the years during the Jefferson Administration, 1801 to 1817, written with the sole intention of capturing a single rigorously-detailed moment of causality in the course of human history. Set shown is the nine-volume series published in 1889 to 1891 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Ѻ) |
“Historians undertake to arrange sequences,—called stories, or histories,—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about. Adams, for one, had toiled in vain to find out what he meant.
He had even published a dozen volumes of American history for no other purpose than to satisfy himself whether, by severest process of stating, with the least possible comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed rigorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary sequence of human movement. The result had satisfied him as little as at Harvard College.
Where he saw sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure. He cared little about his experiments and less about his statesmen, who seemed to him quite as ignorant as himself and, as a rule, no more honest; but he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by one method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”
— Henry Adams (1900), The Education of Henry Adams (§25: The Dynamo and the Virgin)
“In reading Henry Adams’ astonishing tract, I can not help suspecting at times that he is making fun of us historians; for he proposes, as I think you would agree with me, something which is not only impossible for anyone to carry out but which he himself never even attempted to carry out. In all the nine volumes of his American History, is there a hint of the second law of thermodynamics? Can you discover the slightest trace of a common formula for history and physical chemistry?”
Adams' 1858 Harvard graduation photo. |
“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.”
Left: a circa 1860s/70s photo of Adams. Right: a leather-bound edition of Adams' 1907 The Education of Henry Adams, his most-famous book. |
A reconstruction of Adams' phase rule of history conception. |
See main: A Letter to American Teachers of HistoryIn 1910, at the age of seventy-two, Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a "theory of history" based on the second law of thermodynamics, which seemingly had reign over all branches of science except, apparently, human history. In a way, this was a precursor to Arthur Eddington’s 1928 conception of the entropy “arrow of time” in history. [4] In short, he argued that the physics of dynamical systems of Rudolf Clausius, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William Thomson should be applied to the modeling of human history.
“The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.”— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams [34]
“Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity”— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams (Ѻ)
“The philosopher says--I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers:--No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.”— Henry Adams (1884), Esther (Ѻ)
Henry Adams is buried next to his wife Clover Adams, ‘without inscription’, at the Adams memorial, in section E of Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington D.C., erected in 1891 via commission of Adams as memorial to his wife, who had died (dereacted) in 1885 by suicide through the ingestion of potassium cyanide. The seated figure draped in cloth, is a representation of Guan Yin, the bodhisattva (bodhi) of compassion, constructed via the suggestions of Adams, who advised the artist, Irish-born American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), to contemplate iconic images from Buddhist devotional art. (Ѻ) |
“I have already told you that I got my first warning. With me, as with many other fools and some geniuses, the weak spot is what is known as Brocas convolution of the brain, which contains the shelves of memory. Suddenly or slowly the shelves close and can’t be opened. Mine have been closing normally and slowly, but one day in July I happened to go into Audrain’s place to ask a question, and, to my consternation, my French tumbled out all in a heap. The words came without connection. The man looked at me queerly; I mumbled something, and got out into the street; by the time I got back to my rooms, the paralysis had passed; but I knew quite well what it meant.”
“If I can get two more years, without a breakdown, I shall do well enough, but I doubt it. The margin is wide.”
“No inscription, date, letters, or other memorial, except the monument I have already constructed [shown above], shall be placed over or near our grave.”
“On the matter of science, the consensus of conventional wisdom in Adams scholarship regards him as more of a crank than a prophet.”
“Adams [is the] greatest stylist American historical writing has produced.”— Morris Zucker (1945), The Philosophy of American History: The Historical Field Theory [23]
“There has never been any doubt that the Adams family was America's first family in our politics and memory.”— Paul Nagel (1999), Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family (Ѻ)
“Henry Adams was the preeminent voice of social thermodynamics. “— Paul Staiti (2001), “Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics” (Ѻ)
See main: Adams quotesThe following are quotes by Adams:
“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) [20]
“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) [29]
“Social chemistry—the mutual attraction of equivalent human molecules—is a science yet to be created, for the fact is my daily study and only satisfaction in life.”— Henry Adams (1885), “Letter to Clover Adams” (Apr 12) [10]
“A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence [4 Jul 1776], twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution [17 Sep 1787]; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.”— Henry Adams (1890), A History of the United States of America (Ѻ)
“An atom is a man and Maxwell’s demon, who runs the second law, ought to be made president.”— Henry Adams (1903), “Letter to Brooks Adams”, May 2 [14]
“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) [32]
“Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.”— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams (Ѻ)
“Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.”— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams (Ѻ)
“Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.”— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams (Ѻ)
“A dynamic law requires that two masses—nature and man—must go on, reacting one upon each other, without stop, as the sun and comet react on each other, and that any appearance of stoppage is illusive.”— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams (Ѻ)
“Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.”— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams (Ѻ)
“Intimates are predestined.”— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams (§13: The Perfection of Human Society) (Ѻ)
“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) [31]
“The solution of mind is certainly in the magnet.”— Henry Adams (1908), “Letter to Charles Gaskell” (Sep 27) [31]
“I have run my head hard up against a form of mathematics that grinds my brains out. I flounder like a sculpin in the mud. It is called the ‘law of phases’, and was invented at Yale [by Gibbs]. No one shall persuade me that I am not a phase.”— Henry Adams (1908), “Letter to Elizabeth Cameron” (Sep 29) [28]
“I’m looking for a ‘young and innocent physico-chemist who wants to earn a few dollars by teaching an idiot what is the first element of theory and expression in physics.’”— Henry Adams (1908), “Note to John Jameson” (Dec) [9]
“My essay ‘The Rule of Phase [Applied to History]’ is a ‘mere intellectual plaything, like a puzzle’ [to Brooks]. I am interested in getting it into the hands of a ‘scientific, physico-chemical proofreader’ and I am willing to pay ‘liberally for the job’ [to Jameson].”— Henry Adams (1909), Notes to Brooks Adams and John Jameson [9]
“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) [12]
Adams' 1910 A Letter to American Teachers of History, wherein he advises history professors to begin to use both human molecular theory and thermodynamics to teach history, and his 1919 The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, which contains his: The Tendency of History (1894), his 44-page essay "The Phase Rule Applied to History" (1909), in which he identifies Willard Gibbs as the theorist behind the phases of history, and his A Letter to American Teachers of History (1910). |