Blackwell Reference Online

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Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere 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, with his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of force totally new . The Education of Henry Adams (1907) Henry Adams's meditation on “force” in the well-known “Virgin and the Dynamo” chapter of The Education climaxes in the language of physical violence. Throughout the chapter, Adams manages to describe the scientific discoveries on display at the Great Exposition in Paris with cool detachment but also to render the turbulence of his emotional state. “Force,” as Adams represents it, is the source of revolutionary power, a turning from one world order (the spiritual order of the Old World epitomized by the Virgin) to another (the technological world of scientific discovery represented by the Dynamo). The “historian,” Adams's self-nomination, can grasp the outlines of this shift, but only in the crudest of terms. The forms of historical knowledge that Adams has at his disposal no longer appear functional. He had sought a history that could produce more coherent meaning than mere sequence, that could create order out of the “chaos” of his time. ... log in or subscribe to read full text