^5Mf«NIVn?% v^lOSANCflG^x ^OF-CAUFORi^ ^OF-CAU 1 -^ 'M. f % yf RY^/. -^lUBW yl^ ^^OJIW ^OFCAU ii# ^^Aavai ^iir ;iiiii/ ^ i 1^ «A>«UNIVERy/A avIOSAW § 1 I % "^mim 1^- '^]ym S. 1 f •'audiivj'iw A LETTER TO AMERICAN TEACHERS OP HISTORY BY HENRY ADAMS WASHINGTON 1910 D ie03 H Street, Washington, D. C. Dear Sir : Availing myself of the privilege commonly granted, in the liberal professions, to age and seniority, I use the freedom of an old colleague in offering this small volume for your accept- ance. Some fifteen years ago, on retiring from the Presidency of the Historical Association, I made a short address on the relations of the Historical Department to society ; and, had such a custom existed, I should have gladly enlarged the paper to the dimensions of a Report. The volume now sent you, is, in effect, such a Report, unofficial and personal. Touching, as it does, some of the most deli- cate relations of University Instruction in rival departments, the book has too much the air of provoking controversy. I do not know that iii j.«i^tf-< :'•' '« ,.' 'I iv LETTER TO TEACHERS controversy would do harm, but I see nothing to be gained by provoking it. For the moment, the problem is chiefly one of technical instruc- tion ; of grouping departments ; at most, of hierarchy in the sciences. Some day, it may become a question whether one department, or another, is to impose on the University a final law of instruction ; but, for the present, it is a domestic matter, to be settled at home before inviting the world to interfere. There- fore, the volume will not be published, or offered for sale, or sent to the press for notice. For the same reason, the volume needs no acknowledgment. Unless the questions which it raises or suggests seem to you so personal as to need action, you have probably no other personal interest than that of avoiding the discussion altogether. Few of us are required to look ten, or twenty years, or a whole gen- eration ahead, in order to realise what will then be the relation of history to physics or LETTER TO TEACHERS V physiology, and even if we make the attempt, we are met at the outset by the difficulty of allowiug for our personal error, which is, in so delicate a calculation, an element of the first importance. Commonly, our personal error takes the form of inertia, and is more or less constant and calculable. For myself, the preference for movement of inertia is decided. The risk of error in changing a long-established course seems always greater to me than the chance of correction, unless the elements are known more exactly than is possible in human affairs ; but the need of determining these elements is all the greater on that account ; and this volume is only a first experiment towards calculating their past, present and future values. Mathematicians assume the right to choose, within the limits of logical contradiction, what path they please in reaching their results, provided that when they come to the end of their process, they consent to test their result vi LETTER TO TEACHERS by the facts of experience. More than this cannot fairly be asked of historians. If I call this volume a letter, it is only because that literary form affects to be more colloquial or more familiar than the usual scientific treatise ; but such letters never require a response, even when they invite one ; and in the present case, the subject of the letter involves a problem which will cer- tainly exceed the limits of a life already far advanced, so that its solution, if a solution is possible, will have to be reached by a new generation. 16 February, 1910. CHAPTER I THE PEOBLEM The mechanical theory of the uni- verse governed physical science for three hundred years. Directly suc- ceeding the theological scheme of a universe existing as a unity by the will of an infinite and eternal Creator, it affirmed or assumed the unity and indestructibility of Force or Energy, as a scientific dogma or Law, which was called the Law of the Conserva- tion of Energy. Under this Law the quantity of matter in the universe remained invariable; the sum of move- ment remained constant ; energy was indestructible ; '' nothing was added ; 1 2 LETTER TO TEACHERS nothing was lost;" nothing was created, nothing was destroyed. Towards the middle of the nine- teenth century, — that is, about 1850, — a new school of physicists appeared in Europe, dating from an Essay on the Motive Power of Heat, published by Sadi Carnot in 1824, and made famous by the names of William Thom- son, Lord Kelvin, in England, and of Clausius and Helmholz in Germany, who announced a second law of dynam- ics. The first law said that Energy was never lost; the second said that it was never saved ; that, while the sum of energy in the universe might remain constant, — granting that the universe was a closed box from which nothing could escape, — the higher powers of energy tended always to fall lower, and that this process had no known limit. THE PKOBLEM 3 The second law was briefly stated by Thomson in a paper " On a universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy," published in October 1852, which is now as classic as Kepler's or Newton's Laws, and quite as necessary to a scientific education. Quoted exactly from Thomson's "Math- ematical ?iid Physical Papers " (Cam- bridge, 1882, Vol. I, p. 514), the Law of Dissipation runs thus : — "1. There is at present in the material world a universal tendency to the dissi- pation of mechanical energy. " 2. Any restoration of mechanical energy, without more than an equivalent of dissipation, is impossible in inanimate material processes, and is probably never effected by means of organized matter, either endowed with vegetable life or subjected to the will of an animated creature. 4 LETTER TO TEACHERS " 3. Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come, the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present consti- tuted, unless operations have been, or are to be performed, which are impos- sible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world, are subject." When this young man of twenty- eight thus tossed the universe into the ash-heap, few scientific authorities took him seriously ; but after the first gasp of surprise physicists began to give him qualified support which soon became absolute. " This conclusion made much noise," says Ostwald ('' L'Energie," Paris, 1910) ; " the more because Helm- holz and Clausius gave in their adher- ence to it. We owe to the latter the THE PROBLEM \^ 5 following formula : — ' The Entropy of the Universe tends toward a maximum.' " To physicists, this law of Entropy became " a prodigiously abstract con- ception," according to the familiar phrase of M. Poincare ; but to the vulgar and ignorant historian it meant only that the ash-heap was constantly increasing in size ; while the public understood little and cared less about Entropy, and the literary class knew only that the Newtonian universe, in which they had been cradled, admitted no loss of energy in the solar system, where the planets, at the end of their planetary years, returned exactly to their positions at the beginning. Gravi- tation showed no waste of energy what- ever, except where friction occurred, but had planets gone off like comets, and never returned, the scholar of 1860 6 LETTER TO TEACHERS would still have feared to question the scientific dogma which asserted reso- lutely, without qualification, the fact that nothing in nature was lost. If no other assurance had satisfied him, all doubts were silenced by the famous outburst of eloquence with which Tyn- dall concluded his Lectures in 1862, on " Heat as a Mode of Motion." Old men can still recall how, after explain- ing that "the quantity of the solar heat intercepted by the earth is only o orvM r\r^r\ r\r\f\ ^f tlic total radiation," Z,oUU,UUU,UUU Tyndall refrained from telling what became of the heat not intercepted by the earth, and went on to expatiate with enthusiasm on the unity of the universe and its energy : — " Look at the integrated energies of our world, — the stored power of our THE PROBLEM 7 coalfields ; — our winds and rivers ; — our fleets, armies and guns ! What are they ? They are all generated by a portion of the sun's energy which does not amount to 2,300,000,000 °^ the whole. This, in fact, is the entire fraction of the sun's force intercepted by the earth, and in reality we convert but a small fraction of this fraction into mechanical energy. Multiplying all our powers by millions of millions, we do not reach the sun's expenditure. And, still, notwithstanding this enor- mous drain, in the lapse of human history we are unable to detect a dimi- nution of his store. Measured by our largest terrestrial standards, such a reservoir of power is infinite ; but it is our privilege to rise above these standards, and to regard the sun him- 8 LETTER TO TEACHERS self as a speck in infinite extension, — a mere drop in the universal sea. We analyse the space in which he is immersed, and which is the vehicle of his power. We pass to other systems and other suns, each pouring forth energy like our own, but still without infringement of the law which reveals immutability in the midst of change, which recognises incessant transference and conversion, but neither final gain nor loss. This law general- ises the aphorism of Solomon, that there is nothing new under the sun, by teaching us to detect everywhere, under its infinite variety of appearances, the same primeval force. To nature nothing can be added ; from nature nothing can be taken away ; the sum of her energies is constant, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of THE PROBLEM 9 physical truth, or in the application of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total, and out of one of them to form another. The law of conservation rigidly excludes both creation and annihilation. Waves may change to ripples and ripples to waves, — magnitude may be substituted for number, and number for magni- tude, — asteroids may aggregate to suns, suns may resolve themselves into florae and faunae, and florae and faunae melt in air, — the flux of power is eternally the same. It rolls in music through the ages, and all terrestrial energy, — the manifestations of life as well as the display of phenomena, are but the modulations of its rhythm." This magisterial tone irritated some of the new physicists to the point of hinting that Tyndall deliberately mis- 10 LETTER TO TEACHERS stated the facts of physics, for fear lest some one should drive him into a logical snare, ending in the necessity of admitting a Creation. In flat con- tradiction to Tyndall, Kelvin and Tait affirmed that " the same primeval force " could never be detected, — much less recovered ; that all nature's energies were slowly converting themselves into heat and vanishing in space, until, at the last, nothing would be left except a dead ocean of energy at its lowest possible level, — say of heat at 1° Centi- grade, or — 272° C. below freezing point of water, — and incapable of doing any work whatever, since work could be done only by a fall of tension, as water does work in falling to sea-level. Between such authorities the unscien- tific student could not interfere. Na- turally, all his sympathies were with THE PROBLEM H Tyndall. The idea that the entire sidereal universe could have gone on for eternity dissipating energy, and never restoring it, seemed, at the least, unreasonable ; while the astronomers drew up lists of nebulae by hundreds in the A^ery act of generating universes, and the geologists showered the theory with rocks in order to show that the sun had already reached an age many times greater than Thomson was willing to allow it. No one knew, although everyone explained what had caused the inequali- ties of energy ; least of all could the historian of human society assert or deny that energy could be created or could not be destroyed. The subject was beyond his province. Since the Church had lost its authority, the historian's field had shrunk into narrow 12 LETTER TO TEACHERS limits of rigorously human action ; but, strictly within those limits, he was clear that the energy wdth which his- tory had to deal could not be reduced directly to a mechanical or physico- chemical process. He was therefore obliged either to deny that social energy was an energy at all ; or to assert that it was an energy independent of physi- cal laws. Yet how could he deny that social energy was a true form of energy when he had no reason for existence, as professor, except to describe and discuss its acts ? He could neither doubt nor dispute its existence without putting an end to his own ; and therefore he was of necessity a Vitalist, or adherent of the doctrine that Vital Energy was independent of mechanical law. Vita- lists are of many kinds. Students who are curious on the subject can consult THE PROBLEM 13 the " Vitalismus als Gescliichte imd als Lehre," by Dr. Hans Driesch (Leipzig, 1905) ; but they will understand it little better afterwards than before. For human history the essential was to convince itself that social energy, though a true energy, was governed by laws of its own. To the generation of Lord Macaulay and George Bancroft, the problem seemed scarcely serious. They could ignore the dispute, since Thomson agreed with Tyndall so far as to admit that, for human purposes, the Dissipa- tion of Solar Energy was so slow as to be indistinguishable from Conservation of Energy. The historian never even took the trouble to inform himself of the bearings of the problem. Indeed at that time, the Universities showed a nervous unwillingness to teach phi- 14 LETTER TO TEACHERS losophy at all, and were especially averse to all pliilosopliies of history, whether inspired by Hegel or by Comte, by Buckle or by Karl Marx. The law that history was not a science, and that society was not an organism, calmed all serious effort ; and histo- rians turned to the collection of facts, as the geologists turned to the collec- tion of fossils. For them it was a happy period, and literature profited by it. In fact, the problem was by no means simple, and the historian might have made himself a very competent professor of Physics without the small- est profit to history. Kelvin's law asserted the constant dissipation of energy, but the process was far more complex than appeared in this state- ment. Energy had a way of coming THE PROBLEM 15 and going in phases of intensity much more mysterious than the energy itself. Catastrophe was its law. The sun according to Tyndall, wasted into space practically all its energy except an imperceptible portion that happened to fall on the earth ; but even this por- tion was not utilisable, for human purposes, to boil a pint of water, at sea-level, without assistance. Ice, water, and vapor were phases sharply distinct. So the imperceptible portion of solar energy which fell on the earth, reappeared by some mysterious process, to an infinitely minute measure, in the singular form of intensity known as Vital Energy, and disappeared by a sudden and violent change of phase known as death. Man had always flattered himself that he knew — or was about to know — something that would 16 LETTEE TO TEACHERS make his own energy intelligible to itself, but he invariably found, on further inquiry, that the more he knew, the less he understood. Vital energy was, perhaps, an intensity ; — so, at least, he vaguely hoped; — he knew nothing at all ! No one knew anything ; and yet the analogy between Heat and Vital Energy, suggested by Thomson in his Law of Dissipation, — and received by the public with sleepy indiiference, — was insisted upon by the physicists in accents that became sharper with every generation, until it began to pass the bounds of scientific restraint. Already in 1884, Faye, in his " Origin of the World," fairly threatened mankind with its doom : — " We must therefore renounce those brilliant fancies by which we try to THE PEOBLEM 17 deceive ourselves in order to endow man with unlimited posterity, and to regard the universe as the immense theatre on which is to be developed a spontaneous progress without end. On the contrary, life must disajDpear, and the grandest material works of the human race will have to be effaced by degrees under the action of a few physical forces which will survive man for a time. Nothing will remain : — * etia7ii periere ruinw .' ' " Thus, it seemed, that whatever the universities thought or taught, the physicists regarded society as an organ- ism in the only respect which seriously concerned historians : — It would die ! If life was to disappear, the form of Vital Energy known as Social Energy, must also, presumably, go to increase the Entropy of the Universe, thus 2 y 18 LETTER TO TEACHERS proving — at least to the degree neces- sary and sufficient to produce convic- tion in historians, — that History was a Science. Although Faye settled this point, as a matter of thermodynamics, as early as 1884, his successors in authority have gone on repeating it with increasing energy of expression ever since. To these outbursts of prophecy the story will have to recur, but for the moment, the only point requiring insistence is that sixty years of progress in science have only inten- sified the assertion that Vital Energy obeys the law of thermal energy. The sketch of Kelvin's Life and Work by Professor Andrew Gray, — Professor of "Natural Philosophy in the University ■of Glasgow, — published in 1908, renews the warning in almost angry terms. Once more he asserts, as an axiom of THE PKOBLEM 19 physics, that all work is done by con- version of one energy, or intensity, into another, and a lower : — " If this conversion is prevented, all processes which involve such conversion must cease, and among these are vital pro- cesses. ... It will be the height of imprudence to trust to the prospect, not infrequently referred to, at the present time, of drawing on the energy locked up in the atomic structure of matter. . . After a large part of the whole existent energy has gone to raise the dead level of things, no difference of temperature, adequate to work between, will be possible, and the inevitable death of all things will approach with headlong rapidity." This may serve to represent the very last opinion of physicists. The latest expression of metaphysics, — for the 20 LETTER TO TEACHERS present purpose, — shall be taken from the notes added by Eduard von Hart- mann to the last edition of his works, dated in 1904:— " If the social consciousness of today rebels so strongly against the thought that vital processes will come to an end in the world, the chief reason is because society has indeed absorbed the first principle of thermodynamics, — the conservation of energy, — but not the second, the progressive degradation of energy by dissipation and levelling of intensities ; and, in consequence, has erroneously interpreted the first law as though it contained an eternal guaranty of the endlessness of vital processes . . . In reality, the only question is whether, in the actual result, the world-process will work itself out slowly in prodigious lapse of time, according to purely THE PROBLEM 21 physical laws ; or whether it will find its end by means of some metaphysical resource when it has reached its cul- minating point. Only in the last case would its end coincide with the fulfil- ment of a purpose or object ; in the first case, a long period of purposeless existence would follow after the culmi- nation of life." (Ausgewahlte Werke, VIII, pp. 572-573. Leipzig, 1904.) Thomson's famous paper on "A uni- versal tendency in Nature to the Dissi- pation of Energy" was published in 1852. Seven years afterwards, Charles Darwin announced his law of Evolu- tion, which involved a contradiction, — as von Hartmann implies, — to both the laws of thermodynamics. Thom- son, physicist and mathematician, had thought only of providing the energy necessary to move his world ; Darwin 22 LETTER TO TEACHEES neither physicist nor mathematician, took the necessary energy as given. Possibly, if he thought about it at all, he assumed the Law of Conservation as the mechanical equivalent of Lyell's Law of Uniformity ; but he seemed scrupulously careful to avoid asserting either principle. On his own account he never committed himself to the doctrine that, within the geologi- cal record, organization had largely advanced, or risen to higher powers, but he did assert, and permitted his followers to assert much more broadly that " the inhabitants of the world, at each successive period in its history, have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale " ; meaning probably that they were better fitted to their condi- tions, but conveying the idea that THE PKOBLEM 23 their vital powers had risen from lower to higher by the spontaneous struggle of the organism for life. This popular understanding of Darwinism had little to do with Darwin, whose great service, — in the field of history, — consisted by no means in his per- sonal theories either of natural selec- tion, or of adaptation, or of uniform evolution ; which might be all aband- oned without affecting his credit for bringing all vital processes under the law of development or evolution, — whether upward or downward being immaterial to the principle that all history must be studied as a science. Society naturally and instinctively adopted the view that Evolution must be upward ; and Haeckel performed the feat of measuring the height of each step from protozoa up to man ; but still 24 LETTER TO TEACHERS witliout further attempt to account for the source or the nature of the numer- ous energies implied in the process of elevation. Apparently he felt no need of invoking any energy beyond that of uniform solar heat, and took for granted the power of all organisms to rise in potential by its absorption. Thus, at the same moment, three contradictory laws of energy were in force, all equally useful to science : — 1. The Law of Conservation, that nothing could be added, and nothing lost, in the sum of energy. 2. The Law of Dissipation, that nothing could be added, but that Intensity must always be lost. 3. The Law of Evo- lution, that Vital Energy could be added, and raised indefinitely in poten- tial, without the smallest apparent compensation. THE PROBLEM 26 Although the physicists are far from clear in defining the term Vital Energy, and are exceedingly timid in treating of Social Energy, they are positive that the law of Entropy applies to all vital processes even more rigidly than to mechanical. " Thus it is," says Ostwald C' L'Energie," Paris, 1910, p. 116), '' that animated beings always grow old, and never young." As the point is pivotal for evolution, it must be under- stood as admitted in the Law of Degra- dation. One of the latest authorities, M. Dastre, professor of physics at the Sorbonne, in his volume called " La Vie et la Mori" (Paris, 1902), lays down the dogma in one line : — '' Vital Energy ends as its last term, in thermal Energy." He admits that this rule is too absolute ; it has exceptions ; but the exceptions are not serious : — 26 LETTER TO TEACHERS " The cycle of energy ends occasion- ally in mechanical energy (movement), and in some smaller degree, in other energies, as for example, in the electric energy produced by nervous action and the muscles in all animals ; or in functions of special organs, as in the rays, torpedoes, and thunder-fish ; or finally in the luminous energy of phosphorescent animals ; but these are secondary matters." The essential is that the second law of thermodynamics rules biology with an authority fully as despotic as it asserts in physics. " If chemical energy is the generative maternal form of the vital energies, calorific energy is the form of waste (dechet), of excrement ; the form which is degraded, according to the expression of the physicists. ... In the animal organism, heat is transformed into THE PEOBLEM 27 nothing : it is dissipated " (p. 109). " The animal world expends the energy which the vegetable world has accumu- lated." The vegetable world draws its energy from the sun, and " the animals end by restoring it, in the form of dissipated heat, to the cosmic space." This teaching is explicit. Animal energies accent and emphasize the law of physics that nature, always and everywhere, tends to an equilibrium by levelling its intensities. Mechanical energies admit apparent exceptions, like gravitation, but animal energies admit none. All grow old and die. This is the teaching of physics, and although most physicists show caution in defining exactly what they mean by vital energy, the law, as they announce it, is relentless. For human purposes, whatever does work is a form 28 LETTER TO TEACHERS of energy, and since historians exist only to recount and sum up the work that society has done, either as State, or as Church, as civil or as military, as intellectual or physical, organisms, they will, if they ohey the physical law, hold that society does work by degrad- ing its energies. On the other hand, if the historian follows Haeckel and the evolutionists, he should hold that vital energy, by raising itself to higher potentials, without apparent compensa- tion, has accomplished its work in defiance of both the laws of thermo- dynamics. Down to the end of the nineteenth century nothing greatly mattered, since the actual forces could be fairly well calculated or accounted for on either principle, but schools of applied mechan- ics are apt to get into trouble by using THE PROBLEM 29 contradictory methods. One process or the other acquires an advantage. The weaker submits, hut in this instance, the difficulty of naming the weaker was extreme. That the Evolutionist should surrender his conquests seemed quite unlikely, since he felt behind him the whole momentum of popular success and sympathy, and stood as heir-apparent to all the aspirations of mankind. About him were arranged in battalions, like an army, the energies of government, of society, of democracy, of socialism, of nearly all literature and art, as well as hope, and whatever was left of instinct, — all striving to illustrate not the Descent but the Ascent of Man. The hostis humani generis, the outlaw and enemy, was the Degradationist, who could have no friends, because he proclaimed the 30 LETTER TO TEACHERS steady and fated enfeeblement and extinction of all nature's energies ; but that he should abandon his laws seemed a still more preposterous idea. Never had he asserted them so aggressively, or with such dogmatic authority. He held undisputed possession of every technical school in the world, and even the primary schools were largely under his control. His second law of ther- modynamics held its place in every text-book of science. The Universities and higher branches of education were greatly, if not wholly, controlled by his methods. The field of mathe- matics had become his. He had no serious intellectual rival. Few things are more difficult than to judge how far a society is looking one way and working in another, for the points are shifting and the rate of speed is uncer- THE PROBLEM 31 tain. The acceleration of movement seems rapid, but the inertia, or resis- tance to deflection, may increase with the rapidity, so that society might pass through phase after phase of speed, like a comet, without noting deflection in its thought. If a simpler figure is needed, society may be likened to an island surrounded by a rising ocean which silently floods its defences.. One after another the defences have been abandoned, and society has climbed to higher ground supposed to be out of danger. So the classic Gods were abandoned for monotheism, and schol- astic philosophy was dropped in favor of the Newtonian ; but the classic Gods and the scholastic philosophy were always popular, and the newer philoso- phies won their victories by developing compulsory force. Inertia is the law 32 LETTER TO TEACHERS of mind as well as of matter, and inertia is a form of instinct ; yet in western civilisation it has never held its own. The pessimism or unpopularity of the law will not prevent its enforce- ment, if it develops superior force, even if it leads where no one wants to go. The proof is that the law is already enforced in every field except- ing that of human history, and even human history has not wholly escaped. In physics it rules with uncontested sway. In physiology, the old army of Evolutionists have suffered defections so serious that no discipline remains. A full account of the situation would need an amount of knowledge that is now granted to no one ; but the most trifling popular science is enough for popular teachers like ourselves. THE PROBLEM 33 Everyone knows tliat Darwin owed mucli of his science as well as of his success to Sir Charles Lyell, who sup- plied him with the doctrine of uni- formity and the evidence to support it. Darwin's own assumptions or theo- ries were quite sufficiently difficult of proof, without adding the doctrine of uniformity ; but Sir Charles's ability and authority carried the point in spite of Kelvin's protest that uniformity could not be admitted as possible under the second law of thermody- namics. Lyell's conservative system of evolution, resting on several broad assumptions of fact, became not merely a physiological, but even more a philo- sophical dogma, and in a literary point of view the Victorian epoch rested largely, — perhaps chiefly, — on the faith that society had but to fol- low where science led; to — 3 34 LETTER TO TEACHERS "Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die" ; in order to attain perfection. An infi- nite series of imperceptible steps, con- tinuous under uniform conditions since the earliest traces of organic life, and always tending upwards to liigher intensities, — tensions, — potentials. — ac- cording to the growing complexity of the organism, had already taken the place of religious dogma, and bridged the gap between two phases of thought. With a sense of vast relief, the .generation which began life in 1850, embraced the new creed, not so much because it was proved, as because it was convenient ; but it met with in- stant difficulties on the side of the Darwinists themselves. The warmest ■evolutionists were the least confident, not only about adaptation and the THE PROBLEM 85 struggle for existence, but also, and chiefly, about uniformity. Heer's re- searches on the arctic flora, already cited by Sir Charles Lyell in the tenth edition of his " Principles," (London, 1867), seemed to upset the law of uniformity from top to bottom and to substitute a sweeping law of catastrophe ; so that already in 1879, Saporta, in his History of the World of Plants, asserted that nothing less than absolute revolution in cosmic conditions could account for the changes in northern vegetation. During the whole period since the eocene, the temperature of the planet had steadily declined. " The phenomenon to which the lowering of temperature must be referred," said Saporta, " is in no way peculiar to Europe ; it has noth- ing sudden about it, or accidental, or 36 LETTER TO TEACHEES transient. We pointed out its origin at the end of the eocene ; we have marked its progress by its increasing intensity in the polar regions, and by its gradual extension thence towards the south. At the beginning of the oligocene, the vegetation of the north- ern temperate zone changes character ; new elements, coming from the north, and marking the first progress of a refrigeration, introduce and propagate themselves. We have studied the signs of this revolution, by means of which the differences of latitude tend little by little to accentuate themselves. ... It is impossible not to admit, when we consider this march which nothing- stops, and which continues with moder- ation and regularity, the influence of a cosmic phenomenon embracing the terrestrial globe altogether." (p. 322). THE PBOBLEM 37 The inference followed : — " We recog- nise from this point of view as from others, that the world was once young ; then adolescent ; that it has even passed the age of maturity ; man has come late, when a beginning of physical decadence had struck the globe, his domain." (" Le Monde des Plantes," p. 109.) Nothing could be more fatal, not to Darwin but to Darwin's popular following. As Newton said that he was never a Newtonian, so Darwin might perhaps have said that he was never a Darwinian, but his popular influence lay in the law that evolution had developed itself in unbroken order from lower to higher. Kelvin had indeed, flatly contradicted this assump- tion of fact, but had done so from the physicist's point of view, as a matter V 38 LETTEK TO TEACHEKS of solar heat and terrestrial cooling; while Saporta's studies of vegetation, to everybody's astonishment, so drama- tically confirmed Kelvin's mathematics that, though the two streams of thought continued to flow in opposite directions, Saporta already in 1878 had the courage to incline to the "bold suggestion made some years ago by Dr. Blandet, and approved by the late M. d'Archiac," to the effect that, in times before the cretaceous, — especially well shown in the extrava- gance of the carboniferous, — the sun equaled the orbit of Mercury in dia- meter. The long epochs known as the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous and Eocene allowed ample time for shrinkage before the Miocene first » proved by its temperate vegetation, that the sun had approached its present THE PROBLEM 39 diameter, and could no longer equably warm the world. Such an adhesion to the law of thermodynamics, only twenty years after Darwin and Lyell had established their system on the law of Conser- vation, seemed to strike a very serious blow at the theory of upward evo- lution as the world understood it. The violent contradiction between Kelvin's Degradation and Darwin's Elevation was so profound, — so fla- grant, — so vital to mankind, that the historian of human society must be supposed to have watched with agon- ised interest the direction which science should take ; since the decision of palaeontologists would fatally decide his own. If they should adhere to the high authority of Saporta, the biologists must follow ; and then the 40 LETTER TO TEACHEES historian of man would find himself facing a responsibility such as had never before entered into his imagi- nation. Thirty years have passed since Saporta published his " Monde des Plantes avant I'Apparition de I'Homme," and a whole generation has indefati- gably collected, discussed, published and re-discussed the evidences, with results recorded in a library of books and in a score of great geological museums. With the truths that have been established or the theories that have been proposed, historians need trouble themselves little, or not at all, further than to ask what theories are today actually taught, or are accepted by standard authorities. For American purposes, the object is best reached by restricting the inquiry to the last ten or fifteen years, and, as far as possible, THE PKOBLEM 41 to the schools of the European con- tinent, because distance makes both teachers and teaching impersonal. Beginning with France, the standard authority in geology is said to be Lapparent's Treatise (3 vols. Paris, 1906), and to this the inquirer turns to ask whether Darwin's ideas, or Kelvin's, have prevailed in the French schools. The answer is easily found: — " If there is one fact," says Lap- parent, (Vol. Ill, p. 1951), "that palaeontology, and especially the branch of that science which concerns the vegetable world, has put in strong evidence, it is assuredly the progressive diminution of heat in the high lati- tudes of our globe." Among a number of explanations suggested, none satis- fied all the conditions except that of M. Blandet, — the diminution of the 42 LETTER TO TEACHERS apparent diameter of the sun. *' Out- side of this conception, the maintenance of the solar heat is absolutely inexpli- cable (p. 1954). . . . One cause alone, according to the laws of thermody- namics, is capable of preserving the solar energy without appealing to the quite inadequate help of outside sources ; — this is the phenomenon of condensation in the sun. By the means of such condensation, the cal- orific power of the sun is able to maintain itself without sensible loss, by means of a lessening of apparent diameter which would need several thousand years to become perceptible to our most delicate apparatus. . . . But if, in our days, the sun, reduced as it is, undergoes still this movement of concentration necessary to maintain its energy, what must have been the dif- THE PROBLEM 43 ference of its dimensions at other epoclis from what they are now? Nothing is more logical than this hy- pothesis, and since, — while irreproach- able from the astronomic point of view, — it is alone adequate to explain the palaeothermal phenomena, we think we cannot do better than propose it for the adhesion of geologists." Nothing could be more innocent in intention, or at least in appearance, than this adhesion to the second law of thermodynamics, — this harmonising of several great branches of science, — this unifying of nature ; but its conse- quences to the old law of Evolution and to the school of Darwin were beyond disguise. Lapparent went on to indicate some of them, and first the necessary abandonment of Lyell's law of uniformity : — 44 LETTER TO TEACHERS "Let US content ourselves, then with indicating the possibility of this solu- tion, while affirming, contrary to the doctrines of the uniformitarian school, that the ancient history of our planet has unrolled itself in the midst of external conditions very different from those which now surround us." While Lapparent offered this theory of solar shrinkage as only a possible solution, other geologists were working on a corollary to the theory, which has become one of the commonest foundations of their teaching. Solar shrinkage might perhaps be suggested as a doubtful possibility, but terrestrial shrinkage, which rests on the same law, seems to be now commonly admitted as a reasonably orthodox dogma. Yet terrestrial shrinkage is a mere deriva- tive, which involves solar shrinkage THE PROBLEM 45 as its logical and mathematical con- comitant. If adopted as a fundamental law of geology, it must be admitted as a fundamental law of solar physics, since the one is as inseparable from the other as a Siamese twin. Natu- rally the theory is not conceded to be true ; — no theory is ; — but it is convenient ; it is taught ; and the chance is now small that any geolog- ical physicist will forego the temptation of using M. Blandet's theory as law. Fortunately for the old school of geologists — as well as for all schools of historians, — the few certainties of geology as of history are so easily read in opposite senses, that, in practice, every teacher can teach — and ignore, — what he pleases. Pure geologists still adhere more or less strictly to the uniformitarian creed and reject the 46 LETTEE TO TEACHERS conclusions of Heer and his followers. Geological physicists still teach that if the second law of thermodynamics controlled all history from the gaseous nebula to the glacial epoch, it has certainly controlled the few days or years since the ice-cap retired from the Niagara river. In that case, man be- came the most advanced type of physi- cal decadence, no longer at the top but at the bottom of the ladder, in face of accelerated extinction. At what precise moment the sun reached, under this theory, the equilib- rium which gave the utmost exuber- ance to organic life, only a specialist can venture to say ; but, from the language of their text-books, a reader gathers that the energy of vegetable growth is supposed to have reached its climax as early as the carboniferous, — "periode THE PROBLEM 47 de luxe, s'il en fut jamais " (Saporta, 73) ; — and that when this amazing veg- etation lost its wonderful power, as shown in the coal-formations (Lappa- rent, ii, 1027), it was followed by an equally astonishing animal growth which lasted into the miocene period. There — we are told, — degradation be- gan ! At the end of the miocene, both vegetable and animal forms of life are declared to offer proof that the poles could no longer support their previous exuberance. This teaching assumes that the equable tempera- ture, whether high or low, which had prevailed from the poles to the equator gave place to climatic differences con- sequent on the sun having shrunk to- wards its present diameter. Nature instantly showed the shrinkage of energy. " In spite of the multitude 48 LETTER TO TEACHERS of beings which have disappeared at different epochs," says Gaudry (''Essai," 44), "I think that the sum of appear- ances exceeded that of extinctions down to the end of the miocene period." The steady decline continued until the convulsion of the glacial epoch, when, in the midst of a wrecked solar system, man suddenly appeared. " Since this great event occurred," according to Lapparent (iii, 1655), " the organic world has enriched itself with no new species, but several forms have disap- peared, among those that surrounded the first men ; and the great herbivorous mammals, already on their decline, have seen their principal representatives, little by little, quit the scene of the world." This statement, as a mere statement of fact, seems to be accepted as rather THE PKOBLEM 49 unduly mild; but not yet satisfied with admitting that organic geology, like inorganic, confirms the dissipation of energy down to the present day, M. Lapparent, abandoning all hope that the process can ever be reversed, con- cludes (hi, 1961) : " If any new term is still to be looked for, it seems as. though none could be imagined other than an era where the Soul, freed from the bonds of matter, should dominate. Except for this hope there are none but sombre perspectives in sight for all that surrounds us. The progress of the emersion of boreal lands seems destined to extend from step to step the influence of the polar ice. The sun, whose condensation is already far advanced, will soon find in the narrow- ing of its diameter no sufficient source for maintaining its heat, and large 4 50 LETTER TO TEACHEES spots will appear on its surface, des- tined to transform themselves into a dark shell. The day when the extinc- tion of the central luminary shall be complete, no further physical or physio- logical reaction can take place on our globe, which will then be reduced to the temperature of space, and the sole light of the stars. But, perhaps, before arriving there, the globe will have lost its oceans and its atmosphere, absorbed in the pores and fissures of a shell whose thickness will increase from day to day." If one, and by far the most extensive period of terrestrial history, is already taught in this sense by physicists, all biology, including human history, will have also to be re-edited by them according to this lugubrious plan ; and the University professor of history as THE PEOBLEM 51 it has been hitherto understood, will soon have urgent need to make up his mind whether to accept or resist it. If he decides to accept it, he has only to hold his tongue, and remain quietly in the pleasant meadows of antiquarian- ism, protected as heretofore by the con- venient and sufficient axiom of the nineteenth century that history is not^ a science, and society not an organism ; but if this resource should fail him, his first thought will be to find allies. He will seek them among his Darwinist friends, to begin with ; but he will scarcely finish the opening chapter of the last book on Transformation, Muta- tion, Inheritance, or whatever new name may, as one writer expresses it, dissimulate creative or destructive force under the term Evolution, without dis- covering that the familiar, genial dispute 52 LETTER TO TEACHERS over the origin of species has turned into a sinister and almost lurid battle over the extinction of species, for which the Darwinian theories of survival are declared inadequate to the point of childishness. In the place of minute variations extending over indefinite time under uniform conditions, he will find that views have been put prominently forward which bear an alarming resemblance to the second law of thermodynamics. So, one palaeontolo- gist, — Dollo, — formulated in 1893 the law of evolution in three sections, each a contradiction to the old law. — 1. Development has proceeded by leaps. — 2. It is irreversible. — 3. It is limited. Another authority, Kosa, gave new form to an old idea, by showing how variability proceeds according to a law THE PEOBLEM 53 of progressive reduction ; — that is to say, every series of forms is destined to extinction according to the degree of its specialisation. Even if this law were not rigorously exact, "it is per- fectly exact to say that the number and extent of variations diminishes as the specialisation advances." The reader, who marks with some nervous- ness that Man has certainly advanced by leaps, and that his progress seems to be irreversible, seeks at once to know whether he shows signs of reaching its limit ; and, for an answer, appeals to the only scientific source of information, — the anthropologist. Unless the inquirer is full of courage, he will be aghast at the confusion of responses which his prayer disturbs. Yet he knows, if he is an evolutionist, that Darwinians have always had 54 LETTER TO TEACHERS trouble over the origin and end of Man. To Darwin and Haeckel the difficulties were as great as to their successors. The mystery of man was then, and still remains, a scientific scandal which has inevitably roused bad temper, and sometimes bad man- ners, even in the centres of science itself. Every investigator in turn evaded, with more or less dexterity, — or broke through, with more or less recklessness, — the difficulties that sur- rounded him ; but the difficulties out- lived the explanations. The first and most notorious was due to the fact that, while the strict theory of evolu- tion from lower to higher made it reasonable to assume that man was descended from that group of animals which resembled him most, and while there was no doubt that the nearest THE PROBLEM 55 group whicli could be supposed to lead up to him was that of the anthropoid ape, the anthropologists instantly found so many scientific objections to this line of ascent that it had to be abandoned from the start. The skull of the young anthropoid, it appeared, had more re- semblance than that of its adult parent, to the skull of man ; in other words, the anthropoid might be a degraded man, but man could not be a developed anthropoid. The search would have to go much further back, to find some earlier mammal with less resemblance to man, and therefore with fewer evidences of descent, and less probability of satisfying the rules of evidence. Each step in the ascent added enormously to the difficulties of proof. Every evolutionist knows how disas- 56 LETTEE TO TEACHERS trously this first failure affected anthro- pology ; nor was the case bettered for the anthropologist by Cope, who, reason- ing from the teeth, made man descend from an eocene lemur, and through him from the marsupials, without passing through any known group of anthro- poids at all ; — a leap backwards cover- ing such vast epochs of unknown time and change, — only to end in a type much lower than that of the despised apes, — as to have no more value for human history than though, instead of a hypothetical lemur, the palaeontologists had offered as an ancestor a hypo- thetical lingula of archean time. All this fumbling for an ancestry that should have been self-evident, was sufficiently disconcerting to historians who cared little what kind of a pedigree was given them, but greatly wanted to THE PKOBLEM 57 be sure of it ; and who found themselves embarrassed with a primitive man, — or probably a variety of primitive men, — running back without interme- diate links to a hypothetical, primitive, eocene lemur, whom no one but a trained palaeontologist could distinguish from a hypothetical, primitive opossum, or weasel or squirrel or any other small form of what is commonly known as vermin. For the historian, the lemur was a grievance. It offered no foundation for any theory, whether of conservation, elevation, or degra- dation, physical or moral. Even the Church had always admitted as sound doctrine that God might have used more or less consecutive types for his creations; but between the hypothetic lemur and the talking man, no type, consecutive or other, existed for God to use. 58 LETTER TO TEACHERS The historian had certainly a right to complain of this Pharaonic command to adopt a lemurian and marsupial ancestry, including the duck-billed platypus, and much more ; but had he rashly attempted to seek further, he might probably have found worse. In- deed, from the moment when science had exhausted the whole geological series, — recent, pleistocene, pliocene, miocene, oligocene, and part of the eocene, — without coming upon any reasonable or respectable ancestor at all, the search had become, for the historian's purposes, worse than futile. He would do much better to fall back on the mere hope that his own historical parentage was lost under the polar snows, — like the carboniferous forests, — where some happier anthropoid had been born and bred in temperate miocene luxury, to THE PROBLEM 59 be driven southward before tbe ice-cap which obliterated every trace of him and of his polar Eden as he slowly drifted towards the fortieth parallel. Such a vague but aristocratic origin would relieve him from quartering the arms of the lemur, and might help him to suppress the opossum. Hoping for the best, he next turns to the last text-book, — say Hopf's " Human Species," (London, 1909), — and first notes that it still rests the chief weight of the argument, as Cope did, on the teeth, but in a sense that startles even a sincerely convinced evo- lutionist. Among the first authorities quoted is Professor Klaatsch of Heidel- berg : — " As in his opinion, man by no means stands at the head of all living beings with respect to all parts of his organisation, so too he considers 60 LETTER TO TEACHERS that the human teeth are among the most primitive possessed by any of the existing mammals. Had man not sacri- ficed twelve teeth in the course of his gradual development, he would now have forty-four, the highest number possessed by any land-dwelling mam- mal." Assuredly, according to actual standards of physical beauty, a man — and still more a woman — with forty- four teeth would raise scruples about the law of evolution from lower to higher ; but the Professor evidently regards the modest number of our actual teeth as a decadence ; and goes on to say that even as to his molars, man " has not progressed beyond the stage of development reached by the mammals in the tertiary period." Not a step have the physiologists advanced in thirty years towards proof of any THE PKOBLEM CI rise in vital energy. Greatly concerned at this evidence of feebleness in the evolution of man from the eocene lemur, the historian of human society naturally asks what human senses show more development than is proved by the teeth. Hopf makes no pretence of flattery even on this point. *' Speak- ing generally, man, not only in a state of civilisation, but also the primitive savage, — the Papuan, for example, — has a much less acute sense of smell than that possessed by animals." (Hopf, 240). Finally, though discouraged, the historian probably inquires in what, then, the evolution of man from lower to higher is believed to consist ; and he learns that it consists in the extra- ordinary development of the brain, with its instruments, the hand, the foot, and the vocal organs ; but even 62 LETTER TO TEACHEKS tlie brain is said to show extremely slight real differences from that of the higher monkeys. (Vulpien, Legons. 1866). " The brain has passed through evolution in all the branches of the tree of mammals ; it is highly circum- voluted at the extremity of certain branches ; sometimes the richness of its circumvolutions exceeds that of Man " (Topinard, 334) ; but its only marked development is in weight, and in number of ganglion cells. (Hopf, 168). Inevitably the puzzled historian asks almost stupidly whether the anthropo- logist holds this increase of brain to prove evolution from lower to higher, and he receives an answer that totally demoralizes him. The weight of the brain is not asserted to be a gauge of its energy. Neither instinct nor rea- son is supposed to have any relation THE PKOBLEM 63 to the weight of the brain ; on the contrary, " in a list of seventeen brains, the heaviest known, going from 1729 to 2020 grams, there are seven luna- tics," and only three men of science, about whose degree of aberration no exact statistics can be reasonably ex- pected. (Topinard, 216). This is only the beginning of anthro- pological evolution from lower to higher. The anthropologist seems in- clined to hold that what is called genius has no relation with weight of brain ; but that, even though it had, it would not help evolution, if Arndt is right in asserting that superior mental endowment of any kind is a sign of degeneration ; or if Branco is right in thinking it impossible that the progres- sive enlargement of the human brain can go on indefinitely without enfeebling 64 LETTER TO TEACHEES the body till it dies out ; or if Hopf is right (p. 374), in admitting that, in civilised races, increase in intellectual power often goes with a narrowing of the jaw and an early loss of the teeth, and of the hair, and in women with an inability to suckle their children. To complete the picture, the anthropologist who hesitates to say in what sense the brain should be regarded as proving evolution from lower to higher, shows not the least sign of doubt in regard to the degree to which Man is specialised, particularly as shown by his brain, his hand, his foot and his vocal organs. In fact, according to Louis Agassiz, man is ''the last term of a series beyond which, following the plan on which the whole animal kingdom is built, no further progress is materially possible," (" Be I'Esprit," p. 34), and is, THE PROBLEM 66 therefore, under Rosa's law of progres- sive reduction, destined to be rapidly extinguished. Thus the physical geologist has frankly and finally gone over to the side of Kelvin ; the palaeontologist has kept him company or even went before him ; while the anthropologist is some- what painfully hesitating, obedient to the physicists, but trying to remain true to humanity, though acutely con- scious that the two directions cannot be reconciled. For many years M. Topinard has held a sort of position as semi-official anthropologist of France, but he has become incoherent with age, finding himself caught between the irreconcileable contradictions of science and sentiment: — "The end, as far as concerns us, we know," he says in his last volume (" L'Anthropologie," Paris, 5 66 LETTER TO TEACHEES 1900) ; " our earth will cease to be habitable ; it will grow cold ; will lose its atmosphere and its moisture, and will resemble our actual moon. Previ- ously, evolution, from progressive will become stationary, then regressive. Some day, as Huxley suggests, the lichens, the diatomaceae, the protococcus, will perhaps be the only beings adapted to the conditions; — then, nothing!" The picture seems sad enough, yet M. Topinard might have added that, according to his own palaeontologist authorities, the evolution of life on the earth had ceased to be progressive some millions of years ago, and had passed through its stationary period into regression before man ever ap- peared ; while M. Topinard himself adds (pp. 321, 370) that, "to his stupe- faction," he has reached conclusions of THE PROBLEM 67 his own which seem, to readers who do not take these opinions too seriously, exceedingly like an admission that he j&nds himself an example of the second law of thermodynamics : — " Yes ! there is contradiction between the animal man, — as he was in a state of nature, and as he has maintained himself to our day, — and the social man such as he ought to be. Yes ! the objective realities of science are in contradiction with the subjective aspirations of man. Yes ! nature laughs at our conceptions. Society has been born of man, and has been built on sand, often with only materials of convention. The individ- ual for whom it is created is always its worst enemy ; he admits it, but will not bend to its necessities." Although M. Topinard adhered blind- ly to the second law of thermodynamics 68 LETTER TO TEACHERS in regard to the approaching end of the world, and was logically obliged to accept its conclusion that all useful work or progress, social or mechanical, depended on inequalities of intensity, endowed with energy still left to dis- sipate, the moment he realizes that such inequalities still exist, and that therefore progress is still possible, he bewails the fact as an inexplicable and unfortunate mystery. Such cross-pur- poses have become almost a standard rule in sociology. They have always been the rule in history. In the earlier scientific commenta- ries on the Law of Dissipation, astron- omers and physicists commonly took some little pains to soften the harsh- ness of their doom by assurances that the prospect was not so black as it seemed, but that the sun would adapt THE PROBLEM 69 itself to man's convenience by allowing some thousands or millions of years to elapse before its extinction. This pleasing thoughtfulness has vanished. Geologists, when most generous, scarce- ly allow more than thirty thousand years since the last ice-cap began its partial recession; while, quite commonly, they insist that their most careful and elaborate estimates do not justify them in granting more than a quarter of that time to the very incomplete process of clearing away the ice and snow from the streets of primitive New York and Boston. The cataclys- mic ruin that spread over all the most populous parts of the northern hemi- sphere while the accomplished and highly educated architects of Nippur were laying the arched foundations of their city, has, it is true, been partially 70 LETTER TO TEACHERS covered or disguised under new yege- tation ; but even this brief retrospec- tive reprieve is darkened by the earnest assurances of the most popular text-books and teachers that they can hold out no good reason for hoping that the exemption will last. The sun is ready to condense again at any moment, causing another violent dis- equilibrium, to be followed by another great outburst and waste of its expiring heat. The humor of these prophecies sel- dom strikes a reader with its full force in America, but in Europe the love of dramatic effect inspires every line. Compared with the superficial and self- complacent optimism which seems to veneer the surface of society, the fre- quent and tragic outbursts of physicists, astronomers, geologists, biologists, and THE PROBLEM 71 sociological socialists announcing the ^ end of tlie world, surpass all that could be conceived as a natural pro- duct of the time. The note of warning verges on the grotesque ; it is hysteri- cally solemn ; a little more, and it would sound like that of a Salvation army ; a small natural shock might easily turn it to a panic. Naturally a historian is most interested in what concerns primitive history, and all the relations of primitive man to nature. He takes up the last work on the sub- ject, which happens, in 1910, to be " Les Premieres Civilisations," by M. J. de Morgan, published in June, 1909. M. de Morgan is one of the highest authorities — possibly quite the highest authority — on his subject, and this volume contains the whole result of his vast study. Unconscious of ther- 72 LETTER TO TEACHERS modynamics, he treats primitive man as a sort of function of the glacial epoch, and ends by telling his readers (p. 97) : - " The glacial period is far from being ended ; our times, which still make an integral part of it, are characterised by an important retreat of the glaciers, started long before the beginnings of history. It is to be supposed that this retreat of the ice is not definitive, but that the cold will return, and with it the depopulation of a part of our globe. Nothing can enable us to fore- tell the amplitude of this future oscil- lation, or the lot which the laws of nature destine to humanity. During this cataclysm revolutions will occur which the most fecund imagination can- not conceive, — disasters the more horri- ble because, while the population of the THE PKOBLEM 73 earth goes on increasing every day, and even the less favored districts little by little become inhabited, the different human groups, crowded back one on another, and finding no more space for existence, will be driven to internecine destruction." M. de Morgan belongs to the most serious class of historians, while M. Ca- mille Flammarion, the distinguished director of the Meudon observatory, besides being a serious astronomer, is also one of the most widely read, and most highly intelligent, vulgarisers of science. When he reaches the point of describing the solar catastrophe in his popular astronomy, he lays bare an enormous field for harrowing hor- rors. ("Astronomic Populaire," 102, 103, Paris, 1905) : — " Life and human activity will insen- 74 LETTER TO TEACHERS sibly be sliut up within the tropical zones. Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Lon- don, Paris, Vienna, Constantinople, Rome, will successively sink to sleep under their eternal cerements. During many centuries, equatorial humanity will undertake vain arctic expeditions to rediscover under the ice the sites of Paris, of Bordeaux, of Lyons, of Marseilles. The sea-shores will have changed and the map of the earth will be transformed. No longer will man live, — no longer will he breathe, — except in the equatorial zone, down to the day when the last tribe, already expiring in cold and hunger, shall camp on the shores of the last sea in the rays of a pale sun which will henceforward illumine an earth that is only a wandering tomb, turning around a useless light and a barren THE PEOBLEM 75 heat. Surprised by the cold, the last human family has been touched by the finger of death, and soon their bones will be buried under the shroud of eternal ice. The historian of nature would then be able to write : — * Here lies the entire humanity of a world which has lived ! Here lie all the dreams of ambition, all the conquests of military glory, all the resounding affairs of finance, all the systems of an imperfect science, and also all the oaths of mortals' love ! Here lie all the beauties of earth ! ' — But no mor- tuary stone will mark the spot where the poor planet shall have rendered its last sigh ! " As though to assure the public that he knows what he is talking about, M. Flammarion, who is a practical astronomer, goes on with a certain 76 LETTER TO TEACHERS sombre exaltation, like a religious prophet, to say that the terrors he predicts are of common occurrence in astronomy, and leaves his scholars to infer that nature regards her end as attained only when she has treated man as an enemy to be crushed : — " Already we have seen twenty-five stars sparkle with a spasmodic light in the heavens, and fall back in extinction neighboring death ! Already some of the brilliant stars hailed by our fathers have disappeared from the charts of the sky, and a great number of red stars have entered into their period of extinction ! " Volumes would be needed if a writer should attempt to follow the track of this idea through all the branches of present thought ; but, without unneces- sarily disturbing the labors of anthro- THE PKOBLEM 77 pology and biology, the merest insect might be excused for asking what happens to fellow insects, who, like himself, are enjoying the precarious hospitality of these numerous solar systems. M. de Morgan and M. Flam- marion are contented with freezing them ; but M. Lapparent takes the loftier view that they will do better to become disembodied spirits ; which is even less likely to suit either the American professor or the American student, whose ideas of education are exceptionally practical. The "soul, freed from the bonds of matter," seems to require no education unless in the passive consciousness of pure mathe- matics and logic, which has hitherto been the weakest side of the American student, who is averse even to the ingenuous simplicity of logarithms and 78 LETTER TO TEACHERS vectors. More than this, the law of degradation inexorably implies that, throughout the whole series of phases which may intervene in the future as in the past, in the dissipation of the higher intensities, a sympathetic exhaus- tion must be expected in all the ener- gies dependent on the central system, among which, as the palaeontologists and physicists have assured us, the vital energies are not only the most dependent, but also, and particularly the most sensitive. Physical or mental, they should, according to theory, suffer an accelerated decline, and yet their actual position should also show a cer- tain lag behind the rate of the central energy. They are really worse off than they seem. The soothing vision of thousands or millions of years, for the ultimate extinction of solar energy THE PKOBLEM 79 protects the Universities to a highly inadequate degree from their own ex- tinction in the process. All energies which are convertible into heat must suffer degradation ; among these, as the physicists expressly insist, are all vital processes ; the mere temporary approach to a final equilibrium would be fatal ; and, among all the infinite possibilities of evolution, the only absolute certainty in physics is that the earth every day approaches it. No one can be trusted to express so much as an opinion about the moment when any special vital process may expect to be reduced in energy ; man and beast can, at the best, look forward only to a diversified agony of twenty million years; but at no instant of this considerable period can the professor of mathematics flatter either himself or his students with an 80 LETTER TO TEACHERS exclusive or extended hope of escaping imbecility. According to some geologists, this view is extravagantly — almost ridicu- lously — optimistic; but with the scien- tific correctness of these opinions, the historian is not concerned. He asks only how far the teaching of his col- leagues contradicts his own, and how far society sides with his contradictors. His question is difficult to answer. At first sight he is conscious of no divergence. Society has the air of taking for granted its indefinite pro- gress towards perfection with more confidence, and sometimes with more dogmatism than in 1830, when Macaulay made it a literary law by his famous polemic against Southey. Yet the same society has acquired a growing habit of feeling its own pulse, THE PROBLEM 81 and registering its own temperature, from day to day ; of prescribing to itself new regimes from year to year ; and of doubting its own Health like a nervous invalid. Granting that the intended effect of intellectual education is, — as Bacon, Descartes and Kant began by insisting, — a habit of doubt, it is only in a very secondary sense a habit of timidity or despair. To a certain point, the more education, the more hesitation ; but beyond that point, confidence should begin. Keep- ing Europe still in view for illustration and assuming for the moment that America does not exist, every reader of the French or German papers knows that not a day passes without pro- ducing some uneasy discussion of supposed social decrepitude ; — fall- ing off of the birth-rate ; — decline of rural population ; — lowering of 82 LETTER TO TEACHERS army standards, — multiplication of suicides, — increase of insanity or idiocy, — of cancer, — of tuberculosis ; — signs of nervous exhaustion, — of en- feebled vitality, — " habits " of alco- holism and drugs, — failure of eye-sight in the young, — and so on, without €nd, coupled with suggestions for correcting these evils such as remind a historian of the Lex Poppaea and the Koman Empire rather than they prove that careless confidence in itself which ought to stamp the rapid rise of social energy which everyone asserts and admits. A great newspaper opens the discussion of a social reform by the axiom that " there are unmistak- able signs of deterioration in the race." The County Council of London pub- lishes a yearly volume of elaborate statistics, only to prove, according to THE PEOBLEM 83 the London Times, that "the great city of today," of which Berlin is the most significant type, *' exhibits a con- stantly diminishing vitality ; " and, in almost the same breath, other journals exult in showing that the globe is rapidly becoming a suburb of the great cities. Rarely does the press dwell on proofs of social evolution except as shown negatively in decline of the death-rate, or of illiteracy, or in relief from pain, and never does the statis- tician or sociologist help the historian to any clear understanding of the progress expected as his literary goal. The medical profession is singularly shy of pledges. The poets are pessi- J mists to a man — and to a woman. The legislators pass half their time, in Germany, France and England, framing social legislation, of which a 84 LETTER TO TEACHERS large part rests on the right and duty of society to protect itself against itself, not under the fiction of elevating itself from lower to higher, but — as in the case of alcohol and drugs, — to protect itself from deterioration by the exercise of powers analogous to the power of war. As yet the press is alarmist with decency, even in Paris and Berlin, but at the rate of progress since 1870, the press might soon learn to blacken the prospects of humanity with all the picturesque genius of Camille Flam- mar ion. A little more superficial knowledge is all it needs ; the general disposition is already excellent. Mean- while, the teacher of history has fallen out of sight. The freedom that was liberally extended to others was denied to him. Supposing Kelvin's law, with THE PROBLEM 85 Lapparent's conclusions, and Flamma- rion's illustrations, to be rigorously true, and that its truth was admitted in biology as in physics, the American professor who should begin his annual course by announcing to his class that their year's work would be devoted to showing in American history '' a uni- versal tendency to the dissipation of energy " and degradation of thought, which would soon end in making America " improper for the habitation of man as he is now constituted," might not fear the fate of Giordano Bruno, but would certainly expect that of Galileo, even though he knew that every member of the Cardinal's College of professors held the same opinion. The University would have to protect itself by dismissing him. The truth or the error of the three 86 LETTER TO TEACHERS Laws of Evolution does not properly concern the teacher. No physicist can, in these days, be expected to take oath that Dalton's atoms, or Willard Gibbs's phases, or Bernoulli's kinetic gases, are true. He uses for his scholars the figure or the formula which best suits their convenience. The historian or sociologist is alone restricted in the use of formulas which shock the moral sense; yet the stop- ^page of discussion in the historical ^ lecture-room cannot affect the teach- ing of the same young men in the physical laboratory, — still less the legislation of their parents at the State capital ; it would merely ruin the school of history. However much to be regretted is such a result, society cannot safely permit itself to be con- demned to a lingering death, which is THE PEOBLEM 87 sure to tend towards suicide, merely to suit the convenience of school-teachers. The dilemma is real ; it may become / serious; in any case it needs to be understood. The battle of Evolution has never been wholly won ; the chances at this moment favor the fear that it may yet be wholly lost. The Darwinist no longer talks of Evolution ; he uses the word Transformation. The historian of human society has hitherto, as a habit, preferred to write or to lecture on a tacit assumption that humanity showed upward progress, even when it empha- tically showed the contrary, as was not uncommon ; but this passive atti- tude cannot be held against the physicist who invades his territory and takes the teaching of history out of his hands. Somewhere he will have y 88 LETTER TO TEACHERS to make a stand, but he has been already so much weakened by the surrender of his defences that he knows no longer where a stand can be made. As a form of Vital Energy he is con- victed of being a Vertebrate, a Mammal, a Monodelphe, a Primate, and must eternally, by his body, be subject to the second law of thermodynamics. Escape there is impossible. Science has shut and barred every known exit. Man can detect no outlet except through the loophole called Mind, and even to avail himself of this, he must follow Lapparent's advice, — become a disembodied spirit and seek a confed- erate among such physicists or physi- ologists as are willing to admit that man, as an animal, has no import- ance ; that his evolution or degradation as an organism is immaterial; that THE PEOBLEM 89 his physical force or condition has nothing to do with the subject ; that the old ascetics were correct in sup- pressing the body ; and that his con- sciousness is sufficient proof of his right to regard Keason as the highest poten- tial of Vital Energy. The historian, thrown back on this oldest of battlegrounds, may console himself with the thought that the physicists and physiologists are as much embarrassed as himself ; but while, in former ages, the world went on, after a fashion, trusting to the energy of its archaic instincts to make good the lapses of its reasoning powers, the external pressure of physical forces, under their thermodynamic laws, seems of late to have literally driven physical science into an assumption of universal authority, so that physiologists can no (/ 90 LETTEE TO TEACHERS longer evade the logical necessity of framing a stem-history for the mind, as for the body or the skeleton ; and since their law tends strongly towards monism, — unity of energy, — they can- not supply man with any other energies or laws than he inherited from his only known — or unknown — ancestor, the hypothetical eocene lemur. In the system of Energetik, Keason can be only another phase of the energy earlier known as Instinct or Intuition ; and if this be admitted as the stem- history of the Mind as far back as the eocene lemur, it must be admitted for all forms of Vital Energy back to the vegetables and perhaps even to the crystals. In the absence of any definite break in the series, all must be treated as endowed with energy equivalent to will. THE PEOBLEM 91 The idea is very familiar in philoso- phy ; the strangeness consists in its gaining foothold in science. At the Congress of the Italian Society for the Progress of Sciences held at Parma in 1907, Ciamician, the distinguished Professor of the University of Bologna, suggested that the potential of Vital '-^ Energy should be taken as the Will. The step seems logical, and to the historian it seems natural. The idea is as old as Aristotle ; anyone who cares to study its history will find it in Eduard von Hartmann's " Philosophic des Unbewussten " (Vol. ii, pp. 426- 439, Leipzig, 1904) ; but, for the actual uses of today, the story goes back no further than to Schopenhauer's famous work, "Die Welt als Wille," which appeared in 1819-1844. Schopenhauer held that all energy in nature, latent 92 LETTER TO TEACHEES or active, is identical with Will. Be- fore his time, — he claimed, — the concept of Will was included in the concept of Force; he reversed the order on the ground that the unknown should be referred to the known, and that there- fore the whole universe of energy, known or unknown, of whatever inten- sity or volume, should be brought into the category of intuition. The philoso- phers, even when rejecting the identity of Will with Energy, were before long busily coquetting with the idea, which offered extraordinary charms to inven- tors of systems. For the historian, Schopenhauer's method had the double merit of logically merging the two great historical schools of thought. The old idea of Form, which ruled the philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, slipped readily over the idea THE PROBLEM 93 of Energy, taught by Kelvin and Clausius, so that henceforward it mat- tered little whether the schools, in their rage for nomenclature, called the result "Will," or " Entelechy," or " Dominant," or " Organic Principle," or "Trieb," or " Strebung," or "In- tuition," or " Instinct," or just simply " Force " as of old ; even the forbidden words " Creative power " became almost orthodox science ; in any case the logic of " Will " or " Energetik " impera- tively required that every conception whatever, involving a potential, obliged ontologists to regard the will-power of every stem as the source of variation in the branches, and to admit, as a physical necessity, that the branch which has lost the power of variation should be regarded as an example of enfeebled energy falling under the second law of thermodynamics. V 94 LETTEK TO TEACHERS Such, an arrangement, however con- venient for degradationists, and however tempting to students of palaeontology in particular, is likely to bring trouble on other branches of education. Espe- cially for human history its bearings are painfully pointed. Already the anthropologists have admitted man to be specialised beyond the hope of further variation, so that, as an energy, he must be treated as a weakened Will, — an enfeebled vitality, — a de- graded potential. He cannot himself deny that his highest Will-power, whether individual or social, must have proved itself by his highest variation, which was incontrovertibly his act of transforming himself from a hypothetical eocene lemur, — whatever such a creature may have been, — into a man speaking an elaborately inflected THE PROBLEM 95 language. This staggering but self- evident certainty requires many phases of weakening Will-power to intervene in the process of subsidence into the reflective, hesitating, relatively passive stage called Reason ; so that in the end, if the biologists insist on imposing their law on the anthropologists, while at the same time refusing to admit a break in the series, the historian will have to define his profession as the science of human degradation. The law of thermodynamics must embrace human history in its last as well as in its earliest phase. If the physicist can suggest any plausible way of escaping this demonstration, either logically or by mathematics, he will confer a great benefit on history ; but, pending his decision, if the highest Will-power is conceded to have existed first, and if 96 LETTER TO TEACHERS the physicist is to be granted his pos- tulate that height and intensity are equivalent terms, while fall and diifusion are equivalent to degradation, then the intenser energy of Will which showed itself in the primitive extravagance of variation for which Darwin tried so painfully to account by uniformitarian formulas, must have been — and must be now in the constant process of being — degraded and lost, and can never be recovered. The process, in physics, is not reversible. If the historian of human society is to let himself be placed in this position, the fact should be under- stood and accepted in advance. In that case, two schools of history can be easily organised; but the effect on other branches of instruction is not so simple. Ciamician's suggestion, THE PEOBLEM 97 — like Schopenliauer's, like Nietzsche's, like Eduard von Hartmann's philoso- phy, — does, no doubt, threaten human history with fantastic revolution, but perhaps its strangest result is that of converting metaphysics into a branch of physics. Nothing in the history of philosophy is more distinctly marked than the eifort of physics and meta- physics, since 1890, to approach each other. Only a specialist knows even the titles of the books on this subject, in the German language alone ; but a beginner might perhaps try to get an idea of the process from Wilhelm Wundt's well-known "System der Philosophie," (Leipzig, 1897). The naturalist now readily admits that plants have souls — or will-power, — but he appropriates the soul as an energy of thermodynamics. At first sight, the 7 98 LETTER TO TEACHERS tendency seems towards metaphysics, but the true current is the reverse. The chaos is more chaotic than ever, but the effort to make the laws of Eiuergetih cover all, is perhaps the only very vigorous intellectual activity now in evidence. Both parties have in consequence appealed to the Psychologists, and, under the lead of Ostwald in Germany and of Loeb in America, have created, within the last few years, a new litera- ture so extensive as to defy all students except advanced specialists. Indeed, almost as in mathematics, the specialist himself is rarely equal to his task. Every country in the world is con- tributing to the pursuit of psychological laws. In Russia, Krainsky's volume on the " Law of Conservation of Energy applied to Psychical Activity " THE PEOBLEM 99 appeared as long ago as the year 1897. The amount of intelligence and patient research put into the investigation is as great as though wealth were its end ; and, though the drift of evidence may seem to a historian both clear and strong, he has, as yet, no right to hamper the inquiry by inflicting on these exceedingly clever and earnest seekers any inquiries of his own. At most, in his desperate search for allies to protect him from the tyranny of thermodynamics, he might timidly ask, not them but himself, whether the new w' psychology tends towards the possibility that Reason may be a more or less remote consequence of Tropism, — that is to say, a form of motion excited by exterior forces. In itself, this old and very familiar theory, that " nous vivons parceque nous sommes excites," is as 100 LETTER TO TEACHERS indifferent to sociologists as any other physico-chemical or mechanical analogy used for purposes of technical instruc- tion ; but if it goes to the point of asserting, as an acquired truth, that the motion of the mind is an induced motion which follows the laws of electricity, the historian of mind in its social variety will find himself seriously embarrassed. Without going back to the earlier discussion of this burning question, an inquirer may allow himself to quote the latest form in which the distinguished chief of the school states it. Ostwald says : — " Between psychological and mechan- ical operations, there seems to be nearly the same difference and the same resemblance, as between electric and chemical operations." (" L'Ener- gie." Paris, 1910, p. 210). On this THE PROBLEM 101 question, Loeb is even a higher author- ity than Ostwald, and his latest expres- sions are still more emphatic. He recognises no such thing as Will : — "It seems to me," he says, '' that it is in the interest of psychology itself to / favor the development of the theory of tropisms " ; and not of tropisms alone ; — " My object is to refer psychi- cal phenomena not only to tropisms but also to physico-chemical j^heno- mena." (" La Revue des Idees," October 15, 1909). With the utmost ingenuity and labor he has proved that, at least in many low organisms, what is taken / for Will is really mechanical attraction. Loeb's demonstrations are quite beau- tiful pieces of work which rouse high admiration for his powers ; but their bearing on his colleagues is obscure. If Thought is capable of being classed V J 102 LETTER TO TEACHERS with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessarily to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History. The dilemma is pointed out by Dr. Hanna Thomson, in his book on the Brain, with the emphasis that suits its tension : — " Physically the gap between the brain of man and the brain of an anthropoid ape is too insignificant to count ; but their difference as beings corresponds to the distance of the earth from the nearest fixed star. The brain of man does not account for man ? What does?" THE PEOBLEM 103 The question, tlius bluntly posed, is \/ bluntly answered in a sense hostile to the physicist law. The brain is developed by the Will, which lies within and behind the brain : — " By practice . . . the Will-stimulus will not only organise brain-centres to perform new functions, but will project new connect- ing, — or, as they are technically called, association — fibres, which will make nerve-centres work together as they could not, without being thus associated." The motive-power is not of the brain, "because it is the masterful personal Will which makes the brain human " by developing one of the brain-hemi- spheres ; and " this Something known as Will " continues Dr. Hanna Thomson, " is not natural, but supernatural, both in its powers and in its creations." Of course the supernatural character 104 LETTER TO TEACHERS of the will is the whole point in dispute, and the usual doctrine of the modern psychologist substitutes the word Nature for the word Supernatural. Thus Paul Flechsig, concluding his address to the Psychological Congress in Rome (1905), says that " only by constant, progressive changes in the physical form of the brain, has Nature succeeded in attaining this truly lofty end. Thus the Will shows organic evolution from first to last, and shows in this respect no differ- ence from other bodily functions. It is a product of organic nature, and, at least in its broadest sense, bears that stamp." The three views seem far apart, and yet one can conceive that Kelvin, who troubled himself only with the practical means of obtaining a fall of potential equivalent to the work done, might have THE PROBLEM 105 seen no necessary contradiction to his law in either case : — " Quite so ! " he might be supposed to reply ; " the force that Thomson calls supernatural Will, and Flechsig calls an organic function, and Loeb calls a physico-chemical relation, is the force which I call vital Energy, and which I agree with Dr. Thomson in regarding as supernatural in the sense that nature no longer produces it here, more than she produces any other element or atom. Physicists are at perfect liberty to regard the Will as another name for the same primitive, elementary, unexplained energy which gave odor to a molecule of copper, or made the magnolia burst into flower with more than animal sensuality and perfection of form, color, scent, and line ; or the caterpillar sud- denly soar into the air with the amazing, 106 LETTER TO TEACHERS inconceivable sensual properties of the butterfly ; but the mere brain-mechanism you talk about is, in physics, far less extraordinary, as Will, than what went before it, — creations always growing higher in tension as you go backward, — like the eye, or the innumerable varie- ties or transformations of the shapes which vital energy has taken in every province of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, while all are still subordinate and even trivial when compared with the primary creation of energy itself, about which no one knows anything except its name, — Nature." Such reasoning in circles helps the historian little to make headway against the current of physical energies. His dilemma remains untouched. The physicist says that Thought is an organic growth which has the faculty THE PKOBLEM 107 of determining its own action within certain limits, but whose " Freedom " exists only in the atmosphere of ideals. By the majority of physiologists, Thought seems to be regarded — at present — as a more or less degraded Act, — an enfeebled function of Will : — "Thou2;ht comes as the result of helplessness," says Lalande in his volume on "Dissolution" (Paris, 1899, p. 166) ; " Thought, as Bain says, is the refraining from speech or action. The truth is, therefore, that action comes first ; the idea is an act which tends to accomplish itself, and which, when stopped by some obstacle before its realisation, finds a new form of reality in that stoppage. Jean Jacques Bousseau said : ' The man who thinks is a depraved animal ' ; and in this he expressed an exact view of psychology. V 108 LETTER TO TEACHERS As far as he is animal, the thinker is a bad animal ; eating badly ; digesting badly ; often dying without posterity. In him the degradation of vital energy is flagrant. (La depravation de la nature physique est visible chez lui)." The late volume of M. Bergson, " L'Evolution Creatrice," is the most widely known among the very latest efforts of metaphysicians to defend their conceptions against the methods of physics ; and yet, on this point cf Keason and Instinct, M. Bergson seems ready to go further than M. Lalande. The whole chapter on Instinct ought to be read, and studied in connection with the treatment of the same subject by Reinke, in his " Einleitung " (Kap. 21), and the source of it all in Eduard von Hartmann's " Unbewusste," but a few paragraphs will serve to express THE PKOBLEM 109 the present views of the College de France about the relative value of phases of life as forces : — " From our point of view, life appears globally as an immense wave which starts from a centre to propagate itself outwards, and which is arrested at almost every point of its circumference, and is converted into oscillation without advance ; at one point alone, it has forced the obstacle, and the impulse has passed on freely. This liberty is regis- tered in the form of man. Everywhere except with man, consciousness has been brought to a stop ; with man alone it has pursued its road. ... In doing so, it is true, it has abandoned not merely the baggage that embarrassed it, but has been obliged to renounce also some precious properties. Consciousness, in man, is chiefly intelligeiice. It might 110 LETTER TO TEACHERS have been, — it seems as though it ought to have been, — intuition too. . . . Another evolution might have led to a humanity either still more intelligent, or more intuitive. In reality, in the humanity of which we make part, intu- ition is almost completely sacrificed to intelligence. . . . Intuition is still there, but vague, and especially discontinuous. It is a lamp, almost extinguished, which gains strength at long intervals, where a vital interest is at hasard, but only for a few instants. On our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in nature as a whole, on our origin, and perhaps also on our destiny it casts a feeble and flickering light, but a light which pierces, none the less, the dark- ness of the night in which our intelli- gence leaves us " (pp. 288-289). If this is the best that physiology THE PKOBLEM 111 and metapliysics can do to help the historian of man, the outlook is far from cheerful. The historian is re- ./ quired either expressly to assert, or surreptitiously to assume, before his students, that the whole function of nature has been the ultimate produc- tion of this one-sided Consciousness, — this amputated Intelligence, — this de- graded Act, — this truncated Will. As the function of the crystal is to produce the order of its cleavage, and that of the rose, the beauty of its flower, and that of the peacock, the splendors of its tail, and as, except for these purposes, neither crystal, rose nor peacock has as much human interest as a thistle or a maggot, so the func- tion of man is, to the historian, the 'J production of Thought ; but if all the other sciences affirm that not Thought ■^ 112 LETTER TO TEACHERS but Instinct is the potential of Vital Energy, and if the beauties of Thought — shown in the intuitions of artistic genius, — are to be taken for the last traces of an instinct now wholly dead or dying, nothing remains for the historian to describe or develop except the history of a more or less mechani- cal dissolution. The mere act of reproduction, which seems to have been the most absorbing and passionate purpose of primitive instinct, concerns history not at all, except as the botanist is concerned with the question whether the flower is a developed or degraded leaf; but the question whether the plant exists to produce the flower, or to produce the leaf, is vital. The University, as distinct from the technological school, has no proper function other than to teach that the THE PKOBLEM 113 flower of vital energy is Thought, and that not Instinct but Intellect is the highest power of a supernatural Will ; — an ultimate, independent, self- producing, self-sustaining, incorruptible solvent of all earlier or lower energies, and incapable of degradation or disso- lution. Intellect should bear the same relation to Instinct that the sun bears to a gaseous nebula, and hitherto in human history it has asserted this relation without a doubt of its self-evident truth. The assertion has led to physical violence and intellectual extravagance without limit, so that history shows man as alternately insane with his own pride of intellect, and shuddering with horror at its bloody consequences ; but the remains of primitive instinct taught society that it could not abandon its 8 114 LETTER TO TEACHERS claim to be, or to represent, a super- natural and independent energy, with- out, by the same act, admitting and demonstrating its progressive enfeeble- ment of will. If Intellect led to such an abdication, it proved the universal truth of the second thermodynamic law. Prom the beginnings of philosophy and religion, the thinker was taught by the mere act of thinking, to take for granted that his mind was the highest energy of nature. Society still believes it, and asserts its supremacy, on no other ground, with a sustained force which is the chief theme of history, and which showed no sign of relaxation until attacked in the eighteenth century in its theological or supernatural outposts. Society must still continue to act upon it, as the THE PROBLEM 115 Platonist, the Stoic and the Christian did, for the obvious reason that it was and is their only motive for existence, — their solitary title to their identity. History has never regarded itself as a science of statistics. It was the Science of Vital Energy in relation with time ; and of late this radiating centre of its life has been steadily tending, — together with every form of physical and mechanical energy, — towards mathematical expression. The torrent of physical energy has swept society into its course, until every school, and almost every teacher in the world, — except perhaps in the Church, — takes an attitude of instinctive and silent hostility to any form of energy that claims to be independent. Even though the triumph of this teaching 116 LETTER TO TEACHEES is the ultimate degradation of the energy that is taught, — of the teacher as well as of the pupil and the universe, — and the more complete his . / victory, the more rapid his degradation, the fault is not his that the radiating centre of his world should hetray this visible decline of vigor. Very unwillingly can he admit Reason to be an energy at all ; at the utmost, he can hardly allow it to be more than a passive instrument of a physico-chemical energy called Will ; — an ingenious economy in the appli- cation of power ; a catalytic medium ; a dynamo, mysteriously converting one form of energy into a lower ; — but if persuaded to concede the intrinsic force of Reason, he must still reject its inde- pendence. As a force, it must obey the laws of force ; as an energy it must THE PROBLEM 117 content itself with such freedom as the laws of energy allow ; and in any case it must submit to the final and funda- mental necessity of Degradation. The same law, by still stronger reasoning, applies to the Will itself. CHAPTER II THE SOLUTIONS The general reader, though apt to mistake the drift of thought, is still rather a better judge of it than the specialist can be, and he gets, from the literature of the twentieth century in its first decade, a decided impression that educational energy has passed into the hands of the physico-chemists and teachers of Energetik or thermody- namics. The old Law of Conservation, or mechanics, still rules in the work- shop, but is somewhat lifeless in the scholars if not in the schools. Its teachers seem rather inactive, or even indifferent ; yet possibly, here and there, 119 120 LETTER TO TEACHERS one of them may feel uneasy at the prospect of actually commg to blows with his brother-professors as in the old days of religion. The Law of Con- servation was an easy one ; it left a reasonable share of freedom in the universe ; even astronomers were allowed to be devout, and sometimes actually were so ; while in strictness, physicists cease to be physicists unless they hold that the law of Entropy includes Gods and men as well as universes. Never- theless even a physicist may occasionally bear in patience with perfectly impartial, and, though conservative, yet not unsympathetic bystanders, who try to act as though the door were still open, and who beg only to be told what the new physicists are willing to do for mankind. What mankind will do for itself is quite another matter, since THE SOLUTIONS 121 probably all teachers admit that, in daily life, society may go on indefinitely, quite as well, — or as ill, — in the future as in the past ; but as between schools of education the divergence is wide. Possibly the Universities may think it safer to ignore the dilemma for another decade or two, as they have ignored so many others ; but they would do better to reach an understanding if they can, especially because, if both parties could be brought into some slight sacrifice of principle, and so abate the rigor of their law, the compromise might put new life into the school of history, which badly needs it. For purposes of teaching, the figure is alone essential, and the figure of Rise and Fall has done infinite harm from the beginnings of thought. That of Expansion and Contraction is far more 122 LETTER TO TEACHERS scientific, even in history. Evolution, again, is troublesome, and has already yielded to the less compromising figure of Transformation. Expansion and Transformation are words which commit teachers to no inconvenient dogma ; indeed, they are so happily adapted for Galileos who are wise enough not to shock opinion, that they seem to impose themselves on the lecture-room. In strictness, no doubt, water which falls and dynamite which expands, are equally degraded energies, but the mind is repelled by the idea of degradation, while it is pleased by the figure of expansion. Because an energy is diffused like table-salt in water, it is not rendered less useful ; on the con- trary, it can only by that process be made useful at all to an animal like man whose life is shut within narrow THE SOLUTIONS 123 limits of intensity ; who sends for a physician if his temperature rises a single degree, and who dies if it rises or falls 5° Centigrade ; whose bath must be tempered and his alcohol diluted ; and whose highest ambition is to train and temper his own brute energies to obey law. Notoriously civilisation and education enfeeble personal energy ; emollit mores : they aim especially at extending the forces of society at cost of the intensity of individual forces. " Thou shalt not," is the beginning of law. The individual, like the crystal of salt, is absorbed in the solution, but the solution does work which the indi- vidual could not do. Put in this form the law of thermo- dynamics seems less obnoxious. With the change of one word to another, the most sensitive evolutionist might 124 LETTER TO TEACHERS not refuse a hearing to the physicist who should affirm that organic as well as inorganic nature shows a universal tendency to the dissipation of energy. At the utmost, the Evolutionist would need only to point out that nature, contrary to her usually wasteful habits, often teaches extreme economy, as when she locks up her energies in atoms and molecules, or, what is more to man's purpose, when she trains the glow-worm to habits of costless industry that may well make the sun veil its face ; but, consenting to pass over, for the moment, this restriction on thermodynamic extravagance, the Darwinian will perhaps for the sake of harmony, concede that, however economical the process may be in its details, dissipation of energy is always occurring in the mass, and that nature THE SOLUTIONS 125 shows no known machinery for restor- ing the energy which she dissipates. If the physiologists insist on this concession, the Darwinian may perhaps, by way of reaching an issue, content himself with allowing it, with only a single, but serious, restriction. This single restriction concerns the limitations of science itself, which has thus far penetrated only the grosser operations of nature, and cannot deny that further knowledge may — and probably will — overthrow much of the experience of physics. This possibil- ity is constantly discussed by the most eminent physicists, and is open to endless discussion by physiologists ; but since it is the last ground on which the Darwinian can make a stand, he will do well to reserve it, on the chance that new scientific horizons will open to him. 126 LETTER TO TEACHERS Supposing, then, that the physicist takes the lead, and seeks for a means of compromise, — some middle term, on which the elevationist can stand while discussing the details of a treaty ! The degradationist can produce from his stores of energy a number of figures for choice; — such as that of water, which expands or contracts, according to the temperature, or falls according to its position ; or electricity, which dissipates itself in work ; or of dynamite which does work by explo- sion ; or of gases which work restlessly without accomplishing anything ; or of table-salt, which dissolves mysteri- ously in water, to help digestion or stimulate appetite ; but possibly he may begin with his favorite figure of a gaseous nebula, and may offer to treat primitive humanity as a volume of THE SOLUTIONS 127 hiuman molecules of unequal intensities, tending to dissipate energy, and to correct the loss by concentrating man- kind into a single, dense mass like the sun. History would then become a record of successive phases of contrac- tion, divided by periods of explosion, tending always towards an ultimate equilibrium in the form of a volume of human molecules of equal intensity, without coordination. If this analogy, with its law of phases, should be rejected, the physicist might still offer a number of others, likening social energy to light, heat, electricity or radiating matter ; — in short to any form of physical energy, provided it obeyed his second law of thermody- namics, by dissipating itself beyond recovery ; but, with the utmost good- will, the evolutionist will find himself 128 LETTER TO TEACHERS much embarrassed to accept any of these offers. If he is to remain evolu- tionist, — and he has no other motive for existence, — he is forced to assert, as his most modest claim, the concession of two points : — 1. That organic life has the exclusive power of economising nature's waste. — 2. That man alone enjoys the supernatural power of con- sciously reversing nature's process, by raising her dissipated energies, including his own, to higher intensities. That is to say, man must possess the exclusive power of reversing the process of extinction ipherent in other activities of nature. The mere conservation of energy would not be enough for him, whatever it is for the glow-worm. The physicist cannot for a moment be expected to grant either of these demands, and is quite likely to be THE SOLUTIONS 129 irritated by them even to the point of flatly denying any exclusive privi- leges to organic life except in its processes. He is capable of going on to question the value of the processes too, especially on the point of economy, and of asserting that organisms are bad economists compared with inorganic matter. He will readily admit that some of the lower forms of life are economists: — the honey-bee, for exam- ple ; and some caterpillars which store silk, and the coral i^olyp which stores lime, and so forth ; but the vegetables do much better, with their starch and chlorophyl and carbon, while the ocean and the atmosphere do better still by storing heat on an enormous scale, and distributing it where man needs it ; many natural minerals store heat and light and electricity, and part 9 130 LETTER TO TEACHERS with them for man's uses ; the earth itself is supposed to be a store house of energy ; and the sun is admitted to have stored all sorts of energy in almost infinite volume, for no other known, intelligent use than the pur- poses of man. Further, steel stores elastic energy better than any vegetable life can do it; every molecule stores cohesive energy better than any animal life does it ; while all intelligent people are still staring, with stupid bewilder- ment, at the storage power of an atom of radium. Matter indeed, is energy itself, and its economies first made organic life possible by thus correcting nature's tendency to waste. Even less can the physicist admit that man alone enjoys the sujDernatural power of consciously reversing nature's processes, and of restoring her dissipated THE SOLUTIONS 131 energies to their lost intensity. From the physicist's point of view, Man, as a conscious and constant, single, natural force, seems to have no function except that of dissipating or degrading energy. Indeed, the evolutionist himself has complained, and is still complaining in accents which grow shriller every day, that man does more to dissipate and waste nature's economies than all the rest of animal or vegetable life has ever done to save them. " Already," — one may hear the physicists aver — ''man dissipates every year all the heat stored in a thousand million tons of coal which nature herself cannot now replace, and he does this only in order to convert some ten or fifteen per cent, of it into mechanical energy immediately wasted on his transient and commonly purpose- less objects. He draws great reservoirs 132 LETTER TO TEACHERS of coal-oil and gas out of the earth, which he consumes like the coal. He is digging out even the peat-bogs in order to consume them as heat. He has largely deforested the planet, and hastened its desiccation. He seizes all the zinc and whatever other minerals he can burn, or which he can convert into other forms of energy, and dissipate into space. His consumption of oxygen would be proportionate to his waste of heat. He startles and shocks even himself, in his rational moments, by his extravagance, as in his armies and armaments which are made avowedly for no other purpose than to dissipate or degrade energy, or annihilate it as in the destruction of life, on a scale that rivals operations of nature. What is still more curious, his chief pleasures, so far as they are his own invention, THE SOLUTIONS 133 consist in gratifying the same unintelli- gent passion for dissipating or degrading energy, as in drinking alcohol, or burning fireworks, or firing cannon, or illuminating cities, or deafening them by senseless noises. Worse than all, such is his instinct of destruction that he systematically exterminates or degrades all the larger forms of animal life in which nature stored her last creative efforts, while he breeds arti- ficially, at great expense of his own energies, and at cost of the phosphorus and lime accumulated by nature's mostly extinct organisms, the feebler forms of animal and vegetable energies needed to make good the prodigious waste of his own. Physicists and physiologists equally complain of these tendencies in man, and a large part of their effort is now devoted to correcting them ; but 134 LETTER TO TEACHERS the physicist adds that, compared with this enormous mass of nature's economies which man dissipates every year in rapid progression, the little he captures from the sun, directly or indirectly, as heat-rays, or water-power, or wind- power, is trifling, and the portion that he restores to higher intensities would be insignificant in any case, even if he did not instantly degrade and dissipate it again for some momentary use." Against this indictment of man's wastefulness, not even Darwin, fond of paradox as he was, would have cared to champion man's defence, and since Darwin wrote, the waste of energy has been doubled again and again. On this point, the evolutionist stands at great disadvantage. Astron- omers are given to holding the sun to a sort of moral accountability because THE SOLUTIONS 135 it Utilises only about 2,227,000,000 ^^ its heat, — or gravitation, or electricity, or whatever energies it dissipates, — on any known work, and degrades the rest indefinitely in space; but, if their relative resources are taken into account, the sun is, — according to the physicists, — a model economist com- pared with man. The sun can keep up its expenditure indefinitely, subject to occasional fits of economy ; while man is a bottomless sink of waste unparalleled in the cosmos, and can already see the end of the immense economies which his mother Nature stored for his support. Almost all other organisms, especially the lowest, were good economists, and inorganic matter seemed to be perfect. No physicist dares guess within millions 136 LETTER TO TEACHERS of years tlie date when the carbonif- erous forests stored their carbon ; but it was an affair of today compared with the date when steel stored its elasticity, or the magnet its attraction, or uranium its radiation, or the earth its gravitation; yet the chemists seem unconscious that any of the forms of matter actually known to them, unless it be the radiating activities, have lost or are now degrading their energies, while the higher animals have passed, and are still passing, like dreams. The evolutionist knows all this quite as well as the degradationist, and has never held man's extravagance for a virtue except in a sense of his own, as though he were to adopt the physicist's figure, and say that the enormous fall of potential which he obtained from all this combustion was THE SOLUTIONS 137 utilised or converted by him, and reappeared in the intenser form of energy called Thought. Considered as a mode of motion, Thought was far more valuable than Heat or Electricity, and much more easily stored ; it was subject to the usual mechanical laws of attraction and inertia ; its analogy with Electricity was declared to be close ; and its usefulness was the more important because it had been so carefully economised that its full reser- voir could be drawn upon, — as in Universities and schools and libraries, — by all the world without limit, like the oxygen of the air. In literary language. Thought was God; — Energy in abstract and abso- lute form ; — the ultimate Substance ; — das Ding an sich. Most philosophy rested on this idea that Thought is 138 LETTEK TO TEACHERS the highest or subtlest energy of nature. The sun is an immense energy, but does its work on earth only by expending 2,300,000,000 times more than equivalent energy in space, while Thought does more work without expending any equivalent energy at all. By placing a lens in the path of the sun's rays, it restores to any given intensity the radiation which had been indefinitely diffused. By cheap mechanical instruments it raises or lowers the intensity of the electric current. By slight motions of the hand it sets chemical energies at work without limit ; and, what stamps the act as divine, it impresses the result with Form. Thus the dispute drifts back again to the middle-ages. The physicist can no more compromise with the evolu- THE SOLUTIONS 139 tionist than Lord Bacon could compro- mise with the Schools. Galileo could as well admit that Joshua had held up the sun, as Kelvin could admit the power of man to reverse the dissipation of solar energy, and thus to produce a new energy of higher potential, called Thought ; yet even if, for the argu- ment's sake, he had done so, the dispute would not have been settled. If Thought were actually a result of transforming other energies into one of a higher potential, it must still be equally subject to the laws which governed those energies, and could not be an inde- pendent or supernatural force. Turn or twist the dilemma as they pleased, they returned to it in spite of themselves, and would do no better if the evolutionist were to give way, in his turn, and offer the concession he had refused. 140 LETTER TO TEACHERS " On reflection," lie might say, " I will grant that thought may radiate its energy away, like electricity and heat ; a figure which, I understand you to say, suits your law of degradation while leaving me free to prove, if I can, its power to rise in intensity. Where will this concession hring me out ? You admit that the sun maintains its energy indefinitely by contracting its volume. Are you willing to admit that Vital Energy, regarded as a volume or society, might conceivably do the same thing ? and if so, what then ? " To this, the physicist must be sup- posed to reply, — however unwillingly, — that nothing would suit him better than such a concession, — which he had in fact begun by offering, — but that, in common honesty, he was bound to regard it as a total surrender of the THE SOLUTIONS 141 evolutionist claims. The mind either was an independent energy, or it was not. If evolutionists conceded at the outset that it was not, then the mere figure mattered nothing ; the dispute ended of itself, and the law of thermo- dynamics went into operation. If, on the contrary, the evolutionists meant to insist on independence, they would gain little or nothing by proving a power to prolong life, — animal, vege- table, or physical, — by aggregation or by concentration ; they merely changed the numerical value of the variable called Time : — " No doubt," might a physicist be imagined to continue, "you can, if you like, give to this variable called Time a value approaching infinity, and this is your ordinary loop-hole of escape. You are welcome to it, as 142 LETTER TO TEACHERS far as concerns us physicists, and we will help you to get it, and stay in it, if you will only leave us in peace without annoying us by your unscien- tilBc, ignorant objections which would put a stop to science altogether, if you insist on them. Yet when we look at it from your point of view, we cannot see what you gain by increasing the element of Time. You want to increase not Time but Tension. You do not want to preserve society as it is, — and if you did want it, you could not do it ; you want to raise the level of its Vital Energy. Now, we admit that Vital Energy is not mere attraction or cohesion or elasticity, but we say that it is limited by the same laws, and we know little about any of them except their limitations. Of course, the mind can reverse them in action, but so can THE SOLUTIONS 143 they reverse each other, and the mind too ; as cohesion reverses gravitation ; and a drop of water reverses cohesion ; and one degree of heat reverses all. A watch-spring stores elasticity better'" than the mind stores thought. Any chance bit of obsidian or crystal can set forests afire, without calling itself intelligent. A fall of one degree in temperature gives form to an icicle without claiming to be divine. A summer shower develops electricity at a tension sufficient to reverse the energy of as many minds as get in its way, without asserting the smallest pretension to reverse natural laws. Nature is full of rival energies ; and, — for anything we know, — may once have been full of hostile energies ; but, hostile or friendly, its infinite variety of Forms, Directions, Intensities and Complexities, had taken 144 LETTER TO TEACHERS order from the smallest electron and ion, to the widest range of stellar space measured by the most powerful light- ray, going through every possible form of physical evolution before man, — or his instinct, — or his reason, — or any other animal, or vegetable, or organic life, or vital energy, ever stirred ! " If then the evolutionist, irritated by treatment which seems a far-off echo of the remarks of the King of Brobdingnag to Gulliver nearly two hundred years ago, should still insist upon his mind being the highest possible intensity of energy on account of its consciousness, the degradationist might probably lose his temper and his manners outright, to the point of breaking out : — " The psychologists have already told you that Consciousness is only a phase THE SOLUTIONS 145 in the decline of vital energy ; — a stage of weakening will. We physicists, even less than you Darwinists, deny the intensity of the Will, but we know it to be stronger in the Scarab or the Scorpion, where it is unconscious, than in Monkey or Man, where it is conscious ; while we watch, over and over again, with abject incredulity, the apotheosis of a butterfly or the flowering of an orchid, which reveal to our scientific sense an intensity of vital energy out of all comparison with that of man. We never tire of mar- velling at the essence of substance ; — at the energy of the atom or the glow-worm ; but this is the motive behind our whole thermodynamic law. "The highest intensities of nature, such as produced the atom and the molecule were precisely the earliest 10 146 LETTER TO TEACHEES on our scale. Of the vital energies in the order of time we cannot pretend to know much, since all the types seem to have first developed themselves, during a great many millions of years, in water, or under ground, in conditions indefinitely varied and altogether un- known ; but the moment an animal appears above ground, it turns out to be a Silurian Scorpion, a type of the intensest vital energy that ever lived, if one can trust the entomologists. Next, in the Carboniferous, we happen first on a dragon-fly with ' a spread of wing much exceeding two feet.' (Dana, 702). Carboniferous insects, like carboniferous forests, suggest in- tensities indefinitely stronger in creative power than any energies known to be at work today. In fact, no creative energies whatever are known to be at THE SOLUTIONS 147 work today, unless it be the radiating activities. Mere heat creates nothing. Neither heat nor its absence accounts for any of the problems of vital energy, — neither for the cell, nor the form, nor the movement, nor the consciousness, nor the descent, nor the inheritance, nor the intelligence, of organisms ; nor does motion account for direction. No intelligent man now-a-days is satisfied with a purely mechanical formula. " Palaeontologists talk only of speciali- sation, as though the more elaborate type were the higher intensity. The opposite is more likely to be true. Geology suggests plainly that, after at least fifty million years of conditions which made life impossible except under water, these anarchic forces dissi- pated themselves so far as to settle into 148 LETTER TO TEACHERS an equilibrium which showed itself on land in the wild exuberance of the carboniferous forests, and which then developed into the wilder exuberance of the Eocene mammals. How long this exuberance lasted, Saporta has told us ; and he is also authority for the fact, — not the theory, I say, — that the equi- librium was overthrown by the steady dissipation of energy. Gaudry, another sufficient authority, has added that vital energy fell step by step, and phase by phase, with solar energy. The geolo- gists in general seem to agree with the astronomers in teaching that both forms of energy will continue to fall in intensity until both disappear. Mean- while we are perfectly at liberty to teach that the relative intensity of each phase measured the relative intensity of each creation of land-organisms in the THE SOLUTIONS 149 order of time. We are not only at liberty to do it ; we are logically com- pelled to insist upon it. No other order of sequence can be made to accord with the positively miraculous properties which defy explanation in organic as in inorganic nature. " We all remember the desperate efforts that Darwin made to fit within a uniformitarian schedule these violent leaps in the energy of evolution, but we seldom realise how difficult he found the task of convincing himself that his own scheme was convenient. When he said, as he often did, that he never thought of the eye without a chill, — ' the eye, to this day (1860), gives me a cold shudder,' — he meant, — among other things, — that his theory was good for notliing as a convenient means of explaining why the eye should have 150 LETTEE TO TEACHERS leaped to perfection from its start, when it should have been the slowest in the order of evolution. In fact, the eye of the jSrst fish, at the beginning of geo- logical time, was at least as good as that of his descendant still living unchanged ; and the first trilobites, somewhere in Silurian ages, had eyes of twelve or fifteen thousand facets. * Assuredly,' says Gaudry, ' we marvel at such complication in creatures of such great antiquity, but we cannot conclude that the organ of sight reached its whole perfection in the primary period, for probably the thirty thousand facets of Remopleurides were not equal in value to the two beautiful eyes of our actual mammals.' Such a probably might well cause Darwin a chill ; but had he gone on to say that the decline of the tertiary quadrupeds caused him a worse THE SOLUTIONS 151 shudder, he would have said only what Dana seemed to feel, and what strikes every physicist with astonishment when he reads it in Dana, about the universal stunting of animal life in recent times. In South America alone, during and since the glacial epoch, the extinct species of quadrupeds number more than a hundred, while, among the peculiarly South American order of Ant-eaters, the extinct species were more numerous than all those that ' now exist in that part of the conti- nent, and were far larger animals/ In Australia the Marsupials prove the same law : ' As on the other conti- nents, the moderns are dwarfs by the side of the ancient species.' As a universal rule, the fact of dwindling size holds true of a large part of the mammals, including elephants and 152 LETTER TO TEACHEES herbivores as well as many carnivores, edentates, rodents and marsupials : ' The kinds that continued into modern time became dwindled in the change wherever found over the globe, not- withstanding the fact that genial climates are still to be found over large regions.' (Dana, 997). Neither Kelvin nor Faye, neither Lapparent nor Flammarion, asserted the brutal facts of degradation nearly so strongly as Dana. "To this law, which has already reduced us to ' living in an impoverished world,' you evolutionists require us physicists, under some mysterious pen- alty, to make for you an exception in favor of man. We cannot do it. We are willing to yield much of the old mechanical ground. We grant that we cannot explain why, in man or THE SOLUTIONS 153 in molecule, the primitive energies of nature took directions which imply, — in our limited experience, — a reasoning forethought. Cause is a transcendental problem beyond our grasp. We no longer venture even to assert that we know the creative forces at all. We say only that in the world which we do know, we can see nothing supernatural in action. Infinite complication we admit, but no ultimate contradiction. Sooner or later, every apparent excep- tion, whether man or radium, tends to fall within the domain of physics. Against this necessity, human beings have always rebelled. For thousands of years they have stood apart, superior to physical laws. The time has come when they must yield. " The claim that Reason must be classed as an energy of the highest 154 LETTER TO TEACHERS intensity is itself unreasonable. On the contrary, Reason is the last in time, and therefore the lowest in tension. According to our western standards, the most intense phase of human Energy occurred in the form of religious and artistic emotion, — perhaps in the Crusades and Gothic Churches ; — but since then, though vastly increased in apparent mass, human energy has lost intensity and continues to lose it with accelerated rapidity as the Church proves. Organised in society, as a volume, it becomes a multiplied number of enfeebled units, on which, like the eye in insects, reason acts as an enormously multiplied lens, converging nature's lines of will, and taking direction from them, but adding nothing of its own. Man has, indeed, — or had, — in a few of his THE SOLUTIONS 155 stems, some faculty for artistic expres- sion, not nearly so strong as that of some plants, or some butterflies, or some birds, but more varied. This instinct he probably inherited from an earlier, more gifted, animal ; but as a creative energy he inherited next to nothing. The coral polyp is a giant beside him. As an energy he has but one dominant function : — that of ac- celerating the operation of the second law of thermodynamics. So far as his reason acts as an energy at all, it is a miraculous invention for this purpose, which inspires wonder and almost worship ; but in strjctness the reason does no work, — it is only a mechan- ism ; — nature's energy, which we have agreed to call Will, that lies behind reason, does the work, — and degrades the energy in doing it ! " 156 LETTER TO TEACHERS Evidently, on these lines, no sort of agreement is possible. The two figures contradict each other beyond the chance of conciliation. Of course the contra- diction has been slightly exaggerated to make it clear ; but if the physicist had not himself lost the high literary potential of Swift and Voltaire, he would exaggerate to much better pur- pose, and would handle the unfortu- nate creature called Man in a temper such as anyone may renew who cares to go back to Bunyan or Dante or the Bible, not to mention the Prophets in particular ; but he would convince no one. Man refuses to be degraded in self-esteem, of which he has never had enough to save him from bitter self-reproaches. He yearns for flattery, and he needs it. The contradiction between science and instinct is so radi- THE SOLUTIONS 157 cal that, though science should prove twenty times over, by every method of demonstration known to it, that man is a thermodynamic mechanism, instinct would reject the proof, and whenever it should be convinced, it would have to die. If the dead-lock were a new thing, the situation would not be so difficult, but the history of the last five hundred years tells of little else. Man began by usurping the rank of lord of creation. Galileo and Newton succeeded in depos- ing him, much against his will, — as the Church very candidly confessed, — but he has never despaired of reinstating himself by means of his Reason. The doctrine of evolution seemed, in the nineteenth century, to favor him. For fifty years, society flattered itself that science stood solidly behind it, lifting 158 LETTER TO TEACHERS it up from lower powers to higher, and restoring it to its old rank and self- respect as child and heir to the infinite. The contrary assertion of Kelvin had no effect upon it whatever. Indeed if Eduard von Hartmann is right, society deliberately chose to be silent about the direction of physics, and refused to think or talk about it ; but silence has never stopped this dispute, at least in western civilisation, since the martyrdom of Prometheus, and merely hurried the moment when, on scientific principles, another catastrophe, like that of the Newtonian philosophy, became immi- nent. William Thomson and Clausius, Helmholz and Balfour Stewart, asserted and reiterated the certainty of this catastrophe, in vain, as Descartes had asserted it, — also in vain, — two hundred THE SOLUTIONS 159 years before; but Descartes offered a compromise, and in that respect differed from Kelvin. Descartes proposed to free man from material bondage, pro- vided he might mechanize all other vital energies. Society rose in arms to protect the dog, and so defeated the scheme, leaving the world to go on asserting two contradictory principles in the same breath, down to the present day, to the undiminished embarrassment of Universities, and with little per- ceptible change in the situation, except that the Universities of today hesitate to assert with confidence the old con- viction of spiritual authority, showing in this respect a distinct decline in energy ; while technical instruction has reached, — or seems on the verge of reaching, — the point where it must insist on the universal application of its thermodynamic law. 160 LETTER TO TEACHERS Since compromise of principle seems to be out of the question, there remains only the resource of direct conflict. Each party is thrown back on the horns of a dilemma, — the same old dilemma of Saint Augustine and Descartes, — the dead-lock of free-will. The professor of physics will ask his colleague, the professor of history, to explain the process by which energy raises its own potential without cost, since this has been an object greatly desired by school-masters from the earliest known ages, and would singu- larly simplify the professorial accounts. The teacher of history, who has trouble enough already in trying to raise the potential of his scholars' energy, can only retort by asking his colleague to show how his own teach- ing proves progressive enfeeblement THE SOLUTIONS 161 and degradation of quality. The deg- radationist might be quite ready to admit it, and quite competent to prove it, but he knows that he has already turned his own thermodynamic law into a means of convincing society of the contrary. Since the year 1830, when the great development of physi- cal energies began, all school-teaching has learned to take for granted that man's progress in mental energy is measured by his capture of physical forces, amounting to some fifty million steam horse-power from coal, and at least as much more from chemical and elementary sources ; besides indefinite potentials in his stored experience, and progressive rise in the intensities of the forces he keeps in constant use- He cares little what becomes of all this new power; he is satisfied to 11 162 LETTER TO TEACHERS know that he habitually develops heat at 3000° Centigrade and electricity by the hundred thousand volts, from sources of indefinitely degraded energy ; and that his mind has learned to control them. Man's Reason once credited with this addition of volume and intensity, its victory seems assured. The teacher of history need then trouble himself with no further doubts of Evolution ; but the teacher of physics seems — at least to an ignorant world whose destiny hangs on the balance, — very much required to defend himself. Although this form of physical psy- chology is less than a hundred years old it has already taken possession of society so completely as to serve it, in place of the old religious and mechanical formulas, for a philosophical THE SOLUTIONS 163 foundation. The historian has a right to use it as such ; but according to the understanding of the physical law already discussed, one would think physicists debarred from admitting it. To them it should seem an illusion, although one difficult to deal with ; but, as far as a bystander has means of judging, they would still be at liberty to turn the dilemma about, and seek to impale their antagonist on the reversed horn, by suggesting that the theory of tropism or induction, or of physico-chemical relations .in general, seems to require that the psychical will, under such conditions, should not absorb physical energy so much as physical energy would absorb the psychical will. Two similar energies, when in contact, would tend to a common level ; force, if powerful enough, would control 164 LETTER TO TEACHERS thought ; the ocean would dissolve the crystal of salt ; so that, if the evo- lutionist should insist on identifying the quality of his psychical energy with the quantity of his steam- or water- power or electric voltage, the physicist would expect to see the psychical potential of society vanish as suddenly as the potential of a Ley den jar. Perhaps the Universities might be quicker than the technical schools to see the point of this retort, since they claim, in theory, to deal with quality rather than with quantity, and possibly some professors have noticed that quality may sometimes suffer from contact with volume. The idea is not precisely new, — far from it ! — even beyond the pale of European Univer- sities, portions of society have shown a somewhat enfeebled instinct of revolt THE SOLUTIONS 166 against the psychical processes of the press and the public. Various writers have discussed the effect of dissolving society into a single mixture ; even a name, — panmixia — has been made for it. Nothing is commoner than the prejudice against mechanical energy as a weakener of nervous energy when- ever it gets control, as in manufactur- ing towns ; or the belief that great masses of people under uniform con- ditions tend to a mechanical uniformity of mind, as in agricultural districts ; but the interest of the subject lies less in the application of the theory than in the shape which the theory would have to take in order to conform with the rest of the law of thermodynamics. Physicists know best what their mathematical formulas for electricity and gases and solutions 166 LETTER TO TEACHERS are ; historians have no right to meddle with the methods of colleagues in rival departments ; but they cannot help feeling curiosity to know whether Ostwald's line of reasoning would logically end in subjecting both psychi- cal and physico-chemical energies to the natural and obvious analogy of heat, and extending the law of Entropy over all. (Ostwald, " Vorlesungen," Leipzig, 1902, p. 398). Few physicists would be likely to see any scientific sense in this personal application of their law, and no one is readier than the historian to admit that vital Energy is probably not so simple as any formula that he could state, or understand if stated to him. The most ardent lover of paradox, — the most inveterate humorist, — would hardly think it worth his while to THE SOLUTIONS 167 follow a train of reasoning wliicli would surely immolate physics and metaphysics together. Such amusements seem to be reserved for astronomers ; but neither historians nor sociologists can afford to let themselves be driven into admitting that every gain of power, — from gun- powder to steam, — from the dynamo to the Daimler motor, — has been made at the cost of man's — and of woman's — vitality. The mischiefs thus charged upon Keason would not end there. Metaphysics as well as mathematics would measure enfeeblement ; phi- losophy as well as mechanics would mark degradation ; the Universities as well as the technical schools would alike close their doors without waiting for the sun to grow cold. Direct conflict, therefore, seems to be as barren as compromise. Hereto- 168 LETTER TO TEACHERS fore in human experience, such reason- ing would have been dismissed at once as only the usual futile attempt at reduction to the absurd. That it would pass for such in a University of today is an open question ; it sounds rather like another way of saying what Arndt, Branco and Hopf, as well as Eousseau and a thousand others, have said for the past hundred and fifty years ; but in any case it has no value for teachers, since it leads only to the stoppage of teaching altogether. If the teacher of history cares to contest the ground with the teacher of physics, he must become a physicist himself, and learn to use laboratory methods. He needs technical tools quite as much as the electrician does ; large formulas, like Willard Gibbs's E-ule of Phases ; generalisations, no matter how temporary or hypo- THE SOLUTIONS 169 thetical, sucli as all mathematicians use for the convenience of their scholars. The whole field of physics is covered with such temporary structures, mere approximations to truth, but in con- stant demand as tools. Mathematicians practice absolute freedom ; they have the right — and use it, — to assume that a straight line is, or is not, the shortest distance between two points, as they please. In the whole domain of science, no field of cultivation is poorer in such labor-saving devices than that of human history, yet Man, as a form of energy, is in most need of getting a firm footing on the law of thermodynamics. One cannot doubt that Lord Kelvin could have suggested half-a-dozen figures which would answer the purpose, although he might very well have refused to waste his own stock of vital 170 LETTER TO TEACHERS energy in tlie effort to prove his thermo- dynamic ascent from a hypothetical eocene lemur, or even from a duck- billed platypus ; neither of which would have promised energetic means of saving him from the pitfalls which his keen mathematical instinct would have shown him as the work of his fellow-physicists, planted directly in his path. Whatever the difficulties, Kelvin would have faced them honestly. He had courage beyond the common, and if the problem had been forced on him as he forced it on others, he would not even have felt himself obliged to obey his own laws. Almost in his last words he pathetically pro- claimed that his life was a failure in its long effort to reduce his physical energies to a single term. Dying he left the unity, duality or multiplicity THE SOLUTIONS 171 of energies as much disputed as ever. " A certain anarchy reigns in the sciences of nature's domain," says M. Lucien Poincare, who is regarded as a sufficient authority ; " any venture may be risked ; no law appears rigorously necessary." Within the past year Professor Joly of Dublin has seriously risked such a venture in his " Radio- activity and Geology ; an account of the Influence of Padio-active Energy on Terrestrial History," (London, 1909) ; and although the general reader gathers from it mainly the conclusion that physical science is more or less chaotic, this conclusion is only what he needs to reach before he can begin to deal with vital science which is all chaos. "We see the middle- and the end-series of the phylogenetic series," says Peinke ; 172 LETTER TO TEACHERS "that we do not see the beginning is self-evident, since it was built up in a period of the earth's history which is for us transcendental ; " (" Einleitung," p. 612) ; we could not understand it if we did see it. So far as concerns the history of man, every period of the earth's history, beyond its actual condition, is trans- cendental. The anthropologist knows nothing whatever about it. Among a thousand possible varieties of primitive man, he has scarcely more than two or three doubtful clues to follow, and thus far these lead nowhere. Appar- ently this is the only certain result of sixty years' effort in physics and physiology. Forced back on the logi- cal suicide of asserting or accepting an act of creation, biologists prefer to admit mental enfeeblement, even at THE SOLUTIONS 173 the risk of being driven to admit both ; so that, if the safety of society should seem now to depend on assum- ing a multiple cause, as of old on establishing the unity of creation, nothing obliges society to persist in its monist scheme. If the physicist cannot make mind the master, as the metaphysician would like, he can at least abstain from making it the slave. So little essential is monism, that M. H. Poincare lately startled the world by avowing that physicists used that formula only because all science would become impossible if they were not allowed to assume simple hypothe- ses ( " La Science et I'Hypothese," p. 173) ; but this mental need of unity is also a weakness, which gives the degradationist an artificial and altogether unfair advantage. The con- 174 LETTER TO TEACHERS venience of unity is beyond question, and convenience overrides morals as well as money, when a vast majority of minds, educated or not, are invited to live in a complex of anarchical energies, with only the privilege of acting as chief anarchists. Bewildered and outraged they reject the image ; but they find that of diffusion or degradation so simple and so natural as to satisfy every want. The Dar- winian readily admits that Kelvin's sun accounts for evolution better than Darwin's did ; and he is only too ready to drop all the school-phrases, — to call the process Transformation, and so, quietly, surrender the issue. He is equally ready to admit that Darwin never supplied a motive power that should vary in force with the phenom- ena; he might even go so far as to THE SOLUTIONS 175 concede that the want of such an energy had embarrassed biology nearly to the point of paralysis ; while he must honestly grant that Kelvin began mathematically by giving himself, from the start, all the power he needed, in the degree in which he needed it, so that his system supplied its own force, — like the Niagara river, — by degrading its own energies. Simplicity may not be evidence of truth, and unity is perhaps the most deceptive of all the innumerable illusions of mind ; but both are primary instincts in man, and have an attraction on the mind akin to that of gravitation on matter. The idea of unity sur- vives the idea of God or of Universe ; it is innate and intuitive. Thought floats much more easily towards than against it, and from the moment when 176 LETTER TO TEACHERS heat, or electricity, or thought, or any- other form or symbol or medium of energy, was likened to a falling sub- stance tending to an ultimate ocean of Entropy, nothing was simpler than to plot out the ordinates and abscissas that marked its curve of evolution. Astronomy, geology, palaeontology, biol- ogy, psychology, could all move majes- tically down the decline. Perhaps the feature of the scheme that was most repulsive to instinct, was most seductive to science, — its fatal facility in accounting for Reason. All organisms would tend to develop nervous systems when dynamically ill- nourished. As the Drosera is repre- sented to have taken to a diet of insects when it could no longer nourish itself sufficiently as a vegetable, or as a tree may throw out wider and THE SOLUTIONS 177 deeper roots in the degree that com- plexity might bring moisture, so the vital energy which had developed in the exuberance of physical quantity so long as its dynamic supplies were in excess of its needs, would turn itself, as its conditions were impoverished, into those " connecting, or, as they are technical^ called, association-fibres, which make nerve-currents work together as they could not without being thus associated." Thought then appears in nature as an arrested, — in other words, as a degraded, — physical action. The theory is convenient, and convenience makes law, at least in the laboratory. In this freedom of handling his energies the physicist enjoys another easy advantage over the sociologist. As already pointed out, the physicist 12 178 LETTER TO TEACHERS is safe from interference so long as lie can still promise expansion of power, or relief from pain ; while the oldest and driest professor of history would smile at the idea of trying to imitate his vivacious colleague by telling his students, at the opening of the collegiate year, that, "as an approximately correct working hypothesis," he should proceed to treat the history of modern Europe and America as a typical example of energies indicating degradation " with headlong rapidity " towards " inevitable death." Probably he would have no more difficulty than the physicist has, in making his material fit his figure ; history can be written in one sense just as easily as in another ; but however perfect this figure might seem to him he would not think it suited to the interests of the students or of the Uni- THE SOLUTIONS 179 versity, in spite of the fact that the University has never committed itself to the contrary. Indeed he could truth- fully say that the Universities in Europe have never preached upward evolution at all. History began with admitting as its starting-point that the speechless animal who raised himself to the use of an inflected language must have made an effort greater and longer than the effort required for him, after perfecting his tongue, to vulgarise and degrade it. Even after descending to the familiar facts of relatively recent evolution, historians never teach that Egyptian pyramids and tombs show childlike inferiority to the tombs and temples of Berlin. Artists have never been known to illustrate their lectures on the history of their art by showing how much the 180 LETTER TO TEACHERS sculpture of Pheidias and Praxiteles might have been improved by an acquaintance with the sculpture of Lon- don. Dramatists do not hold up to derision the feebleness of Aeschylus or the folly of Aristophanes before the gigantic force and genius of Sardou and E-ostand on the Paris stage. American professors do not read Pindar or Lucretius aloud in order to suit the intelligence of their children in the nurseries of New York and Chicago. Historians seldom express contempt for Thucydides, and still devote vol- umes to Alexander the Great and Julius Csesar. They have obstinately shirked the duty of applying the law of elevation to their view of history, but rather have bitterly opposed it. Even the prophet of progress in the English school, — Macaulay, — could THE SOLUTIONS 181 not resist the old trick of reviving a conventional barbarian to gloat, " in the midst of a vast solitude," — over the ex- hausted energies of England. Histories invariably use Kelvin's figure Avhenever it is convenient, and talk of new- races in set terms as so much fresh fuel, or oxygen, flung on the burnt-out energies of empire ; while the greatest historical work in the English language is called "The Decline and Fall." Something less than two hundred and fifty years ago, all the greatest scholars and wits of Europe were disputing the relative superiority of ancients and moderns. Swift's Battle of the Books still lives as a sparkling record of it. The moderns, having the advantage of being alive, decided the result in their own favor, but, until the amazing influx of mechanical 182 LETTER TO TEACHERS and physical energies after 1830, the European Universities never seemed clear on the subject, and would be quite likely today to reverse the judgment on such evidence as decided the case in 1700. Only an unusually well-informed scholar could say with certainty what the German or French Universities think about the dogma of upward evolution in the year 1910, but their record is a bad one. On the dogma of Degradation their record is worse. If the human race is to depend on their suifrages, its state is a parlous one. For a thousand years, as long as religion held sway, teachers were not merely permitted, — they were obliged, to condemn the human race, — with rare exceptions, due only to the pity of God, — to eternal degradation following the near THE SOLUTIONS 183 end of the world. After 1500 tlie Church very slowly lost its control of education, but the attitude of the schools changed little in regard to human history. In the University as in the pulpit, the standard of excellence remained among the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Jews, when it was not carried back to the Garden of Eden. In the nineteenth century, everyone knows how eagerly the public responded to Wagner's resuscitation of the Middle Ages. By most artists modern life is assumed as decadence. What is most striking of all, the Universities have begun again, — within fifty years, — to announce through their astrono- mers the approaching demise of the solar system ; through their geologists, the death of the earth and its occu- pants ; through their physicists, the 184 LETTER TO TEACHERS years still left for suns to shine, and the ultimate destiny of the celestial universe to become atomic dust at — 270° Centigrade ; while their anthro- pologists point out the rapid exhaustion of the race, and their newspapers day by day proclaim its steady degradation. What makes the matter infinitely worse is the common, daily experience that, not only in Universities but also at every street-corner of every European city, on every half-holiday, hundreds of thousands of men are taught to believe with delight, that society, down to the present day, is an unnatural abortion, sustained by perverted illu- sions, and destined to immediate suicide. To such a point has this habit of teaching gone, that society itself, at every national and municipal election, is seen physically trembling ; per- THE SOLUTIONS 185 plexed and confused ; feeling its way ; conscious of its dangers ; anxious to do right ; ashamed of the sores which, — as it is solemnly assured, — disfigure its surface, and of the hideous tumors which, — as it is incessantly told, — are ravaging its vitals ; half-willing to be sacrificed, like Iphigenia, but timidly shrinking from staking the life, de- scribed as so worthless, on the gambler's chance of winning something less wretched in an unknown beyond. Among all these voluble prophets, the historian alone may not discuss the problem for respect of youth, lest he should make still more serious an issue which was serious before schools began. If the silent, half-conscious, intuitive faith of society could be fixed, it might possibly be found always tending towards belief in a future equilibrium 186 LETTER TO TEACHERS of some sort, that should end in becoming stable ; an idea which belongs to mechanics, and was probably the first idea that nature taught to a stone, or to an apple ; to a lemur or an ape ; before teaching it to Newton. Unfortu- nately for society, the physicists again abruptly interfere, like Sancho Panza's doctor, by earnest protests that, if one physical law exists more absolute than another, it is the law that stable equi- librium is death. A society in stable equilibrium is — by definition, — one that has no history and wants no historians. Thomson and Clausius startled the world by announcing this principle in 1852 ; but the ants and bees had announced it some millions of years before, as a law of organisms, and it may have been established still earlier, in more convincing form, by some of THE SOLUTIONS 187 the caterpillars. According to the recent doctrine of Will or Intuition, this conclusion was the first logical and ultimate result reached in the evolution of organic life ; but the professor of history who shall accept the hymen- optera and lepidoptera as teachers in the place of Kelvin and Clausius, will probably find himself in the same dilemma as before. If he aims at carrying his audience with him, he will have to adopt the current view of a society rising to an infinitely high potential of energy, and there remaining in equilibrium, the only view which will ensure him the sympathy of men, as well as, — probably, — of caterpillars ; but if he wants to conciliate science, he will have to deride the idea of a stable equilibrium of high potential, and insist that no stable social equilibrium can 188 LETTER TO TEACHERS be reached except by degrading social energies to a level where they can fall no further, and do no more useful work. Perhaps this formula, too, may please many students, whose potential of vital energy, — or, in simpler words, whose love of work, — is less archaic than that of the ants and bees ; but as a matter of practical teaching, — as a mere choice between technical formulas, — the two methods result in the same dilemma for the old-fashioned evolutionist who clings to his ideals of indefinite progress. Between two equilibriums, each mechani- cal, and each insisting that history is at an end, lost forever in the ocean of statistics, the classical University teacher of history, with his intuitions of free- will and art, can exist only as a sporadic survival to illustrate for his colleagues the workings of their second law of thermodynamics. THE SOLUTIONS 189 To some extent, already, he finds himself actually in this awkward situa- tion where his colleagues betray impatience at his continued existence. With singular unanimity, the polite, but embarrassed authorities agree that history is not a science, and show marked unwillingness to permit that it shall ever, with their consent, become one. Except on their own terms, they will have nothing to do with human evolution, and their terms commonly require that they should treat man as a creature habitually striving to attain imaginary ideals always contrary to law. His Will and that of Nature have been constantly at strife, and continue to be so, under the Baconian philosophy and the law of Energetik, as decidedly as under the scholastic philosophy and the Sum ma of St. Thomas Aquinas. 190 LETTER TO TEACHERS Even the friendly Vitalist treats his brother Vitalists with candor not to be mistaken for compliment, because, " in the history of humanity there is always only so much science as there is no History" ; while the most naif of all the historian's naivetes is his favorite notion that the *' understanding " of a problematic humanity can be furthered by adding to it a more problematic phantom of Descent. (Driesch, "Natur- begriffe und Natururtheile." Leipzig, 1904, p. 237.) In truth, one is driven to admit that " the theory of descent," as Von Zittel says, " has introduced new ideas into descriptive natural history, and has given it a higher purpose ; but we must not forget that it is still only a theory, which requires to be proved." On this point, the professor of history who has any smattering of special THE SOLUTIONS 191 training, knows all that he needs to knoAV. He is as free as ever he was to go on compiling tables of dates, or editing, or reediting so-called *' docu- ments," or seeking to infuse into the memories of his students a sufficient acquaintance with the statute Quia Emptores. He has fully made up his mind either for or against the exist- ence of any philosophy at all, as well as whether he is required to lecture on such a philosophy in case it does, or does not, exist. Every competent teacher of history is supposed, justly or unjustly, to know his Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte, even if not his Lamprecht. When his phys- iological colleagues ridicule his aspira- tions to science, the professor of history seems little disposed to resent their attitude, but rather encourages it ; and 192 LETTER TO TEACHERS he is right, if they are right, in doing so ; but, none the less, he finds himself thus placed, for the first time in three hundred years, face to face with a painful, if not a vital problem. In one respect his dilemma is worse than in the sixteenth century, since Bacon's physical teaching aimed at freeing the mind from a servitude, while the law of Entropy imposes a servitude on all energies, including the mental. The degree of freedom steadily and rapidly diminishes. Without rest, the physicists gently push history down the decline, as yet scarcely conscious, which they are certain to plot out by abscissae and ordinates as soon as they can fix and agree upon a sufiScient number of normal variables, not with conscious intention but by unconscious extension. Every reader of current THE SOLUTIONS 193 literature knows that the subject is touched by half the books he reads, and that the most popular are the most outspoken. Few volumes are more widely known than M. Gustave Le Bon's " Physiologic des Foules," (1895), which closes with the following paragraph : — " That which formed a people, a unity, a block, ends by becoming an agglomeration of individuals without cohesion, still held together for a time by its traditions and institutions. This is the phase when men, divided by their interests and aspirations, but no longer knowing how to govern themselves, ask to be directed in their smallest acts ; and when the State exercises its absorbing influence. With the definitive loss of the old ideal, the race ends by entirely losing its soul ; it becomes nothing more 13 194 LETTER TO TEACHERS than a dust of isolated individuals, and returns to what it was at the start, — a crowd." Under the thinnest veil of analogy the physicist-historian, with scientific calmness, condemns our actual society as he condemns the sun ; for the ** crowd" which Gustave Le Bon declares to be the end of social evolution is not at all the same " crowd " that made its beginning, and is wholly incapable of doing useful work. Gustave Le Bon is himself a physicist of wide renown, but he is remarkable also as director of the " Bibliotheque de Philosophic Scien- tifique," the best known of all recent attempts to lighten the load of technical instruction and of scientific baggage. Among the most recent of these admirable volumes is one on " Degra- dation " (Paris, November, 1908), by THE SOLUTIONS 195 M. Bernliard Brunhes, whose position as Director of the Observatory of the Puy de Dome guarantees his competence to narrate the story. In one or two paragraphs, with the lucidity which so often distinguishes French thought from that of some other races, M. Brunhes summarizes the values of the two philosophies of history : — " The preceding remarks give the key to the apparent oj^position which exists between the doctrine of Evolution and the principle of Degradation of energy. Physical science presents to us a world which is unceasingly wearing itself out. A philosophy which claims to derive support from biology, paints compla- cently, on the contrary, a world steadily improving, in which physiological life goes on always growing perfect to the point of reaching full consciousness of 196 LETTEE TO TEACHERS itself in man, and where no limit seems imposed on eternal progress. Observe that this second idea, — of indefinite progress, — has furnished much more material than the first, for literary development ! This is no doubt because the scientific facts on which it is con- structed lend themselves to vulgarisation far more easily than the scientific facts whose combination forms the principle of Carnot. From our point of view the principle of degradation of energy would prove nothing against the fact of Evolution. The progressive trans- formation of species, the realisation of more perfect organisms, contain nothing contrary to the idea of the constant loss of useful energy. Only the vast and grandiose conceptions of imagina- tive philosophers who erect into an absolute principle the law of * universal THE SOLUTIONS 197 progress,' could no longer hold against one of the most fundamental ideas that physics reveals to us. On one side, therefore, the world wears out ; on another side, the appearance on earth of living beings more and more elevated, and, — in a slightly different order of ideas, — the development of civilisation in human society, undoubt- edly give the impression of a progress and a gain." (p. 193.) This, then, is the extreme limit of the physicists' concessions. If a com- promise is to be made, it must rest there. The degradationist can so far ameliorate the immediate rigor of his law as to admit that degradation of energy may create, or convey, an impression of progress and gain ; but if the evolutionist presses the inquiry further, and asks where this proposed 198 LETTER TO TEACHERS compromise will lead him as a teacher of young men, — what future reality lies behind the impression of progress, — what amount of illusion is to be reckoned as an independent variable in the formula of gain, — the degrada- tionist replies, quite candidly and honestly, that this impression of gain is derived from an impression of Order due to the levelling of energies ; but that the impression of Order is an illusion consequent on the dissolution of the higher Order which had supplied, by lowering its inequalities, all the useful energies that caused progress. The reality behind the illusion, is, therefore, absence of the power to do useful work, — or what man knows, in his finite sensibilities, as death : — " Thus Order in the material universe would be the mark of utility and the THE SOLUTIONS 199 measure of value ; and tbis Order, far from being spontaneous, would tend constantly to destroy itself Yet tbe Disorder towards wbicb a collection of molecules moves, is in no respect tbe initial cbaos ricb in differences and inequalities tbat generate useful ener- gies ; on tbe contrary it is tbe average mean of equality and bomogeneity in absolute want of coordination." (p. 53.) Perbaps an instructor needs a memory extending over sixty years in order to measure tbe revolution in tbougbt wbicb sucb teacbing implies. Every rigbt- minded University Professor of 1850 dismissed tbe ideas of Kelvin, as be did tbose of Maltbus, Karl Marx and Scbopenbauer, as fantastic. Tbey sbocked bim, partly for tbeir extrava- gance but cbiefly for wbat be regarded as tbeir destructive pessimism. In 200 LETTER TO TEACHERS 1910, an American professor who should try to get below the surface of thought in Germany, Italy, France, or even in England, would probably incline to the conclusion that Schopenhauer may be regarded as an optimist. In reality pessimists and optimists have united on a system of science which makes pessimism the logical foundation of optimism. History is the victim of both. Let any young student take up the last German book on Biology that happens to fall under his eyes. Within the first hundred pages he is fairly sure to come upon some assertion or assump- tion of the second law of thermody- namics in its dogmatic form : — " The Energetik of the living organism consists, then, in the last analysis, in the fact that the organism, when left to itself, tends in the direction of a stable THE SOLUTIONS 201 equilibrium under the surrender of energy to the outer world. The reach- ing of the stable equilibrium, — even the mere approach to it, — means death. In this respect the organism acts like a clock that has run down." (Reinke, " Einleitung in die theoretische Biolo- gie," p. 152.) In 1852, Thomson contented himself by saying that a restoration of energy is " probably " never effected by organ- ised matter. In 1910, there is nothing " probable " about it ; the fact has become an axiom of biology. In 1852, any University professor would have answered this quotation by the dry remark that society was not an organism, and that history was not a science, since it could not be treated mathematically. Today, M. Bernhard Brunhes seems to feel no doubt that society is an organism, 202 LETTER TO TEACHERS and the physicists invariably stretch Kelvin's law over all organised matter whatever. Instead of being a mere convenience in treatment, the law is very rapidly becoming a dogma of absolute Truth. As long as the theory of Degradation, — as of Evolution, — was only one of the convenient tools of science, the sociologist had no just cause for complaint. Every science, — and mathematics first of all, — uses what tools it likes. The Professor of Physics is not teaching Ethics ; he is training young men to handle concrete energy in one or more of its many forms, and he has no choice but to use the most convenient formulas. Unfortunately the formula most convenient for him is not at all convenient for his colleagues in sociology and history, without press- ing the inquiry further, into more THE SOLUTIONS 203 intimate branches of practice like medicine, jurisprudence and politics. If the entire universe, in every variety of active energy, organic and inorganic, human or divine, is to be treated as clock-work that is running down, society can hardly go on ignoring the fact forever. Hitherto it has often happened that two systems of education, like the Scholastic and Baconian, could exist side by side for centuries, — as they exist still, — in adjoining schools and universi- ties, by no more scientific device than that of shutting their eyes to each other ; but the universe has been terribly narrowed by thermodynamics. Already History and Sociology gasp for breath. The department of history needs to concert with the departments of biology, sociology and psychology some common formula or figure to serve their students 204 LETTER TO TEACHERS as a working model for their study of tlie vital energies ; and this figure must be brought into accord with the figures or formulas used by the depart- ment of physics and mechanics to serve their students as models for the working of physico-chemical and mechanical energies. Without the ad- hesion of physicists, the model would cause greater scandal than though the contradictions were silently ignored as now ; but the biologists, — or, at least, the branches of science concerned with humanity, — will find great difficulty in agreeing on any formula which does not require from physics the abandon- ment, in part, of the second law of thermodynamics. The mere formal exception of Keason from the express operation of the law, as a matter of teaching in the workshop, is not enough. THE SOLUTIONS 205 Either the law must be abandoned in respect to Vital Energy altogether, or Vital Energy must abandon Reason altogether as one of its forms, and return to the old dilemma of Descartes. Meanwhile nothing prevents each instructor from aiming to unite with each of his colleagues in some sort of approach to a common understanding about the first principle of instruction ; if each University solves the problem to its own satisfaction, the problem is, in so far, solved for the whole ; and nothing need hamper the effort of the Universities to carry the process further, if it promises advantage. 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 206 LETTER TO TEACHERS not impossible ; but at present, — for the moment, — as the stream runs, — it also seems, to an impartial bystander, to call for the aid of another Newton. INDEX Aeschylus, 180 Agassiz, Louis, 64 Ant-eaters, 151 Antliropoid ancestors, 55 Anthropology, 53-67, 94, 172 Augustine, Saint, 160 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 92, 189 Aristotle, 91, 92 Arndt, 63, 168 Bacon, Lord, 81, 139, 192 Bain, Alex., 107 Bancroft, George, 13 Bergson, Henri, "L' Evo- lution Creatrice," 108- 110 Berlin, 74, 83, 179 Bernoulli, Daniel, 86 Blandet, theory of solar contraction, 38, 45 Brain, evolution of, 62, 63, 102 Branco, 63, 168 Brunhes, Bernhard, "De- gradation," 194-197, 201 Bruno, Giordano, 85 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 14 Bunyan, John, 156 Carboniferous period, 38, 46, 136, 140, 148 Carnot, Sadi, 2, 196 Chemical energy, 26, 161 Church, the, 154, 157, 183 Ciamician, Professor Gia- como, 91, 96 Clausius,N.,2, 4, 93, 158, 186 Comte, Auguste, 191 Consciousness, chiefly In- telligence, 109, 111, 144 207 208 INDEX Conservation of Energy, Creative Evolution, by Law of, 1, 2, 2i, 119, 120, 128 stated by Tyndall, 6-10 Cope, E. D., 56, 59 Creative Evolution, 93, 103, 106, 146, 147, 148, 153, 155, 172 Henri Bergson, 108- 110 Cretaceous period, 38 Crusades, 154 D Daimler motor, 167 Dalton, John, 86 Dana, James D. , " Man- ual of Geology," 151, 152 D'Archiae and Blandet, 38 Darwin, Charles, on the eye, 149, 150, his Law of Evolution, 21, 22, 23, 33, 37, 64, 96, 134, 174, 190 Dastre, A., "La Vie et la Mort," 25-27 "Decline and Fall," 181 "Degradation," by Bern- hard F.runhes, 194-197 Degradation of Energy, (See Dissipation) 20, 26, 39, 152 equivalent to diffusion, 122, 123 applies to all vital processes, 25, 26, 27, 117, 200-202 Degradation of Energy, convenience of, 174 social bearings of, 30, 78, 178, 196, 197, 198 used for history, 181- 183 De Morgan, J. , " Les Pre- mieres Civilisations," 71-73, 77 Descartes, Ren^, 81, 158, 159, 205 Dissipation of Energy, Law of, 2-4, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 24, 68, 148, 200 applies to vital pro- cesses, 8, 4, 25-27, 52, 78, 79, 124, 133 Dollo's Law of Evolution, 52 Driesch, Dr. Hans, " Der Vitalismus" 13, "Na- turbegriffe," 190 Drosera, 176 INDEX 209 E Egypt, 179 Electricity, 26, 100, 137 Energetik (See Tlierrao- dynamics), 90, 98, 119, 189, 200 Energy, Laws of, 1-4, 18, 19, 20, 24, 26, 79, 93, 161, 170, 200, 201 phases of, 15, 16, 90 storage of, 124 unity of, 90, 173 (See Conservation, De- gradation, Dissipation, Vital, Chemical, Mon- ism). Entelechy, 93 Entropy, Law of, 5, 17, 25, 120, 166, 176, 192 Eocene period, 36, 148 Evolution, Darwin's law of, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 39, 157 Evolution, Lyell's law of uniformity of, 22 contradicted by Sa- porta, 35-39 by Lapparent, 44 by Dollo, 52 equivalent to Trans- formation, 87, 122, 174 consistent with Degra- dation, 195-197 regressive, 66 of man from lemur, 56, 61, 94, 170 of the eye, 106, 149,150 applied to history, 180^ 188, 195-197 Eye, evolution of, 106^ 149, 150 Faye, Hervd Auguste Eti- enne Albans, astrono- mer, " Sur I'Originedu Monde," 16-18, 152 Flammarion, Camille, " Astronomic Popu- laire," 73-76, 77, 84, 152 Galileo, 85, 122, 139, 159 Gaudry, Albert, "Essaide 14 Flechsig, Paul, 104 Form, 92, 138, 143 Free-will, 107, 159, 160 G Pal^ontologie Philoso- phique," 48, 148, 160 210 INDEX Gaudry, Albsrt, on the eye, 150 Geology, of Lyell, 22 of Lapparent, 41-50, 147, 148 of Dana, 151, 152 Gibbs, Willard, 86, 168 Glacial period, 48 date of, 69 Glacial period, expected return of, 66, 69-78 degradation of life in, 151, 152 Gravitation, 5, 143, 175 Gray, Professor Andrew, "Lord Kelvin," 18, 19, 178 Gulliver, 144 H Haeckel, Ernst, 23, 28, 54 Hartraann, Eduard von, 20, 21, 97, 158 ' ' Philosopliie des Un- bewussten," 91, 108 Heat, waste of, 6, 7, 10, 15, 26, 79, 131, 135, 147 development of, 162 a falling substance, 10, 176 Heer, Oswald, " Flora fos- silis Arctica," 35, 46 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fried rich, 14 Helmholz, Ferdinand von, 2, 4, 158 History in relation to vScience, 12, 14, 18, 23, 113, 127, 185, 186, 189 Hopf, Ludwig, "Human Species," 59-64, 168 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 66 Inertia, 31, 32 Instinct, 32, 62, 89, 90, 108-110, 155, 187 Intuition, 92, 110, 187 Joly, Prof. J. " Radioac- tivity and Geology," 171 INDEX 211 K Kant, Immanuel, 81 Kelvin, Lord (Sir William Thomson), 2, 10, 11, 37, 65, 139, 152, 158, 169, 170, 174, 186, 199, 20] his law of thermody- namics, 3, 4, 14, 16, 21, 24. 175 Kelvin, Lord, life of, 18 Klaatsch, Professor, of Heidelberg, 59 Krainski, N., "Gesetz der Erhaltung der En- ergie," 98 Lalande, A. , " Dissolu- tion," 107 Lamprecht, Karl G., 191 Language, 95, 179 Lapparent, A. de, " Traite de Geologie," 41-44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 77, 85, 88, 152 Le Bon, Gustave, 193, 194 Lemur, ancestor of man, 56, 57, 94, 170 Macaulay, Lord, 13, 80, 180 Malthus, T. R, 199 Man (See Anthropology), an agent of waste, 131- 134, 135, 155, 156 his appearance on earth, 48, 172 Nature as economist, 129, 130, 135 Lex Poppaea, 82 Loeb, Jacques, 98, 101 London, 180 Common Council of, 82 Lyell, Sir Charles, his " Principles," 35 his law of uniformity, 22, 33 abandoned by Lappa- rent, 43, 44 M Man, a form of vital en- ergy, 88, 94 Marx, Karl, 14, 199 Miocene period, began degradation, 38, 47 Monism, 90, 173, 175 advantages of, 174 N Nature, full of rival ener- gies, 143 212 INDEX Nature, equilibrium of, Nietzsche, Friedrich Wil- 46, 148, 186 helm, 97 Newton, Sir Isaac, 3, 5, Nippur, 69 37, 157, 186, 206 O Order in the universe, 198, Ostwald, Wilhelm, 4, 25, 199 98, 100, 166 Panmixia, 165 Pessimism, 199, 200 Phases, 15, 16, 86, 90, 168 Pheidias, 180 Physical forces since 1830, 161, 182 (See Energy). Pindar, 180 Poincar^, H., 173 Poincare, Lucien, 5, 171 Psychology, 98-106, 163- 166 R Radium, 130, 153, 171 Reason (see Thought), 62, 89, 95, 153, 155, 157, 162, 167, 204, 205 an arrested Act, 107> 111, 155, 176, 177 a result of tropism, 99, 100 an instrument of Will, 116, 155 Reinke, Dr. J., " Ein- leitung," 108, 171, 172, 200, 201 Remopleurides, 150 Rosa's law of progressive reduction, 52, 65 Rostand, Edmond, 180 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 107, 168 Saporta, Comte de, ' ' Le Monde des Plantes," 35, 36, 37, 47, 148 Schopenhauer, Arthur, "Die Welt alsWille," 91, 92, 97, 199, 200 INDEX 213 Scorpion, 145, 146 Socialist theories of his- tory, 67, 185 Solar energy, inexhausti- ble, 5, 6-11 dissipation of, 13, 15, 49, 68-70, 148 Southey, Robert, 80 Spencer, Herbert, 191 Stationary epoch, 186 Stewart, Balfour, 158 Sun, contraction of, 38, 41- 43, 49 storage-power of, 130 waste of, 7, 8, 134, 135 Swift, Dean, 156, 181 Tait, Peter Guthrie, 5, 8 Thermodynamics, Law of, 3-4, 10, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 24, 145, 148, 155, 159 applies to vital energy, 25-27, 67, 68, 88, 93, 95, 188, 200 to Thought and Will, 116, 117 Thomson, Dr. Hanna, 102, 103, 105 Thomson, Sir William (See Kelvin). Thought, a mode of mo- tion, 102, 137, 163 a diffused energy, 140 an intense energy, 112, 113, 139, 153, 154, 162 Uniformity, Lyell's Law of, 22, 43, 44 Thought, the ultimate energy, 113, 137, 138 an arrested act, 107, 111, 177 an organic growth, 104 106 Times, the London, 83 Topinard, Paul, 62, 63, 65-68 Transformation, equiva- lent to Evolution and Degradation, 87, 122, 174, 196 Tropism, 99, 101, 163 Tyndall, John, " Heat considered as a Mode of Motion," 6-11, 13, 15 U Unity, the Ultimate, (See Monism) 214 INDEX Universities, of Europe, their attitude towards Evolution, 159, 164, 167, 168, 179, 182, 183 Vital Energy, 7, 8, 165, 167, 188, 205 falls under the law of thermodynamics, 3, 15, 17, 18-21, 25, 26, 27, 78, 93, 140, 142, 148, 165, 166, 200 man a form of, 88 an independent energy, 12, 13, 16, 24, 141 Vital Energy, intensity of, 106, 146, 146, 147, 148, 154 the subject of History, 23 the Will its potential, 91 Vitalism, Driesch's His- tory of, 13, 190 Voltaire, 156 W Wagner, Eichard, 183 Will, the potential of vital Energy, 90-96, 155, 187 mechanical attraction, 101, 102 supernatural, 103, 105, 106, 113 Will, absorbed by mechan- anical energy, 163 intensity of, 145 Wundt, Wilhelm, "Sys- tem der Philosophie," 97 Zittel, Karl Alfred von, 190 '^^ PRESS OF J. 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