Henry Adams reflects on history

[alice wellintown]

Yeah, now we're on to it; that AGTD methods or means? Anarchy? These
tweny years after chapters are worth their weight in silver or gold or
...I guess it depends; from a Penn view, the pragmatic reaching an
objective with no regard to the methods, be it setting up a government
in 1789, saving it in 1861, creating an American System; developing
its iron, coal power, inventing its great rail system...or from the
private moral view--morality a private luxury, for one may have a
political policy or an economic one, but not both at the same time.
The lesson of the banks, perhaps no lesson in The Education is more
important to our world today, but ah, like the pantheist and Brahmen
of New England, transparent eyeballs  that Melville sets in the tower
at the watch for whales and who gaze into the deep sea above as below
and the schools of numberless stars, screwed to the navel of the ship,
gazing like some mystic monk Omphalo Dedalus, we are blind to the
blind force that is at work, "a powerful force at work, doing
something that nobody want[s] done...the force [is] one; its operation
is mechanical."

see Brooks Law and Anarchy (Chicago Chapter); Kartels and Forces Unseen

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> the dynamo taught least because it had barely reached infancy [Chicago 1893],
> and, if its progress was to be constant at the
> rate of the last ten years, it would result in infinite costless energy within a
> generation...One lingered long among the dynamos, for they
> were new, and they gave to history a new phase. ...........
>
> Historian(s), who, when he came suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it
> was;--did it pull or did it push? Was it a screw
> or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate? Was it a wire or a mathematical line?
> .......
>
> The historical mind can think only in historical processes, and probably this
> was the first time since historians existed,
>
> that any of them had sat down helpless before a mechanical sequence.
> --Education, p. 319, L of A, vintage edition.
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> TRP, budding "historical" novelist, read this.
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