I will begin by stating that I’m not at all sure what this book was about. It seemed to be an account of Adams’ search for truth. I’m not entirely convinced that Adams knew what he was talking about. It functions, in part, as an incomplete autobiography of Adams. He tells of his childhood and his memories of John Quincy Adams. Henry went to Harvard, where he claims he learned nothing. He was private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams in London during the Civil War, and his account of the personalities of the British politicians and how they felt and acted in regard to America’s war was the most interesting part of the book. Henry then returned to Washington to be a reporter but was quickly disillusioned by the abuses of Grant’s administration. He became a teacher of medieval history at Harvard. He skips twenty years during which he married — his wife went crazy and committed suicide. He doesn’t mention her in the book except for one hazy allusion to her tomb. He then picks up the thread in 1892 and explains his travels in search of answers. Throughout, he is self-deprecating to an extreme, playing the part of a melancholy who fails at everything, but he gives enough clues about his achievements that I suspect he didn’t believe what he was saying.

And now for his search. He begins by rejecting the church as the answer. He dabbles with Darwinism, but quickly decides that it doesn’t conform to common sense. Grant’s failure convinces him that politics isn’t legitimate. He is trying to discover the force behind history, and I think he decides that force is motion and motion includes inertia. This all leads to chaos and instead of one unifying force behind nature, man and history, there is a multiplicity of forces. Adams says that Rome had advanced to the point where the perfecting of society should have soon occurred, except that they hadn’t learned to harness machinery and so couldn’t keep up with their learning. The church then entered and substituted the occult as the force and hampered progress until science eliminated the church. He wrote a companion book, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity which described the church as the force that drove man at that time to create cathedrals, etc. believing that God was the united force behind everything.

The Education of Henry Adams has the subtitle: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity and shows that now we are beyond the church and ready again to progress. Adams compares the world fairs of his time, with their emphasis on machinery, as equal to the cathedrals of an earlier age. He seems to end this book with the expectation that man’s knowledge is increasing at such a rapid pace that mankind will soon understand the chaotic forces and be able to channel them into a near-perfect society.

Adams had a few good quotes. This first one is related to nothing. I just thought it was hilarious. He wrote an article on Grant that was adopted by Democrats, although he considered himself Republican. “He was henceforth in opposition, do what he might; and a Massachusetts Democrat, say what he pleased; while his only reward or return for this partisan service consisted in being formally answered by Senator Timothy Howe, of Wisconsin, in a Republican campaign document, presumed to be also freely circulated, in which the Senator, besides refuting his opinions, did him the honor — most unusual and picturesque in a Senator’s rhetoric — of likening him to a begonia.” When I was losing myself in that sentence, I certainly didn’t expect it to end with the word “begonia.”

On the church — “To what purpose had she existed, if, after 1,900 years, the world was bloodier than when she was born? The stupendous failure of Christianity tortured history. The effort for unity … resolved itself into meaningless motion … Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account for himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed.”

Adams claims that the great discoverers (Newton with gravity, Galileo with planetary movement, etc.) quit trying to force science to fit their formula, but instead observed, “The mind was thenceforth to follow the movement of matter, and unity must be left to shift for itself … Thought did not evolve nature, but nature evolved thought.” He goes on to show how government, society and the church attempted to resist, but how science won out in the end.

I agree with much of this. The “church” as he considers it certainly hasn’t provided any answers. Unfortunately, he lumped the person of Christ with organized religion. This is sad, because what the Bible says about sin, chaos, Satan and salvation could certainly have ended Adams’ search for truth. I liked him, and admire his mind, freely acknowledging that it is way beyond my capacity much of the time. I look forward to reading his histories.