The Education of Henry Adams Chapter Summary & Analysis - Chapter 28 The Abyss of Ignorance (1902) Summary

Chapter 28 The Abyss of Ignorance (1902) Summary

Adams returns for another stay in Paris. He begins to see lines of force everywhere, signs of forces pulling man this way and that. Repulsion, for him, is "only a battle of attractions." Man once thought about the mystery of force as love of God and love of power, but as the religious feeling has decayed (Adams, despite having felt like a Puritan in his youth, was never religious), as the Virgin has been replaced by the Dynamo, modern man no longer has a unified basis for understanding the world. Continuing to develop his theory, he writes that restlessness forces action - that "ennui, like Natural Selection, accounted for change but failed to account for direction of change." He become so interested in the idea that the world is spreading apart that he decides to write a double book examining the phenomena. The first book will be about the cathedral...
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