Henry Adams, scientific historian: ‘even into chaos’

American historian Henry Brooks Adams initiated his life-spanning historical ‘study in unity’ in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, and began studying history in relation to ‘fixed points’ in The Education of Henry Adams. He intended using his studies of the points of ‘Thirteenth-Century Unity’ and ‘Twentieth-Century Multiplicity’ - Europe, or medieval unity (the Virgin), and the Frontier, or modern multiplicity (the Dynamo, or Industrialization) - to develop a ‘science of history’, applying evolutionary theories to history. Adams hoped that this new science would allow historians, using factual documents and papers as evidence, to understand the present and the past, and predict the future, and to demonstrate that ‘there could be no such thing as a stable equilibrium when phenomena are irreversible and events are random.’ Even after Henry Adams began experiencing what he called ‘inevitable isolation and disillusionment’, he continued to insist that the search for a science of history must not be abandoned, believing that ‘[s]cience itself would admit its own failure if it admitted that man, the most important of all its subjects, could not be brought within its range.’ Henry Adams’ tragedy was that he never realized he had found the truth he sought.