Henry Adams's Philosophy of History

T HOSE of us who read.. .the Origin of Species, wrote Henry Adams in 1894 to the American Historical Association, felt the violent impulse which Darwin gave to the study of natural laws, never doubted that historians would follow until they had exhausted every possible hypothesis to create a science of history. Year after year has passed, and little progress has been made.' 1 In that year, William Graham Sumner looked up from his scientific study of society to rebuke Edward Bellamy for having created in Looking Backward (1888) an ideal scientific society in the future which, according to Sumner, violated the known and inevitable laws of economic and social dynamics.2 Four years earlier, Andrew D. White was loading a book with the literary bombs he had been dropping from the height of science on religion.3 And two years after that William James had presented a scientist's faith in his The Will to Believe

Art · Historical and Literary Studies · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography