The Uses of Metaphor

Henry Adams' lifelong quest for certainty led him in his later years to the burgeoning groves of science, with the hope of finding acceptable guidelines for meaning in man's history and in his own still unfinished education. He was certainly not the first to attempt the explanation of social and historical processes in terms of the operation of the laws of natural science; the Pythagoreans had set an ancient precedent. His understanding of scientific principles was limited and the applications he made were often far-fetched and invalid, however prophetic the conclusions he drew from them. The very limitations, however, facilitate analysis of the metaphoric core of his reasoning and illuminate the values and pitfalls inherent in more sophisticated contemporary uses of metaphor. The purpose of this study is to examine the character of his thought, with emphasis on the method of his approach to history through science. The last volume of his History of the United States of America was published in 1891. Even as he was completing it, he found that he could no longer accept the philosophy of history on the basis of the massive work was undertaken many years earlier. In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, there is a gap of two decades between Chapter XX, Failure (1871) and Chapter XXI, Twenty Years After (1892), as if to emphasize the repudiation not only of the thesis but also of the effort he had expended on it. At an age when most men consolidate and round off the labors of a lifetime, Henry Adams rejected his own, as well as his contemporaries', work and embarked in a new direction. He plunged into the search for a science of history, which must be absolute, like other sciences, and must fix with mathematical certainty the path human society has got to follow. His view of history as science began to emerge in later chapters of Education, and was developed more fully in the three essays comprising The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma.2

Epistemology · Linguistics · Metaphor · Historical Philosophy and Science · Philosophy · Research, Science, and Academia · Thoreau and American Literature

• The "Phantasmodesty" of Henry Adams

  Matthew A Taylor•Common Knowledge•2009

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• Henry Adams's Double

  Open Access•John Ernest•Journal of American Culture•1991

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