Volume 47, Number 4 · March 9, 2000
I'll Take Manhattan
By Joyce Carol Oates
City of God
by E.L. Doctorow
Random House, 272 pp., $25.00
Henry Adams in 'A Law of Acceleration' nearly one hundred years ago eloquently brooded upon the increasing split between the mind of the scientist and the mind of the historian-humanist. In this prescient essay, to become the penultimate chapter of The Education of Henry Adams, Adams speaks without the defensive shield of his customary irony; there's an urgency to his prose, a sense of foreboding, and an air even of prophecy, as he contemplates the romantic concept of the nineteenth century's 'law of progress' (to Adams a 'chasing of force into hiding-places where nature herself had never known it') in terms of the alarming acceleration in the increase of a certain kind of knowledge he has witnessed in his lifetime. Adams's conviction is that the civilization he has known is being transformed in ways that he and the (non-scientifically educated) class for whom he presumes to speak can't comprehend. As science doubles, or quadruples, its complexities every ten years, says Adams, even the astute student of history will soon be left behind. Scientific minds are in the process of reducing the universe to a series of mere relations:
Review, 2865 words
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