The Education of Henry Adams
Education of Henry Adams, The,autobiography of Henry Adams, privately printed (1907) and posthumously published (1918). Subtitled “A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity,” the work complements Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), in which Adams interprets the 13th century in Europe as “the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe.” In The Education, embodying his theory of the acceleration of historical force, he describes the modern world as a “multiverse,” leading to a metaphysics and science of multiple aspects and reactions. Using himself “for purpose of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes,” he asserts that his formal education, at Harvard and elsewhere, failed to prepare him for the conflicts he had to meet. The narrative is incomplete, for it omits any mention of his marriage, or...
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