[In the following essay, Hinds delineates the shared formal, thematic, and historic features of Gothic fiction and heavy-metal music, viewing both as subgenres—a term that Hinds takes care to redefine—that subvert their parent forms, the novel and rock and roll, respectively, and use images of the occult to critique mainstream culture.]

   Maybe it's the time of year,
And then maybe it's the time of man.
         —Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, "Woodstock"

It is a long way from the 1764 appearance of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to the 1968 Led Zeppelin I, but the monstrous subgenre behavior of the latter, one of the first unabashedly Heavy Metal albums, surprisingly resembles the former, both formally and historically. The first in a series of albums that came to define Heavy Metal music, this LP did to what had by then become mainstream Rock what Walpole, and later, M. G. Lewis and Mary Shelley, had done to the mainstream novel. Zeppelin I retained the outward form of its parent—standard LP format, largely with newly-written material, but also with one cover version ("You Shook Me"), the four-man band with bass and electric guitars, drums and vocals and the general outline of the Rock lyric—and proceeded to rearrange those basic elements into a genre with an altogether more brash, raunchy and musically subversive arrangement.

As I will illustrate momentarily, the appearance of Gothic fiction in the late eighteenth century and that of Heavy Metal in the late twentieth follows the same historical path as their two parent-forms, namely the novel and Rock music, both of which served subversive purposes at the time of their birth. While both parent-genres followed the same trajectory from radicalism to mainstream culture as do many new genres, their offspring share more than just the historical movement of subversion-to-hegemonic form. The histories of both subgenres are peculiar in their purposeful deformity and evocation of the Satanic: both can be described as a monstrous Gothic Other whose family resemblance to their respective parent was inescapable, but which was, like an unwashed and slightly retarded younger brother, an Other whose distortions of the parent-form became repulsive to the very audience who had supported its entry into the world.

By concentrating on these two species of subgenre, what I aim to discover is three-fold. First, I will describe the nature of the two species Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal. By "nature," however, I do not mean to abstract a principle of operation separate from its cultural context, or what is better called its historical position, but rather to discover this "nature" in that very historical position itself. Thus, the epigraph to this paper. The second, or ulterior, motive is to come to an understanding of "subgenre" as both a term and a concept—what it is we mean when we say "subgenre" rather than "movement"—thereby reclaiming the value of those generic (i.e., aesthetic) categories that have been lost to the forward rush of New-Historical and ideological criticism. It is by redefining "subgenre," a manageable if somewhat reductive category, as taking its characteristics from the flux of epistemic history that I hope to achieve this recuperation. My third and final goal is to register a critique of the very historicist—indeed Marxist—theoretizing gesture that makes this kind of study possible in the first place. Through this final critique, in hopes of opening a new space for understanding, I will imitate the defining feature of the subgenres under discussion in their habit of biting the hands that feed them.

Nineteen sixties Rock music, very like the novel in the mid-eighteenth century, was for a short time a radical, subversive form. No one would argue against the novel's being, by definition, a "new" and popular form, appealing to the sensibilities of an undereducated mass audience and frequently claiming as its own the values of this bourgeois crowd. The 1960s Rock audience was just such a crowd—one who liked the sounds music made, felt its instrumental and lyrical power, but who lacked the resources to educate itself formally. Partly due to its youthful energy and partly due to its position in history, the 1960s Rock band found itself speaking the language of rebellion: instrumentally, it found the sound of Big Bands and Bing Crosby too easy on the ear, too mushy; its lyrics found the crooning of euphemistic love songs and the nonsense verse of 1950s "bubblegum" pop too arid and politically unaware.

This group of musicians—foreseen in Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley—found its leading voices in The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones—those bands who insisted that a handful of people could make a loud and joyful enough noise to forge a Revolution in sound. The music became louder, it became more sexually suggestive, and, most importantly, it began to express the News of the World in lyrics about the pleasures and punishments of the drug culture (The Byrds' "Eight Miles High") and, especially, in lyrics about the Vietnam War (John Lennon and Paul McCartney's "Give Peace a Chance"). Indeed, no one would question the formation of Rock & Roll in the 1960s as a radical casting off of previous popular music standards.

By the late 1960s, however, a hegemonic force had taken hold of Rock music—the same force, spurred by a species of international capitalist ideals brought about by the very nature of "the popular," meaning "that which sells," that had very quickly drawn the novel into its maw in the later eighteenth century. Completely unawares, these two "radical" forms suddenly found themselves co-opted into the mainstream, produced and bought in outrageous numbers, consumed quickly and rehearsed widely. The sign of the novel's sudden acceptance—indeed, an even bourgeois status—came in the lighting bolt of parody, in Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Rock was less parodied than simply engulfed and accepted: witness the appearance in 1967 and 1970 respectively of "Eleanor Rigby" and "Hey Jude" in Muzak. Not much later, the lyrics of both began appearing in anthologies used for Freshman English courses.

The power of international capitalism to embrace and celebrate that which is initially subversive had taken hold, in their respective eras, of both the novel and of Rock music, incorporating both genres into its mass marketing strategies, thereby recreating the form itself vis-a-vis the marketplace. It is at this point—or rather the two points of the late eighteenth and late twentieth centuries—of absolute assimilation that the subgenres of Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal were born. The Gothic novel was undoubtedly a relation of the parent in its prose, highly-storied form, the "well-made" novel of Richardson and Fielding. But where the novel had revealed a closely-knit formal design—a beginning, middle and end centered about a causally-connected universe of motivation and action—the Gothic novel was generally episodic in structure, often with much-maligned "flaws" consisting in unmotivated (usually evil) actions and strands of plot that tend to appear and disappear without explanation. Where the novel had espoused restraint, the Gothic novel demonstrated uninhibited libido, even outright perversion with incest, rape and sadomasochism of all varieties. And finally, where the novel had espoused the singularly righteous in moral vision, detailing the rewards of a good heart and virtuous action within the social sphere, the Gothic novel, although conservative like its parent, took the low road, demonstrating in too-close detail the rewards and punishments of the carnally evil, the best full-blown example of which was Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, organized over a chronology of three hundred years, detailing the desperate attempts of Melmoth who, having sold his soul to the devil for an extended life, attempts to prolong his term on earth by converting others in a series of disconnected episodes ending in Melmoth's eventual failure: in the end, he is "called home" to Satan and must return by way of falling through a craggy abyss, wasting away by starvation for three days and finally being torn to shreds by demons.

Early Heavy Metal music concentrated more intensively on the reward end of the carnal spectrum, but in its totality bespoke the same message of perversion as did the Gothic Novel. Instrumentally, this Heavy Metal style—a name anachronistically applied, I should add—twisted the basic Rock arrangement into what one might call an episodic format. Where the standard Rock single was approximately three minutes long, contained three or sometimes four verses alternating with a two-to-four-line chorus and faded out with repetitions of the chorus, Led Zeppelin I contained a range from three to seven and a half minutes (the latter with "Baby, I'm Gonna Leave You") and a very irregular pattern of repetition for the chorus. Further, while the Heavy Metal form retains the electric guitar emphasis and solos of mainstream Rock, these solos became famous for irregularity and a seemingly uncontrolled formlessness; to call on the originators again, "Dazed and Confused"—including the studio version from Zeppelin I, but especially the live version of the concert film The Song Remains the Same—demonstrates the limits of the guitar solo that changes both rhythm and key and that extends its length to the outrageous—nearly ten minutes. To draw out the analogy, the drum and keyboard solos of early Metal music draw on the "virtuoso" performance style of Rock's Jazz roots to distort and intensify the mainstream Rock concept of the solo. In short, with its irregular placement and number of choruses and verses, its length of solo performances, the intensified role of the bass guitar and lower registers in general, Heavy Metal perverted the well-made, beginning-middle-end structure of the standard into more a series of loosely connected "episodes" than a coherency of "song."

It is in its lyrics, however, that Heavy Metal most systematically subverts its mother form; Robert Pattison accounts for the centrality of these lyrics by writing that they "may be trite, obscene, and idiotic—which is to say, they may be vulgar—but they are certainly not incidental, and the proof of their importance is their consistency." In response to the generally positive—one might say the "feel-good" lyrics of mainstream 1960s Rock—Heavy Metal lyrics focused more particularly on the blatant, the sexual and often, the horrific. Recall some of the most popular of 1960's lyric messages: "Love is all you need" (Beatles, "All You Need is Love") and "I want to hold your hand" (Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand") are both sweetened versions of social and personal closeness. Even the lyrics of the Stones' "Satisfaction" and The Who's "Squeeze Box" euphemistically suggest the sex act, drawing largely on the metaphor and allusion of the previous fifty years of popular music. Subverting the genre, indeed, epitomizing the notion of "subgenre," Heavy Metal made sex, not love. The lyrics here are blatant and often violent. The range of sexual conversation in even the early days of this music moves from the frank—again, the "Dazed and Confused" of Zeppelin Irepeats, "Sweet little baby, I want you again"—to the outright bluntness of the third Zeppelin album (Led Zeppelin III) in "Whole Lotta Love": "Way down inside, woman, you need it.…" Coupled with the alternating short bass and guitar notes and Robert Plant's moaning, the sexual message could not be more clear or less softened by any euphemism of romance.

Like many others, Will Straw points out "an expression of violent sexuality" in Heavy Metal, but seeks to gloss over this overt sexual message by hurriedly noting that Heavy Metal's lyrics are often at the same time "explorations of nonromantic and nonerotic themes." It is precisely those "nonromantic and nonerotic themes" which surround the overtly sexual notations that cause Heavy Metal's sexuality to be, or to be received as, "subversive": when "Dazed and Confused" places the line "Sweet little baby, I want you again" in a series of lamentations on the unfaithfulness of women, the juxtaposition is, at the very least, paradoxical. The magnified range of sexual attention in Heavy Metal music should recall the sexual frankness of the Gothic's "School of Horror," of which M.G. Lewis' The Monk is only the most notorious example, in which Ambrosio, the monk, rapes and later murders his sister, with the help of Matilda, a young initiate of a Satanic order, who has dressed as a man to enter the monastery and "convert" Ambrosio. The monk's sexual exploits are made all the more "horrific" by placing them in the context of the monastery (appropriately, under the monastery in the labyrinthine dungeon).

More importantly, these subgenres are distinguished by their use of sex as a literal act rather than a metonymic expression of romantic love. If Rock music indeed takes part in what Bram Dijkstra calls an "aesthetic of sensuousness," as one could argue for the novel as well—an aesthetic that glorifies or at least takes as subject and object the physical, everyday activities of dancing, flirting, courting, marrying—then the subgenres of Heavy Metal and Gothic fiction take those barely-disguised and socially sanctioned euphemisms for sex and draw them from the "hidden" background into a surface of literal action. Of the staple Gothic theme of incest, for example, William Patrick Day has pointed out that "it was also an aspect of popular fiction, though the threat seems to have been more popular than the actuality" (emphasis added). This literal sexuality distinguishes the two subgenres not only from their parent genres, but also from the closely-related subgenres of "hard" Rock and the picaresque novel, both of which went directly for the sensuous throat, as did the Gothic novel and Heavy Metal, and refused the "communalism" implied in mainstream Rock's dance music format (e.g., the Beatles' "She Loves You") and the mainstream novel's insistence on societal values (e.g., Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe). These related subgenres formally rejected the communal values of the mainstream in much the same way as Heavy Metal and Gothic fiction rejected the same popular forms, but the message of sexuality in hard Rock and the picaresque remained euphemized: Jethro Tull could produce a number like "Velvet Green," instrumentally and structurally diverse and as evocative of sexuality as any Heavy Metal band, but those evocative lyrics still came from the "lyric" tradition of suggestion ("Won't you have my company? / Yes, take it in your hand"); likewise, Moll Flanders may live and breathe in a loosely episodic universe, peopled by first one husband or lover after another (an important subgenre marker: one cannot always tell the difference), but the sex act itself is kept in the background, even though Moll can thrive, literally, only on sex (Defoe, Moll Flanders).

Gothic fiction's and Heavy Metal's making literal the act of sex is, as indicated in the previous plot summary of The Monk, frequently of a piece with Satanic subject matter, although the Satanic takes up a life of its own in both subgenres beyond its connection with the sexual. A healthy branch of Metal music is overtly Satanic, beginning popularly with Led Zeppelin's "The Battle of Evermore," from their untitled fourth album, and extending through Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" to the lyrics of present-day Ozzie Osborn, former lead singer for Black Sabbath. The late 1960s was the beginning of outright Satanism in the Rock format, I should say, since the Devil has long been a powerful character in the Blues lyric, another ancestor of both mainstream Rock and Heavy Metal; this diabolical lineage has been noted by almost every critic to write on either the Rock genre or its Heavy Metal subgenre. The Blues lyrics of Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Skip James, and particularly of Robert Johnson were filled with references to Satan, as in Johnson's line, "Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go," to such a degree that the Blues became known as "Devil's music." These references continued to thrive in the later Zeppelin and other Heavy Metal lyrics, building up a myth of the Heavy Metal band as necessarily Satanic. The rumor of "back-masking" on "Stairway to Heaven" (Led Zeppelin, Untitled) supposedly designed to record the statement, "I worship you, my Satan," backward throughout the song, was no doubt spurred by this overarching myth of the Satanic within the Blues. It is especially interesting that the Satanhunters felt it necessary to play "Stairway to Heaven" backward in search of the satanic message, when the song preceding it on the album, "The Battle of Evermore," constitutes an openly Satanic epic battle, even played forward.

As Pattison explains, however, the occult underpinnings of the Blues mythology as embraced by Heavy Metal bore only a marginal relationship to "reality"; in effect, occult references play on the already-established mythology in order to forge a sense of the subversive more than through any "real" belief in Satan or occult practices. Pattison argues that the players of both Rock and Heavy Metal are quite aware that their occult is a myth. To put it differently, the occult serves merely as a sign-system within which Satanic references signify, in one sense, only "subversion." What would be the point of an admittedly empty myth, then? To fly in the face of established—mass cultural—mythologies, just as Gothic fiction, particularly in its "school of horror" phase, attempted to supply a shock element to carve out an identity in contradistinction to, not simply as one variation upon, mainstream culture. As Peter Wicke notes, subcultures within "highly developed capitalism" may express "distance through excess." The "horror" of excess, regarding both genres, is best expressed in a news item retailed by Pattison as indicative of actual mass cultural response to the "cult" of Heavy Metal:

In 1984, the New York Daily News ran an Associated Press story under the headline, "Satan-Rock Girl Murdered Mom": "A teenage girl who a prosecutor said was involved with her boyfriend in Satanism and heavy-metal rock music has been convicted of murdering her mother, former chairman of a group dedicated to stopping violence in the home." To make matters worse, her boyfriend "had orange hair."

The orange hair is the give-away: that the Associated Press found the boyfriend's hair color relevant speaks to consumer culture's deep fear of the subculture as it takes the subculture's bait. To some extent, this bait merely enforces "difference." It is in this respect that the two subpopular forms under discussion represent "subgenre" par excellence, and here that they become more than just examples of generic behavior. The subgenre differs in kind from a "movement," such as Imagism in the early twentieth century, which differs from its parent genre, Modernism, only in degree. A movement lifts out a select number of the parent genre's characteristics, to magnify and elaborate those few characteristics. Alastair Fowler's definition of subgenre, in fact, more closely approximates what I see as the behavior of a movement: "such groups have a relatively simple logical relation [to the parent genre]: their features are more or less disjunct subsets of the sets of features characterizing kinds … external forms and all." The subgenre, I believe, while it is a "disjunct subset," is labelled "sub-" in the vernacular not without reason. It positively revolts against many of the parent form's "external forms," and in a sort of adolescent rage, pits itself against the very universe its parent inhabits, retaining only the family resemblance. Gothic fiction and Heavy metal epitomize this subgeneric behavior because they manifest the "sub-" in several conceptions: subversive, substandard, subliminal and, if one takes the parent genres' form as the "wellmade" standard, substandard. These two "Satanic" offspring go to great lengths to define and illustrate "difference," and further, a difference "beneath," hidden under the socially acceptable.

This difference, however, does not merely indicate the rebelliousness of youth (although it is that—remember that Lewis was eighteen when he wrote The Monk), nor does it merely signify "subversion," but more subtly implies a critique of the mainstream culture it exists within, a critique manifested in the very Satanism which appears to be a mythology emptied of its value. If the subculture, expressed through the subgenres of Heavy Metal and Gothic fiction, rebels through excess in a kind of parody of the mass movements surrounding it, its rebellion is of a deeply conservative nature, one which rejects the ideology that can take part so willingly in mass production and consumption. The now-commodified genres are ridiculed and rejected by their subgenres for the commodification itself, for their own emptiness of value, while the subgenres Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal attempt to reinsert absolute value into the apparently value-less free-play of commodity consumption.

Absolute value, in this case, is not positive or "religious," yet it does pretend to worship a deity, thereby subscribing to the concept of transcendence. This mythology reinscribes an essential value outside of, or prior to, the alternating currents of supply and demand which equate value with capital and makes valuable only that which sells, in what Dana Polan terms "a spectacle of superficiality." The absolute value asserted by these subgenres, then, can only be spiritual, and then only in the Emersonian sense, in which the nonmaterial is placed in the position of power. The devil positively causes destruction in the Gothic novel; and the devil is the source of energy in "The Battle of Evermore," as is Blake's Satan in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. To be sure, this Satan does destroy—usually individual lives in the Gothic novel, sometimes entire civilizations in Heavy Metal lyrics—but its power is nevertheless spiritual, asserting itself against the Hallmark-card "spiritualism" of commodity culture, the one that pays lip-service to a God who likes everyone equally and wants "only the best" for everyone.

Through this "alternate" spirituality, the Satanic impulse bears out the remarkable ability of popular audiences to make meaning of those products presented as empty form, little more than advertising, whether the ad is for bourgeois moral virtues or for Reeboks. As Paul Willis writes,

Though the whole commodity form provides powerful implications for the manner of its consumption, it by no means enforces them. Commodities can be taken out of context, claimed in a particular way, developed and repossessed to express something deeply and thereby to change somewhat the very feelings which are their product. And all this can happen under the very nose of the dominant class—and with their products.

To witness this active reinscription of the commodified into an alternate universe of spiritual, albeit retrograde, power, is to return some modicum of power to the otherwise passive receiver of popular genres: the young female of the late eighteenth century, reading novels in place of being educated, or the young male or female sitting in front of MTV.

So how far can we push the analogy between Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century and the Heavy Metal beginning in the late 1960s? Historically, the movements are entirely of a piece: both arose on the heels of new and hugely popular forms of cheap entertainment intended for the amusement of the masses. And as we have seen, both subgenres of those more popular, more widespread forms took shape by intensifying the focus of the parent-genres, by perverting the structure of the parent-genres through appeals to a lower order of sensibility and by making literal what was euphemized in the parent-genres. In effect, both Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal represent a return of the repressed—a once-again, newly repressed freedom of form and sexuality—emerging in the wake of supposedly revolutionary genres whose radicalism had become hegemonic manifestations of the larger culture and who, as a result, had lost their power to move.

Naturally, both Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal music succumbed to the very influences they initially set out to subvert. Naturally, that is, because both subgenres belong to already co-opted discourses, those parent-genres which exist, or existed in the past, only by virtue of participation in commercial culture. By definition, those co-opted discourses can be defined only in terms of their production/consumption matrix, what Mary Poovey describes, discussing Rock music, as the mutual dependence of the product with its advertisement. Fredric Jameson describes Rock music and Gothic fiction alike, in their popular natures, likewise as products of "late capitalism"; as "products," they may only produce subgenres that must finally grow into products as well, in order to survive in a consumer culture. Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal both became instant successes, so much so that as early as 1803 Jane Austen was to publish Northanger Abbey, the first widely-known parody of the Gothic form. Heavy Metal has likewise been parodied—most successfully in the 1984 Rob Reiner film This Is Spinal Tap—but has, more importantly, been imitated extensively and without variation, possibly more than any other Rock genre. As a result, popular Heavy Metal productions can be nearly indistinguishable from each other. At the same time, some of Heavy Metal's subversive impulse has cooled, resulting in the shortened form and euphemistic lyrics of its parent twenty years ago. A staple of the form has become, in fact, the love ballad, painfully sentimental and often as painfully self-referential, as with Bon Jovi's "Wanted, Dead or Alive," which chronicles the life of the suffering Heavy Metal band on the road. With its quickness to imitate its own form, Heavy Metal, like Gothic fiction, as quickly has ceased to be a subversive, energized genre, and has instead become both a subject of parody and a product of ravenous consumer appetite.

While Jameson's description of this process sheds light on both the nature of the subgenre and the nature of consumerism, it is in the weakness of his (and others'—I only take Jameson as a leading voice of ideological criticism) label "postmodernism" that we may discover the power of the subgenre as an activity. Jameson aptly describes the "new" of any genre as "ugly, dissonant, bohemian, sexually shocking" to the prevailing bourgeois culture, noting simply that that newness, in becoming co-opted, ceases to shock and opens a space for a yet-newer genre to come along and make its noise. However, he goes on, the postmodern newness is of a different order; "it is not just another word for the description of a particular style." Jameson insists, in fact, that the postmodern is indeed what it sounds like: "a periodizing concept" which describes such a high degree of integration among production, product and consumption that it can take place only in the historical era of late capitalism. Which returns us to the question of Gothic fiction. If what I have argued is correct—that both Gothic fiction upon its first arrival and Heavy Metal Music are by definition subgeneric because they assert the transcendent spiritual against a prevailing commodification, and that they both succumbed to weakened stylization in capitulating to consumer demands—then what Jameson describes as "postmodern" cannot be a periodizing concept, rather, must be "the description of a particular style," since the first Gothic fiction arrived, not in a period of late capitalism, but during the boom years of emergent Western capitalism. The Gothic fiction Jameson refers to, in fact, is a "paraliterature" in his terminology, an "airport paperback category."

Jameson's Gothic fiction, it turns out, is not the historical Gothic fiction of this essay, but is instead a genre uprooted from its "periodized" moorings. Jameson's "airport Gothic" is the already co-opted product, already made imitative and already long past its prime; existing in the same culture as Heavy Metal music, this Gothic may indeed be a postmodern product, historically speaking. But the postmodern itself, pastiche in style, effacing of boundaries, particularly the boundaries of high-and mass-culture, and not least of all existing outside the categories of "art" and "taste"—this postmodernism, which Jameson among others insists results in a value-less culture of late capitalism, is precisely what I have described as "mainstream" culture against which the subgenre revolts. In other words, what Jameson has described as a late twentieth-century phenomenon was already emergent with capitalism itself, born with what Foucault has identified as a great epistemic upheaval in the late eighteenth century.

There are, of course, distinguishing features of postmodernism, in particular the species of "hyperspace" Jameson identifies in the postmodern "texts" of architecture and novel; I do not wish, therefore, to disempower the term altogether. I have attempted, instead, to re-historicize the discussion of commodity culture: to identify the emergence of two subgenres I see as absolutely dependent upon the economic conditions within which they have prevailed, and thereby to describe the nature of "subgenre" itself, as it exists and existed historically, rather than elide historical necessity with the theoretizing gaze that would telescope all manner of texts, both genre and subgenre, into the space of the postmodern, in spite of their varying historical "ages." What the Satanic subgenres do have in common, historically speaking, is their appearance during respective ages of cultural shift, at times of deep change which bring about a dual sense of belatedness and dread, an understanding that an "age" has passed and the new one is none other than chaos itself. As Raymond Williams argues in The Country and the City, there have been many ages of such shift, each of which views the just-passed age in its newly historicized or narrative form as unified in ideology and "whole" in the perception of its inhabitants. It matters little whether this deep change is "real," as we have been taught by Foucault to believe of the late eighteenth century, or perceived but untested, as we speculate about the late twentieth century. What matters is that the emergent subgenre, attempting to assert a "nostalgic" value, responds to what is perceived as chaos—the necessary chaos of the ongoing—by thrusting at it a spiritual power of destructive force. But rather than privilege our own age by calling this phenomenon postmodern, it might better be served under the label "the Henry Adams effect," for it was Adams who best described the vertigo of experience in an as-yet-unstoried present. At the Great Exposition of 1900, "his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new," Adams sounds like a guest of "postmodernism," come to remind us of history:

armed with instruments amounting to new senses of indefinite power and accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places where Nature herself had never known it to be, making analyses that contradicted being, and syntheses that endangered the elements.… In 1900 they were plainly forced back on faith in a unity unproved and an order they had themselves disproved. They had reduced their universe to a series of relations to themselves.