The Education of Henry Adams

Answers

• Q31SACRED

  Can reliance on machinery become a form of idolatry?

  Yes. the dynamo becomes an object of worship. At the 1900 Paris Exposition Adams feels the dynamos as a moral force, as early Christians felt the Cross, and finds himself inclined to pray to one.

  To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power--while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

  Chapter XXV, "The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900)" · Gutenberg #2044; Chapter XXV read. Privately printed 1907, published 1918.