Inductive Reasoning and the Problem of the Individual in Henry Adams's Physicist History

Chapter 8 Toward the Impersonality of History: Inductive Reasoning and the Problem of the Individual in Henry Adams’s Physicist History 1 Science and Historical Studies As Francis Parkman’s use of geology for his historical narrative partially at- tested, nineteenth-century history writing had a close affinity with contempo- rary natural sciences. For historians, history writing was a legitimate branch of modern exact science, because it professedly aimed at reaching objective truths through the inductive generalization of empirical (documentary) facts. Scientific objectivity was a touchstone of whether any given historical account was scientific and trustworthy. During the course of the nineteenth century, history grew to be more widely acknowledged as a science in the United States. One of the reasons was the influence of German historiography. Idolized (or somewhat misrepresented) as a paragon of historical objectivity, Leopold von Ranke’s standards of historical scholarship readily merged with Anglo-Saxon empiricism, and his “Seminary or Laboratory method” introduced a whole new way of handling historical sources critically and impartially.1 History writing, which had basically been a solo pursuit of an independent literary elite, now turned out to be a collective effort of university scholars in “a sort of working historical laboratory,” where the cooperation of diverse individuals could over- come the limitations of a single subjective point of view.2 German-educated professors ushered the method into American universities in the late nineteenth century (Charles Kendall Adams at the University of Michigan, Henry Adams at Harvard University, and Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University), and once institutionalized, it in turn established historical studies as an academic discipline and profession. What Jeremy Belknap had imagined as the Republic of Letters, American historical scholarship tried to fulfill in its 1 Peter Novick dilates on the way late nineteenth-century American historians deliberately misunderstood Ranke’s method and venerated it as the sole standard for scientific history. See Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profes- sion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially 21–46. 2 W. Stull Holt, “The Idea of Scientific History in America,” Journal of History of Ideas 1, no. 3 (June 1940): 353. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004424319_010 Toward the Impersonality of History 179 cooperative and consensual activity of professionals via the German model of historical science.3 The American Historical Association, founded as the first national coali- tion of historians in 1884, was also an extended laboratory for the cooperative science of history. During its inaugural meeting, Justin Winsor compared the practice of the new Association to a laboratory science and historians to natural scientists working together in the lab. We are drawn together because we believe there is a new spirit of re- search abroad,—a spirit which emulated the laboratory work of the naturalists, using that word in its broadest sense. This spirit requires for its sustenance mutual recognition and suggestion among its devotees. We can deduce encouragement and experience stimulation by this sort of personal contact. Scholars and students can no longer afford to live iso- lated. They must come together to derive that zest which arises from personal acquaintance, to submit idiosyncrasies to the contact of their fellows, and they come from the convocation healthier and more circum- spect.4 By “the naturalists, using that word in its broadest sense,” Winsor meant (col)laboratory scientists, not the premodern philosophers of nature’s eternal order. Nineteenth-century historians claimed kinship with laboratory scientists, as it were. That was the age of scientific development, and “[t]o be scientific,” one critic later looked back to note, “was the great desideratum. The very word was a fetish.”5 History emulated the natural sciences and craved their prestige for itself, especially after the prevalence of Darwinian biology, which was also a historical inquiry about the animal kingdom, including mankind. Herbert Baxter Adams even modeled his historical seminary room exactly after a chemistry or biology laboratory, with its special apparatus and lay- out: “The Baltimore seminaries are laboratories where books are treated like mineralogical specimens, passed about from hand to hand, examined, and 3 Both Peter Novick and Peter Charles Hoffer pointed to the collective and consensual nature of late nineteenth-century American historical scholarship. See Novick, That Noble Dream, 52–90 and Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fiction, Fraud—History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (2004; New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 19–21. 4 Herbert B. Adams, “Report of the Organization and Proceedings of the American Historical Association, at Saratoga, September 9–10, 1884,” Papers on the American Historical Associa- tion, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885), 11. 5 Holt, “Idea of Scientific History in America,” 352..

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