icult enough; but

any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by
motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a
unit--the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself
as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led
Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens
Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he
might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything
as true or untrue except relation.... Setting himself to the task, he
began a volume which he mentally knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres: a Study in Thirteenth-Century Unity." From that point he
proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: "The
Education of Henry Adams: a Study in Twentieth-Century Multiplicity."
With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his
lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from
anyone who should know better. Thereupon, he sailed for home.

You are to understand, therefore, that the _Education of Henry Adams_ has
nothing to do really with the person Henry Adams. Since the time of
Rousseau,

the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes 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. The object
of study is the garment, not the figure.... The manikin, therefore,
has the same value as any other geometrical figure of three or four
dimensions, which is used for the study of relation. For that purpose
it cannot be spared; it is the only measure of motion, of proportion,
of human condition; it must have the air of reality; it must be taken
for real; it must be treated as though it had life. Who knows? Perhaps
it had.

Whether it had life or not is, however, of no importance. The manikin is to
be treated impersonally; and will be indicated throughout in the third
person, not as the author's ego, but as a kind of projected and animated
geometrical point upon which cosmic lines of force impinge!

It turns out that the manikin had life after all--a good deal of it; with
the effect that as you go on you become more concerned with the manikin
than with the clothes, and at last find yourself wholly absorbed with an
ego more sub