In the twenty-fifth chapter of The Education, Henry Adams describes with characteristic metaphoric violence his feelings about history. Trained to think that history had an ultimate meaning, that in the sequence of events there was some corresponding sequence of cause and effect, Adams discovers at the end of his researches that there is no understandable pattern; the best that Adams can tell us is that history is force: “and thus it happens that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”