It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that
which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called
"existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't
stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is
that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then
the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they
came.
* * * * *
It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by
attempting to exclude something else: that that which is commonly called
"being" is a state that is wrought more or less definitely
proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that
which is included and that which is excluded.
But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that
all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse
and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week,
or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese.
I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of
an all-inclusive cheese.
Or that red is not positively different from yellow: is only another
degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of: that red and yellow
are continuous, or that they merge in orange.
So then that, if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, Science
should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things as
veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the
demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored
orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the
attempted borderline.
As we go along, we shall be impressed with this:
That no basis for classification, or inclusion and exclusion, more
reasonable than that of redness and yellowness has ever been conceived
of.
Science has, by appeal to various bases, included a multitude of data.
Had it not done so, there would be nothing with which to seem to be.
Science has, by appeal to various bases, excluded a multitude of data.
Then, if redness is continuous with yellowness: if every basis of
admission is continuous with every basis of exclusion, Science must have
excluded some things that are continuous with the accepted. In redness
and yellowness, which merge in orangeness, we typify all tests, all
standards, all means of forming an opinion--
Or that any positive opinion upon any subject is illusion built upon the
fallacy that there are positive differences to judge by--
That the quest of all intellection has been for something--a fact, a
basis, a generalization, law, formula, a major premise that is positive:
that the best that has ever been done has been to say that some things
are self-evident--whereas, by evidence we mean the support of something
else--
That this is the quest; but that it has never been attained; but that
Science has acted, ruled, pronounced, and condemned as if it had been
attained.
What is a house?
It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished
from anything else, if there are no positive differences.
A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes
houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is
a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we
speak of dogs' houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of
Eskimos--or a shell is a house to a hermit crab--or was to the mollusk
that made it--or things seemingly so positively different as the White
House at Washington and a shell on the seashore are seen to be
continuous.
So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance.
It isn't anything, as positively distinguished from heat or magnetism or
life. Metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to define
life. They have failed, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing
to define: there is no phenomenon of life that is not, to some degree,
manifest in chemism, magnetism, astronomic motions.
White coral islands in a dark blue sea.
Their seeming of distinctness: the seeming of individuality, or of
positive difference one from another--but all are only projections from
the same sea bottom. The difference between sea and land is not
positive. In all water there is some earth: in all earth there is some
water.
So then that all seeming things are not things at all, if all are
inter-continuous, any more than is the leg of a table a thing in itself,
if it is only a projection from something else: that not one of us is a
real person, if, physically, we're continuous with environment; if,
psychically, there is nothing to us but expression of relation to
environment.
Our general expression has two aspects:
Conventional monism, or that all "things" that seem to have identity of
their own are only islands that are projections from something
underlying, and have no real outlines of their own.
But that all "things," though only projections, are projections that are
striving to break away from the underlying that denies them identity of
their own.
I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, in which and of which all
seeming things are only different expressions, but in which all things
are localizations of one attempt to break away and become real things,
or to establish entity or positive difference or final demarcation or
unmodified independence--or personality or soul, as it is called in
human phenomena--
That anything that tries to establish itself as a real, or positive, or
absolute system, government, organization, self, soul, entity,
individuality, can so attempt only by drawing a line about itself, or
about the inclusions that constitute itself, and damning or excluding,
or breaking away from, all other "things":
That, if it does not so act, it cannot seem to be;
That, if it does so act, it falsely and arbitrarily and futilely and
disastrously acts, just as would one who draws a circle in the sea,
including a few waves, saying that the other waves, with which the
included are continuous, are positively different, and stakes his life
upon maintaining that the admitted and the damned are positively
different.
Our expression is that our whole existence is animation of the local by
an ideal that is realizable only in the universal:
That, if all exclusions are false, because always are included and
excluded continuous: that if all seeming of existence perceptible to us
is the product of exclusion, there is nothing that is perceptible to us
that really is: that only the universal can really be.
Our especial interest is in modern science as a manifestation of this
one ideal or purpose or process:
That it has falsely excluded, because there are no positive standards to
judge by: that it has excluded things that, by its own pseudo-standards,
have as much right to come in as have the chosen.
* * * * *
Our general expression:
That the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a
flow, or a current, or an attempt, from negativeness to positiveness,
and is intermediate to both.
By positiveness we mean:
Harmony, equilibrium, order, regularity, stability, consistency, unity,
realness, system, government, organization, liberty, independence, soul,
self, personality, entity, individuality, truth, beauty, justice,
perfection, definiteness--
That all that is called development, progress, or evolution is movement
toward, or attempt toward, this state for which, or for aspects of
which, there are so many names, all of which are summed up in the one
word "positiveness."
At first this summing up may not be very readily acceptable. At first it
may seem that all these words are not synonyms: that "harmony" may mean
"order," but that by "independence," for instance, we do not mean
"truth," or that by "stability" we do not mean "beauty," or "system," or
"justice."
I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, which expresses itself in
astronomic phenomena, and chemic, biologic, psychic, sociologic: that it
is everywhere striving to localize positiveness: that to this attempt in
various fields of phenomena--which are only quasi-different--we give
different names. We speak of the "system" of the planets, and not of
their "government": but in considering a store, for instance, and its
management, we see that the words are interchangeable. It used to be
customary to speak of chemic equilibrium, but not of social equilibrium:
that false demarcation has been broken down. We shall see that by all
these words we mean the same state. As every-day conveniences, or in
terms of common illusions, of course, they are not synonyms. To a child
an earth worm is not an animal. It is to the biologist.
By "beauty," I mean that which seems complete.
Obversely, that the incomplete, or the mutilated, is the ugly.
Venus de Milo.
To a child she is ugly.
When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though,
by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.
A hand thought of only as a hand, may seem beautiful.
Found on a battlefield--obviously a part--not beautiful.
But everything in our experience is only a part of something else that
in turn is only a part of still something else--or that there is nothing
beautiful in our experience: only appearances that are intermediate to
beauty and ugliness--that only universality is complete: that only the
complete is the beautiful: that every attempt to achieve beauty is an
attempt to give to the local the attribute of the universal.
By stability, we mean the immovable and the unaffected. But all seeming
things are only reactions to something else. Stability, too, then, can
be only the universal, or that besides which there is nothing else.
Though some things seem to have--or have--higher approximations to
stability than have others, there are, in our experience, only various
degrees of intermediateness to stability and instability. Every man,
then, who works for stability under its various names of "permanency,"
"survival," "duration," is striving to localize in something the state
that is realizable only in the universal.
By independence, entity, and individuality, I can mean only that
besides which there is nothing else, if given only two things, they must
be continuous and mutually affective, if everything is only a reaction
to something else, and any two things would be destructive of each
other's independence, entity, or individuality.
All attempted organizations and systems and consistencies, some
approximating far higher than others, but all only intermediate to Order
and Disorder, fail eventually because of their relations with outside
forces. All are attempted completenesses. If to all local phenomena
there are always outside forces, these attempts, too, are realizable
only in the state of completeness, or that to which there are no outside
forces.
Or that all these words are synonyms, all meaning the state that we call
the positive state--
That our whole "existence" is a striving for the positive state.
The amazing paradox of it all:
That all things are trying to become the universal by excluding other
things.
That there is only this one process, and that it does animate all
expressions, in all fields of phenomena, of that which we think of as
one inter-continuous nexus:
The religious and their idea or ideal of the soul. They mean distinct,
stable entity, or a state that is independent, and not a mere flux of
vibrations or complex of reactions to environment, continuous with
environment, merging away with an infinitude of other interdependent
complexes.
But the only thing that would not merge away into something else would
be that besides which there is nothing else.
That Truth is only another name for the positive state, or that the
quest for Truth is the attempt to achieve positiveness:
Scientists who have thought that they were seeking Truth, but who were
trying to find out astronomic, or chemic, or biologic truths. But Truth
is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to
question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the
complete--
By Truth I mean the Universal.
So chemists have sought the true, or the real, and have always failed in
their endeavors, because of the outside relations of chemical
phenomena: have failed in the sense that never has a chemical law,
without exceptions, been discovered: because chemistry is continuous
with astronomy, physics, biology--For instance, if the sun should
greatly change its distance from this earth, and if human life could
survive, the familiar chemic formulas would no longer work out: a new
science of chemistry would have to be learned--
Or that all attempts to find Truth in the special are attempts to find
the universal in the local.
And artists and their striving for positiveness, under the name of
"harmony"--but their pigments that are oxydizing, or are responding to a
deranging environment--or the strings of musical instruments that are
differently and disturbingly adjusting to outside chemic and thermal and
gravitational forces--again and again this oneness of all ideals, and
that it is the attempt to be, or to achieve, locally, that which is
realizable only universally. In our experience there is only
intermediateness to harmony and discord. Harmony is that besides which
there are no outside forces.
And nations that have fought with only one motive: for individuality, or
entity, or to be real, final nations, not subordinate to, or parts of,
other nations. And that nothing but intermediateness has ever been
attained, and that history is record of failures of this one attempt,
because there always have been outside forces, or other nations
contending for the same goal.
As to physical things, chemic, mineralogic, astronomic, it is not
customary to say that they act to achieve Truth or Entity, but it is
understood that all motions are toward Equilibrium: that there is no
motion except toward Equilibrium, of course always away from some other
approximation to Equilibrium.
All biologic phenomena act to adjust: there are no biologic actions
other than adjustments.
Adjustment is another name for Equilibrium. Equilibrium is the
Universal, or that which has nothing external to derange it.
But that all that we call "being" is motion: and that all motion is the
expression, not of equilibrium, but of equilibrating, or of equilibrium
unattained: that life-motions are expressions of equilibrium unattained:
that all thought relates to the unattained: that to have what is called
being in our quasi-state, is not to be in the positive sense, or is to
be intermediate to Equilibrium and Inequilibrium.
So then:
That all phenomena in our intermediate state, or quasi-state, represent
this one attempt to organize, stabilize, harmonize, individualize--or to
positivize, or to become real:
That only to have seeming is to express failure or intermediateness to
final failure and final success:
That every attempt--that is observable--is defeated by Continuity, or by
outside forces--or by the excluded that are continuous with the
included:
That our whole "existence" is an attempt by the relative to be the
absolute, or by the local to be the universal.
In this book, my interest is in this attempt as manifested in modern
science:
That it has attempted to be real, true, final, complete, absolute:
That, if the seeming of being, here, in our quasi-state, is the product
of exclusion that is always false and arbitrary, if always are included
and excluded continuous, the whole seeming system, or entity, of modern
science is only quasi-system, or quasi-entity, wrought by the same false
and arbitrary process as that by which the still less positive system
that preceded it, or the theological system, wrought the illusion of its
being.
In this book, I assemble some of the data that I think are of the
falsely and arbitrarily excluded.
The data of the damned.
I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical
transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the
dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back
with the quasi-souls of lost data.
They will march.
* * * * *