Because there is nothing to prove.
When I say that there is nothing to prove, I mean that to those who
accept Continuity, or the merging away of all phenomena into other
phenomena, without positive demarcations one from another, there is, in
a positive sense, no one thing. There is nothing to prove.
For instance nothing can be proved to be an animal--because animalness
and vegetableness are not positively different. There are some
expressions of life that are as much vegetable as animal, or that
represent the merging of animalness and vegetableness. There is then no
positive test, standard, criterion, means of forming an opinion. As
distinct from vegetables, animals do not exist. There is nothing to
prove. Nothing could be proved to be good, for instance. There is
nothing in our "existence" that is good, in a positive sense, or as
really outlined from evil. If to forgive be good in times of peace, it
is evil in wartime. There is nothing to prove: good in our experience is
continuous with, or is only another aspect of evil.
As to what I'm trying to do now--I accept only. If I can't see
universally, I only localize.
So, of course then, that nothing ever has been proved:
That theological pronouncements are as much open to doubt as ever they
were, but that, by a hypnotizing process, they became dominant over the
majority of minds in their era:
That, in a succeeding era, the laws, dogmas, formulas, principles, of
materialistic science never were proved, because they are only
localizations simulating the universal; but that the leading minds of
their era of dominance were hypnotized into more or less firmly
believing them.
Newton's three laws, and that they are attempts to achieve positiveness,
or to defy and break Continuity, and are as unreal as are all other
attempts to localize the universal:
That, if every observable body is continuous, mediately or immediately,
with all other bodies, it cannot be influenced only by its own inertia,
so that there is no way of knowing what the phenomena of inertia may be;
that, if all things are reacting to an infinitude of forces, there is no
way of knowing what the effects of only one impressed force would be;
that if every reaction is continuous with its action, it cannot be
conceived of as a whole, and that there is no way of conceiving what it
might be equal and opposite to--
Or that Newton's three laws are three articles of faith:
Or that demons and angels and inertias and reactions are all
mythological characters:
But that, in their eras of dominance, they were almost as firmly
believed in as if they had been proved.
* * * * *
Enormities and preposterousnesses will march.
They will be "proved" as well as Moses or Darwin or Lyell ever "proved"
anything.
* * * * *
We substitute acceptance for belief.
Cells of an embryo take on different appearances in different eras.
The more firmly established, the more difficult to change.
That social organism is embryonic.
That firmly to believe is to impede development.
That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate.
* * * * *
But:
Except that we substitute acceptance for belief, our methods will be the
conventional methods; the means by which every belief has been
formulated and supported: or our methods will be the methods of
theologians and savages and scientists and children. Because, if all
phenomena are continuous, there can be no positively different methods.
By the inconclusive means and methods of cardinals and fortune tellers
and evolutionists and peasants, methods which must be inconclusive, if
they relate always to the local, and if there is nothing local to
conclude, we shall write this book.
If it function as an expression of its era, it will prevail.
* * * * *
All sciences begin with attempts to define.
Nothing ever has been defined.
Because there is nothing to define.
Darwin wrote _The Origin of Species_.