It is not possible to define.
Nothing has ever been finally found out.
Because there is nothing final to find out.
It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that
never was--
But that all scientific attempts really to find out something, whereas
really there is nothing to find out, are attempts, themselves, really to
be something.
A seeker of Truth. He will never find it. But the dimmest of
possibilities--he may himself become Truth.
Or that science is more than an inquiry:
That it is a pseudo-construction, or a quasi-organization: that it is an
attempt to break away and locally establish harmony, stability,
equilibrium, consistency, entity--
Dimmest of possibilities--that it may succeed.
* * * * *
That ours is a pseudo-existence, and that all appearances in it partake
of its essential fictitiousness--
But that some appearances approximate far more highly to the positive
state than do others.
We conceive of all "things" as occupying gradations, or steps in series
between positiveness and negativeness, or realness and unrealness: that
some seeming things are more nearly consistent, just, beautiful,
unified, individual, harmonious, stable--than others.
We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists--that
nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are
approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness.
So then:
That our whole quasi-existence is an intermediate stage between
positiveness and negativeness or realness and unrealness.
Like purgatory, I think.
But in our summing up, which was very sketchily done, we omitted to make
clear that Realness is an aspect of the positive state.
By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into something else,
and that which is not partly something else: that which is not a
reaction to, or an imitation of, something else. By a real hero, we mean
one who is not partly a coward, or whose actions and motives do not
merge away into cowardice. But, if in Continuity, all things do merge,
by Realness, I mean the Universal, besides which there is nothing with
which to merge.
That, though the local might be universalized, it is not conceivable
that the universal can be localized: but that high approximations there
may be, and that these approximate successes may be translated out of
Intermediateness into Realness--quite as, in a relative sense, the
industrial world recruits itself by translating out of unrealness, or
out of the seemingly less real imaginings of inventors, machines which
seem, when set up in factories, to have more of Realness than they had
when only imagined.
That all progress, if all progress is toward stability, organization,
harmony, consistency, or positiveness, is the attempt to become real.
So, then, in general metaphysical terms, our expression is that, like a
purgatory, all that is commonly called "existence," which we call
Intermediateness, is quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal, but
expression of attempt to become real, or to generate for or recruit a
real existence.
Our acceptance is that Science, though usually thought of so
specifically, or in its own local terms, usually supposed to be a prying
into old bones, bugs, unsavory messes, is an expression of this one
spirit animating all Intermediateness: that, if Science could absolutely
exclude all data but its own present data, or that which is assimilable
with the present quasi-organization, it would be a real system, with
positively definite outlines--it would be real.
Its seeming approximation to consistency, stability,
system--positiveness or realness--is sustained by damning the
irreconcilable or the unassimilable--
All would be well.