Except that, in the seven, there was a lapse of several years--and where
was the volcanic dust all that time?
You'd think that such a question as that would make trouble?
Then you haven't studied hypnosis. You have never tried to demonstrate
to a hypnotic that a table is not a hippopotamus. According to our
general acceptance, it would be impossible to demonstrate such a thing.
Point out a hundred reasons for saying that a hippopotamus is not a
table: you'll have to end up agreeing that neither is a table a
table--it only seems to be a table. Well, that's what the hippopotamus
seems to be. So how can you prove that something is not something else,
when neither is something else some other thing? There's nothing to
prove.
This is one of the profundities that we advertised in advance.
You can oppose an absurdity only with some other absurdity. But Science
is established preposterousness. We divide all intellection: the
obviously preposterousness and the established.
But Krakatoa: that's the explanation that the scientists gave. I don't
know what whopper the medicine men told.
We see, from the start, the very strong inclination of science to deny,
as much as it can, external relations of this earth.
This book is an assemblage of data of external relations of this earth.
We take the position that our data have been damned, upon no
consideration for individual merits or demerits, but in conformity with
a general attempt to hold out for isolation of this earth. This is
attempted positiveness. We take the position that science can no more
succeed than, in a similar endeavor, could the Chinese, or than could
the United States. So then, with only pseudo-consideration of the
phenomena of 1883, or as an expression of positivism in its aspect of
isolation, or unrelatedness, scientists have perpetrated such an
enormity as suspension of volcanic dust seven years in the
air--disregarding the lapse of several years--rather than to admit the
arrival of dust from somewhere beyond this earth. Not that scientists
themselves have ever achieved positiveness, in its aspect of unitedness,
among themselves--because Nordenskiold, before 1883, wrote a great deal
upon his theory of cosmic dust, and Prof. Cleveland Abbe contended
against the Krakatoan explanation--but that this is the orthodoxy of the
main body of scientists.
My own chief reason for indignation here:
That this preposterous explanation interferes with some of my own
enormities.
It would cost me too much explaining, if I should have to admit that
this earth's atmosphere has such sustaining power.
Later, we shall have data of things that have gone up in the air and
that have stayed up--somewhere--weeks--months--but not by the sustaining
power of this earth's atmosphere. For instance, the turtle of Vicksburg.
It seems to me that it would be ridiculous to think of a good-sized
turtle hanging, for three or four months, upheld only by the air, over
the town of Vicksburg. When it comes to the horse and the barn--I think
that they'll be classics some day, but I can never accept that a horse
and a barn could float several months in this earth's atmosphere.
The orthodox explanation:
See the _Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society_. It
comes out absolutely for the orthodox explanation--absolutely and
beautifully, also expensively. There are 492 pages in the "Report," and
40 plates, some of them marvelously colored. It was issued after an
investigation that took five years. You couldn't think of anything done
more efficiently, artistically, authoritatively. The mathematical parts
are especially impressive: distribution of the dust of Krakatoa;
velocity of translation and rates of subsidence; altitudes and
persistences--
_Annual Register_, 1883-105:
That the atmospheric effects that have been attributed to Krakatoa were
seen in Trinidad before the eruption occurred:
_Knowledge_, 5-418:
That they were seen in Natal, South Africa, six months before the
eruption.
* * * * *
Inertia and its inhospitality.
Or raw meat should not be fed to babies.
We shall have a few data initiatorily.
I fear me that the horse and the barn were a little extreme for our
budding liberalities.
The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.
Hailstones, for instance. One reads in the newspapers of hailstones the
size of hens' eggs. One smiles. Nevertheless I will engage to list one
hundred instances, from the _Monthly Weather Review_, of hailstones the
size of hens' eggs. There is an account in _Nature_, Nov. 1, 1894, of
hailstones that weighed almost two pounds each. See Chambers'
Encyclopedia for three-pounders. _Report of the Smithsonian
Institution_, 1870-479--two-pounders authenticated, and six-pounders
reported. At Seringapatam, India, about the year 1800, fell a
hailstone--
I fear me, I fear me: this is one of the profoundly damned. I blurt out
something that should, perhaps, be withheld for several hundred
pages--but that damned thing was the size of an elephant.
We laugh.
Or snowflakes. Size of saucers. Said to have fallen at Nashville, Tenn.,
Jan. 24, 1891. One smiles.
"In Montana, in the winter of 1887, fell snowflakes 15 inches across,
and 8 inches thick." (_Monthly Weather Review_, 1915-73.)
In the topography of intellection, I should say that what we call
knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter.
* * * * *
Black rains--red rains--the fall of a thousand tons of butter.
Jet-black snow--pink snow--blue hailstones--hailstones flavored like
oranges.
Punk and silk and charcoal.
* * * * *
About one hundred years ago, if anyone was so credulous as to think that
stones had ever fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with:
In the first place there are no stones in the sky:
Therefore no stones can fall from the sky.
Or nothing more reasonable or scientific or logical than that could be
said upon any subject. The only trouble is the universal trouble: that
the major premise is not real, or is intermediate somewhere between
realness and unrealness.
In 1772, a committee, of whom Lavoisier was a member, was appointed by
the French Academy, to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from
the sky at Luce, France. Of all attempts at positiveness, in its aspect
of isolation, I don't know of anything that has been fought harder for
than the notion of this earth's unrelatedness. Lavoisier analyzed the
stone of Luce. The exclusionists' explanation at that time was that
stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may seem to fall,
and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly
had landed--only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it.
The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion.
Lavoisier's analysis "absolutely proved" that this stone had not fallen:
that it had been struck by lightning.
So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned. The stock means of
exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike
something--that had been upon the ground in the first place.
But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement. It is not
customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence
of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did--or data of them
bombarded the walls raised against them--
_Monthly Review_, 1796-426
"The phenomenon which is the subject of the remarks before us will seem
to most persons as little worthy of credit as any that could be offered.
The falling of large stones from the sky, without any assignable cause
of their previous ascent, seems to partake so much of the marvelous as
almost entirely to exclude the operation of known and natural agents.
Yet a body of evidence is here brought to prove that such events have
actually taken place, and we ought not to withhold from it a proper
degree of attention."
The writer abandons the first, or absolute, exclusion, and modifies it
with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in
Tuscany, June 16, 1794, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius--
Or that stones do fall from the sky, but that they are stones that have
been raised to the sky from some other part of the earth's surface by
whirlwinds or by volcanic action.
It's more than one hundred and twenty years later. I know of no aerolite
that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestrial origin.
Falling stones had to be undamned--though still with a reservation that
held out for exclusion of outside forces.
One may have the knowledge of a Lavoisier, and still not be able to
analyze, not be able even to see, except conformably with the hypnoses,
or the conventional reactions against hypnoses, of one's era.
We believe no more.
We accept.
Little by little the whirlwind and volcano explanations had to be
abandoned, but so powerful was this exclusion-hypnosis, sentence of
damnation, or this attempt at positiveness, that far into our own times
some scientists, notably Prof. Lawrence Smith and Sir Robert Ball,
continued to hold out against all external origins, asserting that
nothing could fall to this earth, unless it had been cast up or whirled
up from some other part of this earth's surface.
It's as commendable as anything ever has been--by which I mean it's
intermediate to the commendable and the censurable.
It's virginal.
Meteorites, data of which were once of the damned, have been admitted,
but the common impression of them is only a retreat of attempted
exclusion: that only two kinds of substance fall from the sky: metallic
and stony: that the metallic objects are of iron and nickel--
Butter and paper and wool and silk and resin.
We see, to start with, that the virgins of science have fought and wept
and screamed against external relations--upon two grounds:
There in the first place;
Or up from one part of this earth's surface and down to another.
As late as November, 1902, in _Nature Notes_, 13-231, a member of the
Selborne Society still argued that meteorites do not fall from the sky;
that they are masses of iron upon the ground "in the first place," that
attract lightning; that the lightning is seen, and is mistaken for a
falling, luminous object--
By progress we mean rape.
Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon
it.
3
So then, it is our expression that Science relates to real knowledge no
more than does the growth of a plant, or the organization of a
department store, or the development of a nation: that all are
assimilative, or organizing, or systematizing processes that represent
different attempts to attain the positive state--the state commonly
called heaven, I suppose I mean.
There can be no real science where there are indeterminate variables,
but every variable is, in finer terms, indeterminate, or irregular, if
only to have the appearance of being in Intermediateness is to express
regularity unattained. The invariable, or the real and stable, would be
nothing at all in Intermediateness--rather as, but in relative terms, an
undistorted interpretation of external sounds in the mind of a dreamer
could not continue to exist in a dreaming mind, because that touch of
relative realness would be of awakening and not of dreaming. Science is
the attempt to awaken to realness, wherein it is attempt to find
regularity and uniformity. Or the regular and uniform would be that
which has nothing external to disturb it. By the universal we mean the
real. Or the notion is that the underlying super-attempt, as expressed
in Science, is indifferent to the subject-matter of Science: that the
attempt to regularize is the vital spirit. Bugs and stars and chemical
messes: that they are only quasi-real, and that of them there is nothing
real to know; but that systematization of pseudo-data is approximation
to realness or final awakening--
Or a dreaming mind--and its centaurs and canary birds that turn into
giraffes--there could be no real biology upon such subjects, but
attempt, in a dreaming mind, to systematize such appearances would be
movement toward awakening--if better mental co-ordination is all that we
mean by the state of being awake--relatively awake.
So it is, that having attempted to systematize, by ignoring externality
to the greatest possible degree, the notion of things dropping in upon
this earth, from externality, is as unsettling and as unwelcome to
Science as--tin horns blowing in upon a musician's relatively symmetric
composition--flies alighting upon a painter's attempted harmony, and
tracking colors one into another--suffragist getting up and making a
political speech at a prayer meeting.
If all things are of a oneness, which is a state intermediate to
unrealness and realness, and if nothing has succeeded in breaking away
and establishing entity for itself, and could not continue to "exist" in
intermediateness, if it should succeed, any more than could the born
still at the same time be the uterine, I of course know of no positive
difference between Science and Christian Science--and the attitude of
both toward the unwelcome is the same--"it does not exist."
A Lord Kelvin and a Mrs. Eddy, and something not to their liking--it
does not exist.
Of course not, we Intermediates say: but, also, that, in
Intermediateness, neither is there absolute non-existence.
Or a Christian Scientist and a toothache--neither exists in the final
sense: also neither is absolutely non-existent, and, according to our
therapeutics, the one that more highly approximates to realness will
win.