The Book of the Damned | Page 2

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 sea-shore 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 can not 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 pseudostandards,
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,