The Book of the Damned | Page 4

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.
* * *
As to the logic of our expressions to come --

That there is only quasi-logic in our mode of seeming:
That nothing ever has been proved --
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