The Book of the Damned | Page 5

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.
He was never able to tell what he meant by a "species."
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