The Book of the Damned | Page 9

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.
A secret of power--
I think it's another profundity.
Do you want power over something?
Be more nearly real than it.
We'll begin with yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth:
we'll see whether our data of them have a higher approximation to
realness than have the dogmas of those who deny their existence--that

is, as products from somewhere external to this earth.
In mere impressionism we take our stand. We have no positive tests nor
standards. Realism in art: realism in science--they pass away. In 1859,
the thing to do was to accept Darwinism; now many biologists are
revolting and trying to conceive of something else. The thing to do was
to accept it in its day, but Darwinism of course was never proved:
The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest--
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does
survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.
Although Darwinism, then, seems positively baseless, or absolutely
irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted coherence
approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency than did the
inchoate speculations that preceded it.
Or that Columbus never proved that the earth is round.
Shadow of the earth on the moon?
No one has ever seen it in its entirety. The earth's shadow is much
larger than the moon. If the periphery of the shadow is curved--but the
convex moon--a straight-edged object will cast a curved shadow upon a
surface that is convex.

All the other so-called proofs may be taken up in the same way. It was
impossible for Columbus to prove that the earth is round. It was not
required: only that