Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/143

Rh Disregarded.

How can one think of something and something else, too?

I'm in the state of mind of a savage who might find upon a shore, washed up by the same storm, buoyant parts of a piano and a paddle that was carved by cruder hands than his own: something light and summery from India, and a fur overcoat from Russia—or all science, though approximating wider and wider, is attempt to conceive of India in terms of an ocean island, and of Russia in terms of India so interpreted. Though I am trying to think of Russia and India in world-wide terms, I cannot think that that, or the universalizing of the local, is cosmic purpose. The higher idealist is the positivist who tries to localize the universal, and is in accord with cosmic purpose: the super-dogmatist of a local savage who can hold out, without a flurry of doubt, that a piano washed up on a beach is the trunk of a palm tree that a shark has bitten, leaving his teeth in it. So we fear for the soul of Dr. Gray, because, he did not devote his whole life to that one stand that, whether possible or inconceivable, thousands of fishes had been cast from one bucket.

So, unfortunately for myself, if salvation be desirable, I look out widely but amorphously, indefinitely and heterogeneously. If I say I conceive of another world that is now in secret communication with certain esoteric inhabitants of this earth, I say I conceive of still other worlds that are trying to establish communication with all the inhabitants of this earth. I fit my notions to the data I find. That is supposed to be the right and logical and scientific thing to do; but it is no way to approximate to form, system, organization. Then I think I conceive of other worlds and vast structures that pass us by, within a few miles, without the slightest desire to communicate, quite as tramp vessels pass many islands without particularizing one from another. Then I think I have data of a vast construction that has often come to this earth, dipped into an ocean, submerged there a while, then going away—Why? I'm not absolutely sure. How would an Eskimo explain a vessel, sending ashore for coal, which is plentiful upon some Arctic beaches, though of unknown use to the natives, then sailing away, with no interest in the natives?

A great difficulty in trying to understand vast constructions that show no interest in us:

The notion that we must be interesting.

I accept that, though we're usually avoided, probably for moral