Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/160

 CHAPTER XII

STRONOMY.

And a watchman looking at half a dozen lanterns, where a street's been torn up.

There are gas lights and kerosene lamps and electric lights in the neighborhood: matches flaring, fires in stoves, bonfires, house afire somewhere; lights of automobiles, illuminated signs

The watchman and his one little system.

Ethics.

And some young ladies and the dear old professor of a very "select" seminary.

Drugs and divorce and rape: venereal diseases, drunkenness, murder

Excluded.

The prim and the precise, or the exact, the homogeneous, the single, the puritanic, the mathematic, the pure, the perfect. We can have illusion of this state—but only by disregarding its infinite denials. It's a drop of milk afloat in acid that's eating it. The positive swamped by the negative. So it is in intermediateness, where only to "be" positive is to generate corresponding and, perhaps, equal negativeness. In our acceptance, it is, in quasi-existence, premonitory, or pre-natal, or pre-awakening consciousness of a real existence.

But this consciousness of realness is the greatest resistance to efforts to realize or to become real—because it is feeling that realness has been attained. Our antagonism is not to Science, but to the attitude of the sciences that they have finally realized; or to belief, instead of acceptance; to the insufficiency, which, as we have seen over and over, amounts to paltriness and puerility, of scientific dogmas and standards. Or, if several persons start out to Chicago, and get to Buffalo, and one be under the delusion that Buffalo is Chicago, that one will be a resistance to the progress of the others.

So astronomy and its seemingly exact, little system

But data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; 154