Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/20

14 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.