Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/22

16 That, if every observable body is continuous, mediately or immediately, with all other bodies, it can not 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 can not 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.