Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/223

Rh that one could "hardly resist"; and most of his resentment is against Mr. Proctor's thinking that he had not resisted. It seems too bad—if apotheosis be desirable.

The point in Intermediatism here is:

Not that to adapt to the conditions of quasi-existence is to have what is called success in quasi-existence, but is to lose one's soul But is to lose "one's" chance of attaining soul, self, or entity.

One indignation quoted from Proctor interests us:

"What happens on the moon may at any time happen to this earth."

Or:

That is just the teaching of this department of Advanced Astronomy:

That Russell and Hirst saw the sun eclipsed relatively to the moon by a vast dark body;

That many times have eclipses occurred relatively to this earth, by vast, dark bodies;

That there have been many eclipses that have not been recognized as eclipses by scientific kindergartens.

There is a merger, of course. We'll take a look at it first—that, after all, it may have been a shadow that Hirst and Russell saw, but the only significance is that the sun was eclipsed relatively to the moon by a cosmic haze of some kind, or a swarm of meteors close together, or a gaseous discharge left behind by a comet. My own acceptance is that vagueness of shadow is a function of vagueness of intervention; that a shadow as dense as the shadow of this earth is cast by a body denser than hazes and swarms. The information seems definite enough in this respect—"quite as dark as the shadow of this earth during the eclipse of the moon."

Though we may not always be as patient toward them as we should be, it is our acceptance that the astronomic primitives have done a great deal of good work: for instance, in the allaying of fears upon this earth. Sometimes it may seem as if all science were to us very much like what a red flag is to bulls and anti-socialists. It's not that: it's more like what unsquare meals are to bulls and anti-socialists—not the scientific, but the insufficient. Our acceptance is that Evil is the negative state, by which we mean the state of maladjustment, discord, ugliness, disorganization, inconsistency, injustice, and so on—as determined in Intermediateness, not by real standards, but only by higher approximations to adjustment, harmony, beauty, organization, consistency, justice, and so on. Evil is