Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/224

218 outlived virtue, or incipient virtue that has not yet established itself, or any other phenomenon that is not in seeming adjustment, harmony, consistency with a dominant. The astronomers have functioned bravely in the past. They've been good for business: the big interests think kindly, if at all, of them. It's bad for trade to have an intense darkness come upon an unaware community and frighten people out of their purchasing values. But if an obscuration be foretold, and if it then occur—may seem a little uncanny—only a shadow—and no one who was about to buy a pair of shoes runs home panic-stricken and saves the money.

Upon general principles we accept that astronomers have quasi-systematized data of eclipses—or have included some and disregarded others.

They have done well.

They have functioned.

But now they're negatives, or they're out of harmony If we are in harmony with a new dominant, or the spirit of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be overthrown; if we have data of many obscurations that have occurred, not only upon the moon, but upon our own earth, as convincing of vast intervening bodies, usually invisible, as is any regularized, predicted eclipse.

One looks up at the sky.

It seems incredible that, say, at the distance of the moon, there could be, but be invisible, a solid body, say the size of the moon.

One looks up at the moon, at a time when only a crescent of it is visible. The tendency is to build up the rest of it in one's mind; but the unillumined part looks as vacant as the rest of the sky, and it's of the same blueness as the rest of the sky. There's a vast area of solid substance before one's eyes. It's indistinguishable from the sky.

In some of our little lessons upon the beauties of modesty and humility, we have picked out basic arrogances—tail of a peacock, horns of a stag, dollars of a capitalist—eclipses of astronomers. Though I have no desire for the job, I'd engage to list hundreds of instances in which the report upon an expected eclipse has been "sky overcast" or "weather unfavorable." In our Super-Hibernia, the unfavorable has been construed as the favorable. Some time ago, when we were lost, because we had not recognized our own dominant, when we were still of the unchosen and likely to be more malicious than we now are—because we have noted a steady tolerance creeping into our attitude—if astronomers are not to blame,