Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/233

Rh sky, and falls of substances and objects whether commonly called meteoritic or not.

Not one of these occurrences fits in with principles of primitive, or primary, seismology, and every one of them is a datum of a quaked body passing close to this earth or suspended over it. To the primitives there is not a reason in the world why a convulsion of this earth's surface should be accompanied by unusual sights in the sky, by darkness, or by the fall of substances or objects from the sky. As to phenomena like these, or storms, preceding earthquakes, the irreconcilability is still greater.

It was before 1860 that Perrey made his great compilation. We take most of our data from lists compiled long ago. Only the safe and unpainful have been published in recent years—at least in ambitious, voluminous form. The restraining hand of the "System"—as we call it, whether it has any real existence or not—is tight upon the sciences of to-day. The uncanniest aspect of our quasi-existence that I know of is that everything that seems to have one identity has also as high a seeming of everything else. In this oneness of allness, or continuity, the protecting hand strangles; the parental stifles; love is inseparable from phenomena of hate. There is only Continuity—that is in quasi-existence. Nature, at least in its correspondents' columns, still evades this protective strangulation, and the Monthly Weather Review is still a rich field of unfaithful observation: but, in looking over other long-established periodicals, I have noted their glimmers of quasi-individuality fade gradually, after about 1860, and the surrender of their attempted identities to a higher attempted organization. Some of them, expressing Intermediateness-wide endeavor to localize the universal, or to localize self, soul, identity, entity—or positiveness or realness—held out until as far as 1880; traces findable up to 1890—and then, expressing the universal process—except that here and there in the world's history there may have been successful approximations to positiveness by "individuals"—who only then became individuals and attained to selves or souls of their own—surrendered, submitted, became parts of a higher organization's attempt to individualize or systematize into a complete thing, or to localize the universal or the attributes of the universal. After the death of Richard Proctor, whose occasional illiberalities I'd not like to emphasize too much, all succeeding volumes of Knowledge have yielded scarcely an unconventionality. Note the great number of times that the American Journal of Science and the Report of the