Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/252

 CHAPTER XX HE New Dominant.

Inclusionism.

In it we have a pseudo-standard.

We have a datum, and we give it an interpretation, in accordance with our pseudo-standard. At present we have not the delusions of Absolutism that may have translated some of the positivists of the nineteenth century to heaven. We are Intermediatists—but feel a lurking suspicion that we may some day solidify and dogmatize and illiberalize into higher positivists. At present we do not ask whether something be reasonable or preposterous, because we recognize that by reasonableness and preposterousness are meant agreement and disagreement with a standard—which must be a delusion—though not absolutely, of course—and must some day be displaced by a more advanced quasi-delusion. Scientists in the past have taken the positivist attitude—is this or that reasonable or unreasonable? Analyze them and we find that they meant relatively to a standard, such as Newtonism, Daltonism, Darwinism, or Lyellism. But they have written and spoken and thought as if they could mean real reasonableness and real unreasonableness.

So our pseudo-standard is Inclusionism, and, if a datum be a correlate to a more widely inclusive outlook as to this earth and its externality and relations with externality, its harmony with Inclusionism admits it. Such was the process, and such was the requirement for admission in the days of the Old Dominant: our difference is in underlying Intermediatism, or consciousness that though we're more nearly real, we and our standards are only quasi

Or that all things—in our intermediate state—are phantoms in a super-mind in a dreaming state—but striving to awaken to realness.

Though in some respects our own Intermediatism is unsatisfactory, our underlying feeling is

That in a dreaming mind awakening is accelerated—if phantoms in that mind know that they're only phantoms in a dream. Of 246