Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/45

Rh Manifestation of commercial and social relations.

How could a mountain be without base in a greater body?

Storekeeper live without customers?

The prime resistance to the positivist attempt by Science is its relations with other phenomena, or that it only expresses those relations in the first place. Or that a Science can have seeming, or survive in Intermediateness, as something pure, isolated, positively different, no more than could a river or a city or a mountain or a store.

This Intermediateness-wide attempt by parts to be wholes—which can not be realized in our quasi-state, if we accept that in it the co-existence of two or more wholes or universals is impossible—high approximation to which, however, may be thinkable Scientists and their dream of "pure science."

Artists and their dream of "art for art's sake."

It is our notion that if they could almost realize, that would be almost realness: that they would instantly be translated into real existence. Such thinkers are good positivists, but they are evil in an economic and sociologic sense, if, in that sense, nothing has justification for being, unless it serve, or function for, or express the relations, of some higher aggregate. So Science functions for and serves society at large, and would, from society at large, receive no support, unless it did so divert itself or dissipate and prostitute itself. It seems that by prostitution I mean usefulness.

There have been red rains that, in the middle ages, were called "rains of blood." Such rains terrified many persons, and were so unsettling to large populations, that Science, in its sociologic relations, has sought, by Mrs. Eddy's method, to remove an evil

That "rains of blood" do not exist;

That rains so called are only of water colored by sand from the Sahara desert.

My own acceptance is that such assurances, whether fictitious or not, whether the Sahara is a "dazzling white" desert or not, have wrought such good effects, in a sociologic sense, even though prostitutional in the positivist sense, that, in the sociologic sense, they were well justified;

But that we've gone on: that this is the twentieth century; that most of us have grown up so that such soporifics of the past are no longer necessary:

That if gushes of blood should fall from the sky upon New York City, business would go on as usual.

We began with rains that we accepted ourselves were, most likely,