The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort (e book reader free .txt) 📕

which there is nothing else. Though some things seem to have—or have—higher approximations to stability than have others, there are, in our experience, only various degrees of intermediateness to stability and instability. Every man, then, who works for stability under its various names of "permanency," "survival," "duration," is striving to localize in something the state that is realizable only in the universal.

By independence, entity, and individuality, I can mean only that besides which there is nothing else, if given only two things, they must be continuous and mutually affective, if everything is only a reaction to something else, and any two things would be destructive of each other's independence, entity, or individuality.

All attempted organizations and systems and consistencies, some approximating far higher than others, but all only intermediate to Order and Disorder, fail eventually because of their relations with outside forces. All are attempted completenesses. If to all local phenomena there are always outside forces, these attempts, too, are realizable only in the state of completeness, or that to which there are no outside forces.

Or that all these words are synonyms, all meaning the state that we call the positive state—

That our whole "existence" is a striving for the positive state.

The amazing paradox of it all:

That all things are trying to become the universal by excluding other things.

That there is only this one process, and that it does animate all expressions, in all fields of phenomena, of that which we think of as one inter-continuous nexus:

The religious and their idea or ideal of the soul. They mean distinct, stable entity, or a state that is independent, and not a mere flux of vibrations or complex of reactions to environment, continuous with environment, merging away with an infinitude of other interdependent complexes.

But the only thing that would not merge away into something else would be that besides which there is nothing else.

That Truth is only another name for the positive state, or that the quest for Truth is the attempt to achieve positiveness:

Scientists who have thought that they were seeking Truth, but who were trying to find out astronomic, or chemic, or biologic truths. But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete—

By Truth I mean the Universal.

So chemists have sought the true, or the real, and have always failed in their endeavors, because of the outside relations of chemical phenomena: have failed in the sense that never has a chemical law, without exceptions, been discovered: because chemistry is continuous with astronomy, physics, biology—For instance, if the sun should greatly change its distance from this earth, and if human life could survive, the familiar chemic formulas would no longer work out: a new science of chemistry would have to be learned—

Or that all attempts to find Truth in the special are attempts to find the universal in the local.

And artists and their striving for positiveness, under the name of "harmony"—but their pigments that are oxydizing, or are responding to a deranging environment—or the strings of musical instruments that are differently and disturbingly adjusting to outside chemic and thermal and gravitational forces—again and again this oneness of all ideals, and that it is the attempt to be, or to achieve, locally, that which is realizable only universally. In our experience there is only intermediateness to harmony and discord. Harmony is that besides which there are no outside forces.

And nations that have fought with only one motive: for individuality, or entity, or to be real, final nations, not subordinate to, or parts of, other nations. And that nothing but intermediateness has ever been attained, and that history is record of failures of this one attempt, because there always have been outside forces, or other nations contending for the same goal.

As to physical things, chemic, mineralogic, astronomic, it is not customary to say that they act to achieve Truth or Entity, but it is understood that all motions are toward Equilibrium: that there is no motion except toward Equilibrium, of course always away from some other approximation to Equilibrium.

All biologic phenomena act to adjust: there are no biologic actions other than adjustments.

Adjustment is another name for Equilibrium. Equilibrium is the Universal, or that which has nothing external to derange it.

But that all that we call "being" is motion: and that all motion is the expression, not of equilibrium, but of equilibrating, or of equilibrium unattained: that life-motions are expressions of equilibrium unattained: that all thought relates to the unattained: that to have what is called being in our quasi-state, is not to be in the positive sense, or is to be intermediate to Equilibrium and Inequilibrium.

So then:

That all phenomena in our intermediate state, or quasi-state, represent this one attempt to organize, stabilize, harmonize, individualize—or to positivize, or to become real:

That only to have seeming is to express failure or intermediateness to final failure and final success:

That every attempt—that is observable—is defeated by Continuity, or by outside forces—or by the excluded that are continuous with the included:

That our whole "existence" is an attempt by the relative to be the absolute, or by the local to be the universal.

In this book, my interest is in this attempt as manifested in modern science:

That it has attempted to be real, true, final, complete, absolute:

That, if the seeming of being, here, in our quasi-state, is the product of exclusion that is always false and arbitrary, if always are included and excluded continuous, the whole seeming system, or entity, of modern science is only quasi-system, or quasi-entity, wrought by the same false and arbitrary process as that by which the still less positive system that preceded it, or the theological system, wrought the illusion of its being.

In this book, I assemble some of the data that I think are of the falsely and arbitrarily excluded.

The data of the damned.

I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data.

They will march.

As to the logic of our expressions to come—

That there is only quasi-logic in our mode of seeming:

That nothing ever has been proved—

Because there is nothing to prove.

When I say that there is nothing to prove, I mean that to those who accept Continuity, or the merging away of all phenomena into other phenomena, without positive demarcations one from another, there is, in a positive sense, no one thing. There is nothing to prove.

For instance nothing can be proved to be an animal—because animalness and vegetableness are not positively different. There are some expressions of life that are as much vegetable as animal, or that represent the merging of animalness and vegetableness. There is then no positive test, standard, criterion, means of forming an opinion. As distinct from vegetables, animals do not exist. There is nothing to prove. Nothing could be proved to be good, for instance. There is nothing in our "existence" that is good, in a positive sense, or as really outlined from evil. If to forgive be good in times of peace, it is evil in wartime. There is nothing to prove: good in our experience is continuous with, or is only another aspect of evil.

As to what I'm trying to do now—I accept only. If I can't see universally, I only localize.

So, of course then, that nothing ever has been proved:

That theological pronouncements are as much open to doubt as ever they were, but that, by a hypnotizing process, they became dominant over the majority of minds in their era:

That, in a succeeding era, the laws, dogmas, formulas, principles, of materialistic science never were proved, because they are only localizations simulating the universal; but that the leading minds of their era of dominance were hypnotized into more or less firmly believing them.

Newton's three laws, and that they are attempts to achieve positiveness, or to defy and break Continuity, and are as unreal as are all other attempts to localize the universal:

That, if every observable body is continuous, mediately or immediately, with all other bodies, it cannot be influenced only by its own inertia, so that there is no way of knowing what the phenomena of inertia may be; that, if all things are reacting to an infinitude of forces, there is no way of knowing what the effects of only one impressed force would be; that if every reaction is continuous with its action, it cannot be conceived of as a whole, and that there is no way of conceiving what it might be equal and opposite to—

Or that Newton's three laws are three articles of faith:

Or that demons and angels and inertias and reactions are all mythological characters:

But that, in their eras of dominance, they were almost as firmly believed in as if they had been proved.

Enormities and preposterousnesses will march.

They will be "proved" as well as Moses or Darwin or Lyell ever "proved" anything.

We substitute acceptance for belief.

Cells of an embryo take on different appearances in different eras.

The more firmly established, the more difficult to change.

That social organism is embryonic.

That firmly to believe is to impede development.

That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate.

But:

Except that we substitute acceptance for belief, our methods will be the conventional methods; the means by which every belief has been formulated and supported: or our methods will be the methods of theologians and savages and scientists and children. Because, if all phenomena are continuous, there can be no positively different methods. By the inconclusive means and methods of cardinals and fortune tellers and evolutionists and peasants, methods which must be inconclusive, if they relate always to the local, and if there is nothing local to conclude, we shall write this book.

If it function as an expression of its era, it will prevail.

All sciences begin with attempts to define.

Nothing ever has been defined.

Because there is nothing to define.

Darwin wrote The Origin of Species.

He was never able to tell what he meant by a "species."

It is not possible to define.

Nothing has ever been finally found out.

Because there is nothing final to find out.

It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was—

But that all scientific attempts really to find out something, whereas really there is nothing to find out, are attempts, themselves, really to be something.

A seeker of Truth. He will never find it. But the dimmest of possibilities—he may himself become Truth.

Or that science is more than an inquiry:

That it is a pseudo-construction, or a quasi-organization: that it is an attempt to break away and locally establish harmony, stability, equilibrium, consistency, entity—

Dimmest of possibilities—that it may succeed.

That ours is a pseudo-existence, and that all appearances in it partake of its essential fictitiousness—

But that some appearances approximate far more highly to the positive state than do others.

We conceive of all "things" as occupying gradations, or steps in series between positiveness and negativeness, or realness and unrealness: that some seeming things are more nearly consistent, just, beautiful, unified, individual, harmonious, stable—than others.

We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists—that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness.

So then:

That our whole quasi-existence is an intermediate stage between positiveness and negativeness or realness and unrealness.

Like purgatory, I think.

But in our summing up, which was very sketchily done, we omitted to make clear that Realness is an aspect of the positive state.

By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into something else, and that which is not partly something else: that which is not a reaction to, or an imitation of, something else. By a real hero, we mean one who is not partly a coward, or whose actions and motives do not merge away into cowardice. But, if in Continuity, all things do merge, by Realness, I mean the Universal, besides which there is nothing with which to merge.

That,