 1. A procession of the damned. By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them, or they'll march. Some of them livid, and some of them fiery, and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems, and things that are rags. They'll go by like Euclid, arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will foot little harlots. Many are clowns, but many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches, and gaunt superstitions, and mere shadows, and lively malices, whims and amiabilities, the naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile, a stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety, the ultra-respectable, but the condemned anyway. The aggregate appearance is of dignity and disilluteness. The aggregate voice is a defiant prayer, but the spirit of the whole is processional. The power that is said to all these things that they are damned is dogmatic science, but they'll march. The little harlots will caper, and the freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries. But the solidity of the procession as a whole, the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming. The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass formations that pass and pass and keep on passing. So by the damned, I mean the excluded. But by the excluded, I mean that which will someday be the excluding. Or everything that is won't be, and everything that isn't will be. But of course will be that which won't be. It is our expression that the plaques between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly an absurdly called existence, is a rhythm of heavens and hells, that the damned won't stay damned, that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that someday our accursed tatter-demelions will be sleek angels, then the sub-inferences that some later day back they'll go whence they came. It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else, that that which is commonly called being is a state that has wrought more and less definitely proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that which is included and that which is excluded. But it is our expression that there are no positive differences, that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. As a mouse and a bug, no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month, both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese. Or that red is not positively different from yellow is only another degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of, that red and yellow are continuous, or that they merge in orange. So then that if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, science should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all things red as verifiable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary because things colored orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the attempted borderline. As we go along we shall be impressed with this, that no basis for classification or inclusion and exclusion more reasonable than that of redness and yellowness has ever been conceived of. Redness has, by appeal to various bases, excluded a multitude of data. Then if redness is continuous with yellowness, if every basis of admission is continuous with every basis of exclusion, science must have excluded some things that are continuous with the accepted. In redness and yellowness, which merge in orange-ness, we typify all tests, all standards, all means of forming an opinion. Or that any positive opinion on any subject is illusion, built upon the fallacy, that there are positive differences to judge by. That the quest of all intellection has been for something, a fact, a basis, a generalization, law, formula, a major premise that is positive, that the best that has ever been done has been to say that some things are self-evident, whereas by evidence we mean the support of something else, that this is the quest but that it has never been attained, but that science has acted ruled, pronounced, and condemned as if it had been attained. What is a house? It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else if there are no positive differences. A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is a house, and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs' houses, nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos, or a shell is a house to a hermit crab, or was to the mollusk that made it, or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington, and a shell on the seashore are seen to be continuous. So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance. It isn't anything, as positively distinguished from heat or magnetism or life, metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to define life. They have failed, because in a positive sense there is nothing to define. There is no phenomenon of life that is not, to some degree, manifest in chemism, magnetism, astronomical motions. White Coral Islands in a Dark Blue Sea. There seeming of distinctness, the seeming of individuality, or of positive difference, one from another. But all are only projections from the same sea-bottom. The difference between sea and land is not positive. In all water there is some earth. In all earth there is some water. So then that all seeming things are not things at all, if all are intercontinuous, any more than is the leg of a table, a thing in itself. If it is only a projection from something else, that not one of us is a real person if, physically, we are continuous with environment, if, psychically, there is nothing to us but expression of relation to environment. Our general expression has two aspects. Or that all things that seem to have identity of their own are only islands that are projections from something underlying and have no real outlines of their own. But that all things, though only projections, are projections that are striving to break away from the underlying that denies them identity of their own. I conceive of one intercontinuous nexus in which and of which all seeming things are only different expressions, but in which all things are localizations of one attempt to break away and become real things, or to establish entity or positive difference or final demarcation or unmodified independence or personality or soul, as it is called in human phenomena, that anything that tries to establish itself as real or positive or absolute system, government, organization, self, soul, entity, individuality can so attempt only by drawing a line about itself or about the inclusions that constitute itself and damning or excluding or breaking away from all other things. That if it does not so act it cannot seem to be. That if it does so act it falsely and arbitrarily and futilely and disastrously acts just as would one who draws a circle in the sea including a few waves saying that the other waves with which the included are continuous are positively different and stakes his life upon maintaining that the admitted and the damned are positively different. Another expression is that our whole existence is animation of the local by an ideal that is realizable only in the universal. That if all exclusions are false because always are included in excluded continuous, that if all seeming of existence perceptible to us is the product of exclusion, there is nothing that is perceptible to us that really is, that only the universal can really be. Our special interest is in modern science as a manifestation of this one ideal or purpose or process. That it is falsely excluded because there are no positive standards to judge by, that it has excluded things that, by its own pseudo standards, have as much right to come in as have the chosen. Our general expression, that the state that is commonly an absurdly called existence is a flow or a current or an attempt from negativeness to positiveness and is intermediate to both. By positiveness we mean harmony, equilibrium, order, regularity, stability, consistency, unity, realness, system, government, organization, liberty, independence, soul, self, personality, entity, individuality, truth, beauty, justice, perfection, definitiveness. That all that is called development, progress or evolution is movement toward or attempt toward this state for which or for aspects of which there are so many names, all of which are summed up in the one word, positiveness. At first this summing up may not be very readily acceptable, at first it may seem that all these words are not synonyms, that harmony may mean order, but that by independence for instance we do not mean truth or that by stability we do not mean beauty or system or justice. I conceive of one intercontinuous nexus which expresses itself an astronomical phenomena and chemic, biologic, psychic, sociologic, that it is everywhere striving to localize positiveness, that to this attempt in various fields of phenomena which are only quasi-different, we give different names. We speak of the system of the planets and not of their government, but in considering a store for instance and its management we see that the words are interchangeable. It used to be customary to speak of chemic equilibrium but not of social equilibrium. That false demarcation has been broken down. We shall see that by all these words we mean the same state, as everyday conveniences or in terms of common illusions, of course they are not synonyms. To a child an earthworm is not an animal, it is to a biologist. By beauty I mean that which seems complete. Oversely that the incomplete or the mutilated is the ugly. Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness even though by physiologic standards incomplete she is beautiful. A hand thought of only as a hand may seem beautiful. Found on a battlefield, obviously apart, not beautiful. But everything in our experience is only a part of something else, that in turn is only a part of still something else. Or that there is nothing beautiful in our experience, only appearances that are intermediate to beauty and ugliness, that only universality is complete, that only the complete is the beautiful, that every attempt to achieve beauty is an attempt to give the local the attribute of the universal. By stability we mean the immovable and the unaffected. But all seeming things are only reactions to something else. Stability too then, can be only the universal or that besides which there is nothing else. Though something 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 this 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 effective. If everything is only a reaction to something else, and any two things would be destructive of each others 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 completeness. 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 intercontinuous nexus. The religious, and their idea, or ideal of the soul, they mean distinct stable entity, or a state that is independent, and not 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. The 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 astronomical or chemical or biological 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 chemical 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 they're striving for positiveness under the name harmony, but they're pigments that are oxidizing or are responding to a deranging environment, or the strings of musical instruments that are differently and disturbingly adjusting to outside chemical 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 was 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, astronomical, 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 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 in equilibrium. So then, that all phenomena in our intermediate state, or quasi-state, represent this one attempt to organize, stabilize, harmonize, individualize, or to positiveize, 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 this 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 has ever 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. As animal-ness 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 animal-ness and vegetableness. There is then no positive test, standard criteria on 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 your existence that is good in a positive sense, or has 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 width, or is only another aspect of evil. As for 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 they ever were, but that, by a hypnotizing process, they become dominant over the majority of minds in their era. That, in a succeeding era, the laws, dogmas, formulas, principles, and 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, immediately or immediately, with all other bodies, it cannot be observed 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 inertia's 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. Enormity's and preposterousness's will march. They will be proved as well as Moses or Darwin or Liel 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, accept 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 began 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 to 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 though the local might be universalized, it is not conceivable that the universal can be localized, but that high approximations there may be and that these approximate successes may be translated out of intermediateness into realness, quite as in a relative sense, the industrial world recruits itself by translating out of unrealness or out of the seemingly less real imaginings of inventors, machines which seem, when set up in factories, to have more of realness than they had when only imagined. That all progress, if all progress is towards stability, organization, harmony, consistency, or positiveness is the attempt to become real. So then in general metaphysical terms, our expression is that like a purgatory, all that is commonly called existence, which we call intermediateness, is quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal, but expression of attempt to become real or to generate for or recruit a real existence. Our acceptance is that science, though usually thought of so specifically or in its own local terms, usually supposed to be a prying into old bones, bugs, unsavory messes, is an expression of this one spirit animating all intermediateness. That if science could absolutely exclude all data but its own present data or that which is assimilable with the present quasi-organization, it would be a real system with positively definite outlines. It would be real. It's seeming approximation to consistency, stability, system, positiveness or realness is sustained by damning the irreconcilable or the unassimilable. All would be well. All would be heavenly. If the damned would only stay damned. End of chapter one. This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading by Matthew Shepard, www.shep.ca. The Book of the Damned by Charles Forte, chapter two. In the autumn of 1883 and for years afterward occurred brilliant colored sunsets such as had never been seen before within the memory of all observers. Also, there were blue moons. I think that one is likely to smile incredulously at the notion of blue moons. Nevertheless, they were as common as were green suns in 1883. Science had to account for these unconventionalities. Such publications as nature and knowledge were besieged with inquiries. I suppose in Alaska and in the South Sea Islands, all the medicine men were similarly upon trial. Something had to be thought of. Upon the 28th of August, 1883, the volcano of Krakatoa, of the Straits of Sunda, had blown up. Terrific. We're told that the sound was heard 2,000 miles and that 36,380 persons were killed. Seems just a little unscientific or impositive to me. Marvel to me, we're not told 2,163 miles and 36,387 persons. The volume of smoke that went up must have been visible to other planets. Or, tormented with our crawlings and scurries, the earth complained to Mars, swore a vast black oath at us. In all textbooks that mention this occurrence, no exception so far, so I've read, it is said that the extraordinary atmospheric effects of 1883 were first noticed in the last of August or the first of September. That makes a difficulty for us. It is said that these phenomena were caused by particles of volcanic dust that were cast high in the air by Krakatoa. This is the explanation that was agreed upon in 1883. But for seven years, the atmospheric phenomena continued. Except that, in the seven, there was a lapse of several years. And where was the volcanic dust all that time? You'd think such a question as that would make trouble. Then you haven't studied hypnosis. You have never tried to demonstrate to a hypnotic that a table is not a hippopotamus. According to our general acceptance, it would be impossible to demonstrate such a thing. Point out a hundred reasons for saying that a hippopotamus is not a table. You'll end up agreeing that neither is a table a table. It only seems to be a table. Well, that's not what the hippopotamus seems to be. So how can you prove that something is not something else when neither is something else some other thing? There's nothing to prove. This is one of the profundities that we advertised in advance. You can oppose an absurdity only with some other absurdity, but science is established preposterousness. We divide all intellection, the obviously preposterous and the established. But Krakatoa, that's the explanation that the scientists gave. I don't know what Whopper the medicine men told. We can see from the start the very strong inclination of science to deny as much as it can external relations of this earth. This book is an assemblage of data of external relations of this earth. We take the position that our data have been damned upon no consideration for individual merits or demerits, but in conformity with a general attempt to hold out for isolation of this earth. This is attempted positiveness. We take the position that science can no more succeed than in a similar endeavor. Could the Chinese or then could the United States? So then, with only pseudo consideration of the phenomena of 1883, or as an expression of positivism in its aspect of isolation or unrelatedness, scientists have perpetrated such an enormity as suspension of volcanic dust seven years in the air, disregarding the lapse of several years, rather than admit the arrival of dust from somewhere beyond this earth. Not that scientists themselves have ever achieved positivness in its aspect of unitedness among themselves, because Norton Skiold, before 1883, wrote a great deal upon his theory of cosmic dust and Professor Cleveland Abbey contended against the Krakatoan explanation, but that this is the orthodoxy of the main body of scientists. My own chief reason for indignation here is that this preposterous explanation interferes with some of my own enormities. It would cost me too much explaining if I should have to admit that this earth's atmosphere has such sustaining power. Later, we shall have data of things that have gone up in the air and that have stayed up somewhere, weeks, months, but not by the sustaining power of the earth's atmosphere. For instance, the Turtle of Vicksburg. It seems to me that it would be ridiculous to think of a good-sized turtle hanging for three or four months upheld only by the air over the town of Vicksburg. When it comes to the horse and the barn, I think they'll be classic someday, but I can never accept that a horse and a barn could float several months in this earth's atmosphere. The orthodox explanation. See the report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society. It comes out absolutely for the orthodox explanation, absolutely and beautifully and also expensively. There are 492 pages in the report and 40 plates, some of them marvelously colored. It was issued after an investigation that took five years. You couldn't think of anything done more efficiently, artistically, authoritatively. The mathematical parts are especially impressive, distribution of the dust of Krakatoa, velocity of transmission, and rates of subsistence, altitudes and persistencies. Annual register, 1883, 105, that the atmospheric effects that have been attributed to Krakatoa were seen in Trinidad before the eruption occurred. Knowledge, five, 418, that they were seen in Natal, South Africa, six months before the eruption. Inertia and its inhospitality or raw meat should not be fed to babies. We shall have a few data initiatorially. I fear me that the horse and the barn were a little extreme for our budding liberalities. The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely. Hailstones, for instance. One reads in the newspapers of Hailstones, the size of hen's eggs. One smiles. Nevertheless, I will engage to list 100 instances from the monthly weather review of Hailstones, the size of hen's eggs. There is an account in nature, November 1st, 1894, of Hailstones that weighed almost two pounds each. See Chambers Encyclopedia for Three Pounders, report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1870, 479, two pounders authenticated and six pounders reported that searing a Patam, India, about the year 1800, fell a hailstone. I fear me, I fear me. This is one of the profoundly damned. I blurred out something that should perhaps be withheld for several hundred pages, but that damned thing was the size of an elephant. We laugh. Or snowflakes, size of saucers, said to have fallen at Nashville, Tennessee, January 24th, 1891. One smiles. In Montana, in the winter of 1887, fell snowflakes 15 inches across and eight inches thick. Monthly weather review, 1915, 73. In the topography of intellectual, I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter. Black rains, red rains, the fall of a thousand tons of butter. Jet black snow, pink snow, blue hailstones, hailstones flavored like oranges, punk and silk and charcoal. About 100 years ago, if anyone was so credulous as to think that stones had ever fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with. In the first place, there are no stones in the sky. Therefore, no stones can fall from the sky. Or nothing more reasonable or scientific or logical than that could be said upon any subject. The only trouble is the universal trouble, that the major premise is not real or is intermediate somewhere between realness and unrealness. In 1772, a committee of whom Lavoisier was a member was appointed by the French Academy to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from the sky at Luce, France. Of all attempts at positiveness in its aspect of isolation, I don't know of anything that has been fought harder for than the notion of this earth's unrelatedness. Lavoisier analyzed the stone of Luce. The exclusionist's explanation at that time was that stones do not fall from the sky, that luminous objects may seem to fall and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly had landed, only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it. The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion. Lavoisier's analysis absolutely proved that this stone had not fallen, that it had been struck by lightning. So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned. The stock means of exclusion remain the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike something that had been upon the ground in the first place. But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement, it is not customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence of exclusion, but subjectively, aerolites did. Or data of them bombarded the walls raised against them. Monthly review, 1796, 426. The phenomenon which is the subject of the marks before us will seem to most persons as little worthy of credit as any that could be offered. The falling of large stones from the sky without any assignable cause of their previous ascent seems to partake so much of the marvelous as almost entirely to exclude the operation of known and natural agents. Yet a body of evidence is here brought to prove that such events have actually taken place and we ought not to withhold it from a proper degree of attention. The writer abandons the first or absolute exclusion and modifies it with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in Tuscany, June 16, 1794, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius or that stones do fall from the sky, but they are stones that have been raised to the sky from some other part of the Earth's surface by whirlwinds or by volcanic action. It's more than 120 years later. I know of no aerolite that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestrial origin. Falling stones had to be undammed, though still with a reservation that held out for the exclusion of outside forces. One may have the knowledge of a la Voizier and still not be able to analyze, not be able even to see except conformably with the hypnosis or the conventional reactions against hypnosis of one's era. We believe no more. We accept. Little by little, the whirlwind and volcano explanations had to be abandoned, but so powerful was this exclusion hypnosis, sentence of damnation or this attempted positiveness that far into our own times, some scientists, notably Professor Lawrence Smith and Sir Robert Ball continued to hold out against all external origins asserting that nothing could fall to this Earth unless it had been cast up or whirled up from some other part of the Earth's surface. It's as commendable as anything has ever been, by which I mean it's intermediate to the commendable and the censurable. It's virginal. Meteorites, data of which were once damned, have been admitted, but the common impression of them is only a retreat of attempted exclusion, that only two kinds of substance fall from the sky, metallic and stony, and the metallic objects are iron and nickel, butter and paper and wool and silk and resin. We see to start with that the virgins of science have fought and wept and screamed against external relations upon two grounds. They're in the first place or up from one part of this Earth's surface and down to another. As late as November 1902, in nature notes, 13231, a member of the cell-born society still argued that meteorites do not fall from the sky, that they are masses of iron upon the ground in the first place that attract lightning, that the lightning is seen and mistaken for a falling luminous object. By progress, we mean rape, butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it. End of chapter two. This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading by Matthew Shepard, www.shep.ca. The Book of the Damned by Charles Forte, chapter three. So then, it is our expression that science relates to real knowledge no more than does the growth of a plant or the organization of a department store or the development of a nation, that all are assimilative or organizing or systematizing processes that represent different attempts to attain the positive state. The state commonly called heaven, I suppose I mean. There can be no real science where there are indeterminate variables, but every variable is, in finer terms, indeterminate or irregular if only to have the appearance of being in intermediateness is to express regularity unattained. The invariable or the real and stable would be nothing at all in intermediateness, rather as, but in relative terms, an undistorted interpretation of external sounds in the mind of a dreamer could not continue to exist in a dreaming mind because that touch of relative realness would be of awakening and not of dreaming. Science is the attempt to awaken to realness, wherein it is attempt to find regularity and uniformity or the regular in uniform would be that which is nothing external to disturb it. By the universal, we mean the real or the notion is that the underlying super attempt as expressed in science is indifferent to the subject matter of science that the attempt to regularize is the vital spirit. Bugs and stars and chemical messes that they are only quasi-real and that of them there is nothing real to know but that systemization of pseudodata is approximation to realness or final awakening or a dreaming mind and it's centaurs and canary birds that turn into giraffes. There could be no real biology upon such subjects but attempt in a dreaming mind to systematize such appearances would be movement toward awakening. If better mental coordination is all that we mean by the state of being awake, relatively awake. So it is that having attempted to systematize by ignoring externality to the greatest possible degree, the notion of things dropping in upon this earth from externality is as unsettling and unwelcome to science as tin horns blowing in upon a musician's relatively symmetric composition, flies, a lighting upon a painter's attempted harmony and tracking colors into one another, suffragist getting up and making a political speech at a prayer meeting. If all things are of a oneness which is a state intermediate to unrealness and realness and if nothing has succeeded in breaking away and establishing entity for itself and could not continue to exist in indeterminateness, if all things are of a oneness which is a state intermediate to unrealness and realness and if nothing has succeeded in breaking away and establishing entity for itself and could not continue to exist in intermediateness, if it should succeed any more than could the born still at the same time be the uterine, I of course know of no positive difference between science and Christian science and the attitude of both toward the unwelcome is the same, it does not exist. Award Kelvin and a Mrs. Eddy and something not to their liking, it does not exist. Of course not, we intermediates say, but also that in intermediateness, neither is there absolute nonexistence. Or a Christian scientist and a toothache, neither exists in the final sense, also neither is absolutely nonexistent and according to our therapeutics, the one that more highly approximates to realness will win. A secret of power. I think it's another profundity. Do you want power over something? Be more nearly real than it. We'll begin with yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth. We'll see whether our data of them have a higher approximation to realness than have the dogmas of those who deny their existence, that is, as products from somewhere external to this earth. In mere impressionism, we take our stand. We have no positive tests nor standards. Realism in art, realism in science, they pass away. In 1859, the thing to do was to accept Darwinism. Now many biologists are revolting and trying to conceive of something else. The thing to do was to accept it in its day, but Darwinism, of course, was never proved. The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest, not the cleverest. Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness, except in that a thing does survive. Fitness, then, is only another name for survival. Darwinism, that survivors survive. Although Darwinism, then, seems positively baseless or absolutely irrational, its massing of supposed data and its attempted coherence approximate more highly to organization and consistency than did the Inchoate speculations that preceded it. Or that Columbus never proved that the earth is round. Shadow of the earth on the moon? No one has ever seen it in its entirety. The earth's shadow is much larger than the moon if the periphery of the shadow is curved. But the convex moon, a straight-edged object will cast a curved shadow upon a surface that is convex. All the other so-called proofs may be taken up the same way. It was impossible for Columbus to prove that the earth is round. It was not required, only that with a higher seeming of positiveness than that of his opponents he should attempt. The thing to do in 1492 was nevertheless to accept that beyond Europe to the west were other lands. I offer for acceptance as something concordant with the spirit of this first quarter of the 20th century, the expression that beyond this earth there are other lands from which come things as from America float things to Europe. As to yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth, the endeavor to exclude extra mundane origins is the dogma that all yellow rains and yellow snows are colored with pollen from this earth's pine trees. Simon's meteorological magazine is especially prudish in this respect and regards as highly improper all advances made by other explainers. Nevertheless, the monthly weather review May 1877 reports a golden yellow fall of February 27th, 1877 at Peclo, Germany, in which four kinds of organisms, not pollen, were the coloring matter. There are minute things shaped like arrows, coffee beans, horns, and discs. They may have been symbols. They may have been objective hieroglyphics. Mere passing fancy, let it go. In the Announce de Chime, 85, 288, there is a list of rains said to have contained sulfur. I have 30 or further, I have 30 or 40 other notes. I'll not use one of them. I'll admit that every one of them is upon a fall of pollen. I said to begin with that our methods would be the methods of theologians and scientists, and that they always begin with an appearance of liberality. I grant 30 or 40 points to start with. I'm as liberal as any of them, or that my liberality won't cost me anything, the enormous, the enormousness of the data that we shall have. Or just to look over a typical instance of this dogma and the way it works out. In the American Journal of Science, 142, 196, we are told of a yellow substance that fell by the bucketful upon a vessel one windless night in June in Pictu Harbor, Nova Scotia. The writer analyzed the substance and it was found to give off nitrogen, an ammonia, and an animal odor. Now, one of our intermediateist principles to start with is that so far from positive in the aspect of homogenousness are all substances that, at least in what is called an elementary sense, anything can be found anywhere. Mahogany logs on the coast of Greenland, bugs of a valley on top of Mont Blanc, atheists at a prayer meeting, ice in India. For instance, chemical analysis can reveal that almost any dead man was poisoned with arsenic, we'll say, because there is no stomach without some iron, lead, tin, gold, arsenic in it and of it. Which of course, in a broader sense, doesn't matter much because a certain number of persons must, as a restraining influence, be executed for murder every year and if detectives aren't able really to detect anything. Illusion of their success is all that is necessary and it is very honorable to give up one's life for society as a whole. The chemist who analyzed the substance of Pictu sent a sample to the editor of the journal. The editor, of course, found pollen in it. My own acceptance is that there'd have to be some pollen in it that nothing could very well fall through the air in June near the pine forests of Nova Scotia and escape all floating spores of pollen. But the editor does not say that this substance contained pollen. He disregards nitrogen and ammonia and an animal odor and says that the substance was pollen. For the sake of our 30 or 40 tokens of liberality or pseudo-liberality, if we can't be really liberal, we grant that the chemist of the first examination probably wouldn't know an animal odor if you were janitor of a menagerie. As we go along, however, there can be no such sweeping ignoring of this phenomenon. The fall of animal matter from the sky. I'd suggest to start with that we'd put ourselves in the place of deep-sea fishes. How would they account for the fall of animal matter from above? They wouldn't try or it's easy enough to think of most of us as deep-sea fishes of a kind. Journal Franklin Institution, 9011. That, upon the 14th of February, 1870, there fell a Genoa Italy, according to Director Bacardo of the Technical Institute of Genoa and Professor Castellani, a yellow substance. But the microscope revealed numerous globules of cobalt blue, also corpuscles of a pearly color that resembled starch. See Nature, 2166. Contrandu, 56, 972. Missy Bouille says of a substance, reddish varying to yellowish, that fell enormously and successively, or upon April 30th, May 1st and May 2nd, in France and Spain, that it carbonized and spread the odor of charred animal matter, that it was not pollen, that in alcohol and left a residue of resinous matter. Hundreds of thousands of tons of this matter must have fallen. Odor of charred animal matter, or an aerial battle that occurred in interplanetary space several hundred years ago, effective time in making diverse remains uniform in appearance. It's all very absurd because, even though we are told of a prodigious quantity of animal matter that fell from the sky, three days, France and Spain, we are not ready yet. That's all. Missy Bouille says that this substance was not pollen. The vastness of the fall makes acceptable that it was not pollen. Still, the resinous residue does suggest pollen of pine trees. We shall hear a great deal of a substance with a resinous residue that has fallen from the sky. Finally, we shall divorce it from all suggestion of pollen. Blackwood's Magazine, 3338. A yellow powder that fell at Jirass, Calabria, March 14th, 1813. Some of this substance was collected by Sinyar Semeny, Professor of Chemistry at Navels. It had an earthy and sippid taste and is described as unctuous. When heated, this matter turned brown then black, then red. According to the annals of philosophy, 11466, one of the components was a greenish-yellow substance, which, when dried, was found to be resinous. But concomitants of this fall, loud noises were heard in the sky, stones fell from the sky. According to Chladini, these concomitants occurred. And to me they seem rather brutal or not associable, with something so soft and gentle as a fall of pollen. Black rains and black snows rains as black as a deluge of ink, jet black snowflakes. Such a rain is that which fell in Ireland, May 14th, 1849, described in the annals of scientific discovery, 1850, and the annual register, 1849. It fell upon a district of 400 square miles and was the color of ink and of a fetid odor and a very disagreeable taste. The rain at Castle Common, Ireland, April 30th, 1887, thick black rain, American Meteorological Journal, 4193. A black rain fell in Ireland October 8th and 9th, 1907, Simon's Meteorological Magazine, 43, 2. It left a most peculiar and disagreeable smell in the air. The orthodox explanation of this rain occurs in nature, March the 2nd, 1908, cloud of soot that had come from South Wales, crossing the Irish Channel and all of Ireland. So the black rain of Ireland, of March, 1898, ascribed in Simon's Meteorological Magazine, 3340, to clouds of soot from the manufacturing towns of North England and South Scotland. Our Intermediatist Principle of Pseudologic, where our principle of continuity is, of course, that nothing is unique or individual, that all phenomena merge away into all other phenomena, that, for instance, suppose there should be vast super-oceanic or interplanetary vessels that come near this earth and discharge volumes of smoke at times. We're only supposing such a thing as that now because conventionally, we are beginning modestly and tentatively. But if that were so, there would necessarily be some phenomenon upon this earth with which that phenomenon would merge. Extra mundane smoke and smoke from cities merge or both would manifest in black precipitations in rain. In continuity, it is impossible to distinguish phenomena at their merging points, so we look for them at their extremes. Impossible to distinguish between animal and vegetable in some infusoria, but hippopotamus and violet. For all practical purposes, they're distinguishable enough. No one but a Barnum or a Bailey would send one a bunch of hippopotamia as a token of regard. So away from the great manufacturing centers. Black Rain in Switzerland, January 20th, 1911. Switzerland is so remote and so ill at ease is the conventional explanation here that Nature 85451 says of this rain that in certain conditions of weather, snow may take on an appearance of blackness that is quite deceptive. Maybe so. Or at night, if dark enough, snow may look black. This is simply denying that a black rain fell in Switzerland January 20th, 1911. Extreme remoteness from the great manufacturing centers. La nature, 1888 to 406. That August 14th, 1888, there fell at the Cape of Good Hope, a rain so black as to be described as a shower of ink. Continuity dogs us. Continuity rules us and pulls us back. We seem to have a little hope that by the method of extremes we could get away from things that merge indistinguishably into other things. We find that every departure from one merger is entrance upon another. At the Cape of Good Hope, vast volumes of smoke from great manufacturing centers as an explanation cannot very acceptably merge with the explanation of extra mundane origin. But smoke from a terrestrial volcano can and that is the suggestion that is made in La Natue. There is in human interaction no real standard to judge by, but our acceptance for the present is that the more nearly positive will prevail. By the more nearly positive, we mean the more nearly organized. Everything merges away into everything else, but proportionately to its complexity, if unified, a thing seems strong, real, and distinct. In aesthetics, it is recognized that diversity in unity is higher beauty, or approximation to beauty, than is simpler unity. So the logicians feel that agreement of diverse data constitute greater convincingness or strength than that of mere parallel instances. So to Herbert Spencer, the more highly differentiated and integrated is the more fully evolved. Our opponents hold out for mundane origin of all black rains. Our method will be the presenting of diverse phenomena in agreement with the notion of some other origin. We take up not only black rains, but black rains, and their accompanying phenomena. A correspondent to knowledge, 5190, writes of a black rain that fell in the Clyde Valley March 1st, 1884, of another black rain that fell two days later. According to the correspondent, a black rain had fallen in the Clyde Valley March 20th, 1828, then again March 22nd, 1828. According to Nature, 943, a black rain fell at Marlesford, England, September 4th, 1873, more than 24 hours later, another black rain fell in the same small town. The black rains of slains. According to Reverend James Rust, of Scottish showers, a black rain at Slains, January 14th, 1862, another at Carluck, 140 miles from Slains, May 1st, 1862, at Slains, May 20th, 1862, Slains, October 28th, 1863. But after two of these showers, vast quantities of a substance described sometimes as pumice stone, but sometimes as slag, were washed upon the seacoast near Slains. A chemist's opinion is given that this substance was slag, that it was not a volcanic product, slag from smelting works. We now have for black rains a concomitant that is irreconcilable with origin from factory chimneys. Whatever it may have been, the quantity of this substance was so enormous that, in Mr. Rust's opinion, to have produced so much of it would have required the united output of all the smelting works in the world. If slag it were, we accept that an artificial product has in enormous quantities fallen from the sky. If you don't think that such occurrences are damned by science, read Scottish showers and see how impossible it was for the author to have this matter taken up by the scientific world. The first and second rains corresponded, in time, with ordinary ebullitions of Vesuvius. The third and fourth, according to Mr. Rust, corresponded with no known volcanic activities upon this earth. That's Yaspeltu, 1126. That, between October 1863 and January 1866, four more black rains fell at Slain's, Scotland. The writer of this supplementary account tells us, with a better or more unscrupulous orthodoxy than Mr. Rust's, that of the eight black rains, five coincided with eruptions of Vesuvius and three with eruptions of Etna. The fate of all explanation is to close one door, only to have another fly wide open. I should say that my own notions upon the subject will be considered irrational, but at least my gregariousness is satisfied in associating here with the preposterous. Or this writer, and those who think in his rut, have to say that they can think of four discharges from one far-distant volcano passing over a great part of Europe, precipitating nowhere else, discharging precisely over one small northern parish. But also of three other discharges from another far-distant volcano, showing the same precise preference, if not marksmanship, for one small parish in Scotland. Nor would orthodoxy be any better off in thinking of exploding meteorites and their debris. Preciseness and recurrence would be just as difficult to explain. My own notion is of an island near an oceanic trade route it might receive debris from passing vessels seven times in four years. Other concomitants of black rains. In Tim's yearbook, 1851 to 70, there is an account of a sort of rumbling as of wagons was heard for upward of an hour without seizing. July 16th, 1850, Bollack Rectory, Northampton, England. On the 19th, a black rain fell. In Nature, 36, a correspondent writes of an intense darkness at Preston, England, April 26th, 1884, page 32. Another correspondent writes of a black rain at Crowell, near Worcester, April 26th, that a week later, or May 3rd, it had fallen again. Another account of black rain upon the 28th of April near Church, Stratton, so intense that the following day, Brooks, were still died with it. According to four accounts by correspondence to Nature, there were earthquakes in England at this time. Or the black rain of Canada. On November 9th, 1819, this time it is orthodoxy to attribute the black precipitate to smoke of forest fire south of the Ohio River. Zercher, Meteors, page 238, that this black rain was accompanied by shocks like those of an earthquake. Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 2, 381, that the earthquake had occurred at the climax of intense darkness and the fall of black rain. Red rains. Orthodoxy, sand blown by the Sirocco from the Sahara to Europe. Especially in the earthquake regions of Europe, there have been many falls of red substance, usually not always precipitated in rain. Upon many occasions, these substances have been absolutely identified as sand from the Sahara. When I first took this matter up, I came across assurance after assurance, so positive to this effect that, had I not been an intermediatist, I'd have looked no further. Samples collected from a rain at Genoa, samples of sand forwarded from the Sahara. Absolute agreement, some writer said, same color, same particles of quartz, even the same shells of diatoms mixed in. Then the chemical analysis. Not a disagreement worth mentioning. Our intermediatist means of expression will be that with proper exclusions after the scientific or theological method, anything can be identified with anything else if all things are only different expressions of an underlying oneness. To many minds, there's a rest and there is satisfaction in that expression, absolutely identified. Absoluteness, or the illusion of it, the universal quest. If chemists have identified substances that have fallen in Europe as sand from African deserts, swept up in African whirlwinds, that's assuasive to all the irritations that occur to those cloistered minds that must repose in the concept of a snug, isolated little world, free from contact with cosmic wickedness, safe from stellar guile undisturbed by interplanetary prowlings and invasions. The only trouble is that a chemist's analysis, which seems so final and authoritative to some minds, is no more nearly absolute than as identification by a child or description by an imbecile. I take some of that back. I accept that the approximation is higher, but that it's based upon delusion because there is no definitiveness, no homogeneity, no stability, only different stages, somewhere between them and indefiniteness, heterogeneity and instability. There are no chemical elements. It seems acceptable that Ramsey and others have settled that. The chemical elements are only another disappointment in the quest of the positive as the definite, the homogenous and the stable. If there were real elements, there could be a real science of chemistry. Upon November 12th and 13th, 1902, occurred the greatest fall of matter in the history of Australia. Upon the 14th of November, it rained mud in Tasmania. It was, of course, attributed to Australian whirlwinds. But according to the monthly weather review, in 1932, 365, there was a haze all the way to the Philippines, also as far as Hong Kong. It may be that this phenomenon had no special relation with the even more tremendous fall of matter that occurred in Europe, February 1903. For several days, the south of England was a dumping ground from somewhere. If you'd like to have a chemist's opinion, even though it's only a chemist's opinion, see the report of the meeting of the Chemical Society of London, April 2nd, 1903. Mr. E. G. Clayton read a paper upon some of the substance that had fallen from the sky, collected by him. The Sahara explanation applies mostly to falls that occur in southern Europe. Farther away, the conventionalists are a little uneasy. For instance, the editor of the monthly weather review, 29-121, says of a red rain that fell near the coast of Newfoundland early in 1890, it would be remarkable if this was Sahara dust. Mr. Clayton said that the matter examined by him was merely wind-borne dust from the roads and lanes of Wessex. This opinion is typical of all scientific opinion or theological opinion or feminine opinion, all very well except for what it disregards. The most charitable thing I can think of, because I think it gives us a broader tone to relieve our malices with occasional charities, is that Mr. Clayton had not heard of the astonishing extent of this fall, had covered the Canary Islands on the 19th, for instance. I think, myself, that in 1903 we passed through the remains of a powdered world left over from an ancient interplanetary dispute brooding in space like a red resentment ever since. Or like every other opinion, the notion of dust from Wessex turns into a provincial thing when we look it over. To think is to conceive incompletely because all thought relates only to the local. We metaphysicians, of course, like to have the notion that we think of the unthinkable. As to opinions or pronouncements, I should say, because they always have such an authoritative air of other chemists, there is an analysis in nature, 6854, giving water and organic matter at 9.08%. It's that carrying out of fractions that's so convincing. The substance is identified as sand from the Sahara, the vastness of this fall. In nature, 6865, we are told that it occurred in Ireland too. The Sahara, of course, because prior to February 19th there had been dust storms in the Sahara, disregarding that in that great region there's always in some part of it a dust storm. However, just at present, it does look reasonable the dust had come from Africa via the canaries. The great difficulty that authoritativeness has to contend with is some other authoritativeness. When an infallibility clashes with a pontification, they explain. Nature, March 5th, 1903, another analysis. 36% organic matter. Such disagreements don't look very well, so in Nature, 68109, one of the differing chemists explains. He says that his analysis was of muddy rain, and the other was of sediment of rain. We're quite ready to accept excuses from the most high, though I do wonder whether we're quite so damned as we were if we find ourselves in a gracious and tolerant mood toward the powers that condemn. But the tax that now comes upon our good manners and unwillingness to be too severe. Nature, 68223, another chemist. He says it was 23.49% water and organic matter. He identifies this matter as sand from an African desert, but after deducting organic matter. But you and I could be identified as sand from an African desert after deducting all there is to us except sand. Why can we not accept that this fall was of sand from the Sahara, omitting the obvious objection that in most parts the Sahara is not red at all, but is usually described as dazzling white. The enormousness of it. That a whirlwind might have carried it, but that, in that case it would be no suppositious or doubtfully identified whirlwind, but the greatest atmospheric cataclysm in the history of this earth. Journal Royal Meteorological Society, 3056. That, up to the 27th of February, this fall had continued in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Austria, that in some instances it was not sand or that almost all the matter was organic. That a vessel had reported the fall as occurring in the Atlantic Ocean midway between South Anthem and the Barbados. The calculation is given that in England alone, 10 million tons of matter had fallen. It had fallen in Switzerland, Simon's Meteorological Magazine, March, 1903. It had fallen in Russia, Bulletin Communication Geology, 2248. Not only had a vast quantity of matter fallen several months before in Australia, but it was at this time falling in Australia Victorian naturalist, June, 1903, enormously red mud, 50 tons per square mile. The Wessex Explanation. Or that every explanation is a Wessex explanation. By that I mean an attempt to interpret the enormous in terms of the minute, but then nothing can be finally explained because by truth we mean the universal and that even if we could think as wide as universality, that would not be requital to the cosmic quest which is not for truth, but for the local that is true, not to universalize the local, but to localize the universal or to give to a cosmic cloud absolute interpretation in terms of the little dusty roads and lanes of Wessex. I cannot conceive that this can be done. I think of high approximation. Our intermediateist concept is that because of the continuity of all things which are not separate positive or real things, all pseudo things partake of the undertaking or only different expressions, degrees or aspects of the underlying. So then that a sample from somewhere in anything must correspond with a sample from somewhere in anything else. That by do care in selection and disregard for everything else or the scientific and theological method, the substance that fell February 1903 could be identified with anything or with some part or aspect of anything that could be conceived of. With sand from the Sahara, sand from a barrel of sugar or dust of your great, great grandfather. Different samples are described and listed in the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 3057, or we'll see whether my notion that a chemist could have identified some one of these samples as from anywhere conceivable is extreme or not. Similar to brick dust in one place, buff or light brown in another place, chocolate colored and silky to the touch and slightly iridescent, gray, red rust color, reddish raindrops and gray sand, dirty gray, quite red, yellow brown with a tinge of pink, deep yellow clay color. In nature it is described as of a peculiar yellowish cast in one place, reddish somewhere else and salmon colored in another place or there could be real science if there were really anything to be scientific about. Or the science of chemistry is like a science of sociology prejudiced in advance because only to see is to see with a prejudice setting out to prove that all inhabitants of New York came from Africa. Very easy matter, samples from one part of town disregard for all the rest. There is no science, but Wessex science. According to our acceptance there should be no other but that approximation should be higher that metaphysics is super evil that the scientific spirit is of the cosmic quest. Our notion is that in a real existence such a quasi system of fables as the science of chemistry could not deceive for a moment but that in an existence endeavoring to become real it represents that endeavor and will continue to impose its pseudo-positiveness until it be driven out by a higher approximation to realness that the science of chemistry is as impositive as fortune telling or no. That though it represents a higher approximation to realness than does alchemy for instance and so drove out alchemy it is still somewhere between myth and positiveness. The attempt at realness or to state a real and unmodified fact here is the statement, all red rains are colored sands from the Sahara Desert. My own impositivist acceptances are that some red rains are colored by sands from the Sahara Desert. Some by sands from other terrestrial sources. Some by sands from other worlds or from their deserts also from aerial regions to indefinite or amorphous to be thought of as worlds or planets. That no suppositious whirlwind can account for the hundreds of millions of tons of matter that fell upon Australia, Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean and Europe in 1902 and 1903. That a whirlwind that could do that would not be suppositious. But now we shall cast off some of our wessicality by accepting that there have been falls of red substance other than sand. We regard every science as an expression of the attempt to be real but to be real is to localize the universal or to make some one thing as wide as all things successful accomplishment of which I cannot conceive of. The prime resistance to this endeavor is the refusal of the rest of the universe to be damned, excluded, disregarded to real to receive Christian science treatment by something else so attempting. Although all phenomena are striving for the absolute or if surrendered to and have incorporated themselves in higher attempts simply to be phenomenal or to have seeming in intermediateness is to express relations. A river. It is water expressing the gravitational relation of different levels. The water of the river, expression of chemical relations of hydrogen and oxygen which are not final. A city. Manifestation of commercial and social relations. How could a mountain be without base in a greater body? Storekeeper with 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 city or a river or a mountain or a store. This intermediateness wide attempt by parts to be holes which cannot be realized in our quasi-state if we accept that in it the coexistence of two or more holes 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 it's 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 positive sense they were well justified. But that we've gone on. That this is the 20th century that most of us have grown up so that such sapaphorics 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 only of sand. In my own still immature hereticalness and by heresy or progress I mean very largely of return though with many modifications to the superstitions of the past I think I feel considerable aloofness to the idea of rains of blood. Just at present it is my conservative or timid purpose to express only that there have been red rains that very strongly suggest flood or finely divided animal matter. Debris from interplanetary disasters. Aerial battles. Food supplies from cargoes of super vessels wrecked in interplanetary traffic. There was a red rain in the Mediterranean region March 6th, 1888, 12 days later it fell again. Whatever this substance may have been when burned the odor of animal matter from it was strong and persistent. Astronomy, 1888, 205. But infinite heterogeneity or debris from many different kinds of aerial cargoes there have been red rains that have been colored by neither sand nor animal matter. Annals of philosophy, 16226. That November 2nd, 1819, week before the Black Rain and Earthquake of Canada there fell at Blankenberg Holland a red rain. As to sand, two chemists of Bruges concentrated 144 ounces of the rain to four ounces. No precipitate fell. But the color was so marked that had there been sand it would have been deposited. If the substance had been diluted instead of concentrated experiments were made and various reagents did cast precipitates. But other than sand the chemists concluded that the rainwater contained myriad of cobalt which is not very enlightening. That could be said of many substances carried in vessels upon the Atlantic Ocean. Whatever it may have been in the allows de chemie, 212, 432. Its color is said to have been red violent. For various chemic reactions C. Quarterly Journal Royal Institute, 9202 and Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 2381. Something that fell with dust said to have been meteoric. March 9th, 10th, 11th, 1872 described in the chemical news, 25300 as a peculiar substance consisted of a red iron ochre carbonate of lime and organic matter. Orange red hail, March 14th, 1879 in Tuscany, notes and queries, 9516. Rain of lavender colored substance at Oudon, France, December 19th, 1903. Both in Société Meteorologique de France, 1904, 124. La nature, 1885, 2351, that. According to Professor Schweedhoff, there fell in Russia, June 14th, 1880 red hailstones, also blue hailstones, also gray hailstones. Nature, 34123. A correspondent writes that he had been told of a resident in a small town in Venezuela that there, April 17th, 1886 had fallen hailstones. Some red, some blue, some whitish. Informant said to have been unlikely to have heard of the Russian phenomenon described as an honest, plain countryman. Nature, July 5th, 1877, quotes a Roman correspondent to the London Times who sent a translation from an Italian newspaper that a red rain had fallen in Italy, June 23rd, 1877 containing microscopically small particles of sand. Or, according to our acceptance, any other story would have been an evil thing in the sociologic sense in Italy in 1877. But the English correspondent from a land where terrifying red rains are uncommon does not feel this necessity. He writes, I am by no means satisfied that the rain was of sand and water. His observations are that drops of this rain left stains such as sandy water could not leave. He notes that when the water evaporated, no sand was left behind. L'Anne scientifique, 1888, 75, that December 13th, 1887, there fell in Cochin, China a substance like blood, somewhat coagulated. Announced to Kimi, 85, 266, that a thick viscous red matter fell at Oom in 1812. We now have a datum with a factor that has been foreshadowed which will recur and recur and recur throughout this book. It is a factor that makes for speculation so revolutionary that it will have to be reinforced many times before we can take it into full acceptance. Yearbook of Facts, 1861, 273, quotation from a letter from Professor Campini to Professor Madiuchi, that upon December 28th, 1860 at about 7 a.m. and the Northwestern part of Siena, a reddish rain fell copiously for two hours. A second red shower fell at 11 o'clock. Three days later, the red rain fell again. The next day, another red rain fell. Still more extraordinarily, each fall occurred in exactly the same quarter of the town. End of chapter three. This recording is in the public domain.