BOOK OF THE DAMNED 17 



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 is it 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 unreal- 

 ness: 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 intermediat- 

 ists that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phe- 

 nomena 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 omit- 

 ted to make clear that Realness is an aspect of the positive state. 



By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into some- 

 thing 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 

 notives do not merge away into cowardice. But, if in Continuity, 



