34 BOOK OF THE DAMNED . 



sand forwarded from the Sahara "absolute agreement" some writers 

 said: same color, same particles of quartz, even the same shells of 

 diatoms mixed in. Then the chemical analyses: 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 ex- 

 pressions of an underlying oneness. 



To many minds there's rest and there's satisfaction in that ex- 

 pression, "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 wickednesses, 

 safe from stellar guile, undisturbed by inter-planetary 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 is identification by a child or description by an im- 

 becile 



I take some of that back: I accept that the approximation is 

 higher 



But that it's based upon delusion, because there is no definiteness, 

 no homogeneity, no stability, only different stages somewhere be- 

 tween them and indefiniteness, heterogeneity, and instability. There 

 are no chemical elements. It seems acceptable that Ramsay and 

 others have settled that. The chemical elements are only another 

 disappointment in the quest for the positive, as the definite, the 

 homogeneous, and the stable. If there were real elements, there 

 could be a real science of chemistry. 



Upon Nov. 12 and 13, 1902, occurred the greatest fall of matter 

 in the history of Australia. Upon the i4th of November, it "rained 

 mud," in Tasmania. It was of course attributed to Australian 

 whirlwinds, but, according to the Monthly Weather Review, 32- 

 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 especial rela- 

 tion 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 



