BOOK OF THE DAMNED 39 



Manifestation of commercial and social relations. 



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



Storekeeper live without customers? 



The prime resistance to the positivist attempt by Science is its re- 

 lations with other phenomena, or that it only expresses those rela- 

 tions in the first place. Or that a Science can have seeming, or survive 

 in Intermediateness, as something pure, isolated, positively different, 

 no more than could a river or a city or a mountain or a store. 



This Intermediateness-wide attempt by parts to be wholes which 

 can not be realized in our quasi-state, if we accept that in it the 

 co-existence of two or more wholes or universals is impossible high 

 approximation to which, however, may be thinkable 



Scientists and their dream of "pure science." 



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



It is our notion that if they could almost realize, that would be 

 almost realness: that they would instantly be translated into real 

 existence. Such thinkers are good positivists, but they are evil in 

 an economic and sociologic sense, if, in that sense, nothing has 

 justification for being, unless it serve, or function for, or express 

 the relations, of some higher aggregate. So Science functions for 

 and serves society at large, and would, from society at large, receive 

 no support, unless it did so divert itself or dissipate and prostitute 

 itself. It seems that by prostitution I mean usefulness. 



There have been red rains that, in the middle ages, were called 

 "rains of blood." Such rains terrified many persons, and were so 

 unsettling to large populations, that Science, in its sociologic rela- 

 tions, 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 prosti- 

 tutional in the positivist sense, that, in the sociologic sense, they 

 were well justified; 



But that we've gone on: that this is the twentieth century; that 

 most of us have grown up so that such soporifics of the past are no 

 longer necessary: 



That if gushes of blood should fall from the sky upon New York 

 City, business would go on as usual. 



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



