76 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



as the Scientific American Supplement would say mysterious dis- 

 appearance of a sea captain, his family, and the crew 



Of positivists, by the route of Abrupt Transition, I think that 

 Manet was notable but that his approximation was held down by 

 his intense relativity to the public or that it is quite as impositive 

 to flout and insult and defy as it is to crawl and placate. Of course, 

 Manet began with continuity with Courbet and others, and then, 

 between him and Monet there were mutual influences but the 

 spirit of abrupt difference is the spirit of positivism, and Manet's 

 stand was against the dictum that all lights and shades must merge 

 away suavely into one another and prepare for one another. So a 

 biologist like De Vries represents positivism, or the breaking of 

 Continuity, by trying to conceive of evolution by mutation against 

 the dogma of indistinguishable gradations by "minute variations." 

 A Copernicus conceives of helio-centricity. Continuity is against 

 him. He is not permitted to break abruptly with the past. He 

 is permitted to publish his work, but only as "an interesting 

 hypothesis." 



Continuity and that all fhat we call evolution or progress is 

 attempt to break away from it 



That our whole solar system was at one time attempt by planets 

 to break away from a parental nexus and set up as individualities, 

 and, failing, move in quasi-regular orbits that are expressions of 

 relations with the sun and with one another, all having surrendered, 

 being now quasi-incorporated in a higher approximation to system; 



Intermediateness in its mineralogic aspect of positivism or Iron 

 that strove to break away from Sulphur and Oxygen, and be real, 

 homogeneous Iron failing, inasmuch as elemental iron exists only 

 in text-book chemistry; 



Intermediateness in its biologic aspect of positivism or the 

 wild, fantastic, grotesque, monstrous things it conceived of, some- 

 times in a frenzy of effort to break away abruptly from all preceding 

 types but failing, in the giraffe-effort, for instance, or only carica- 

 turing an antelope 



All things break one relation only by the establishing of some 

 other relation 



All things cut an umbilical cord only to clutch a breast. 



So the fight of the exclusionists to maintain the traditional or to 

 prevent abrupt transition from the quasi-established fighting so" 

 that here, more than a century after meteorites were included, no 

 other notable inclusion has been made, except that of cosmic dust, 



