CHAPTER X 



EARLY explorers have Florida mixed up with Newfoundland. 

 But the confusion is worse than that still earlier. It arises 

 from simplicity. Very early explorers think that all land westward 

 is one land, India: awareness of other lands as well as India comes 

 as a slow process. I do not now think of things arriving upon this 

 earth from some especial other world. That was my notion when I 

 started to collect our data. Or, as is a commonplace of observation, 

 all intellection begins with the illusion of homogeneity. It's one of 

 Spencer's data: we see homogeneousness in all things distant, or 

 with which we have small acquaintance. Advance from the rela- 

 tively homogeneous to the relatively heterogeneous is Spencerian 

 Philosophy like everything else, so-called: not that it was really 

 Spencer's discovery, but was taken from von Baer, who, in turn, 

 was continuous with preceding evolutionary speculation. Our own 

 expression is that all things are acting to advance to the homo- 

 geneous, or are trying to localize Homogeneousness. Homogeneous- 

 ness is an aspect of the Universal, wherein it is a state that does not 

 merge away into something else. We regard homogeneousness as 

 an aspect of positiveness, but it is our acceptance that infinite frus- 

 trations of attempts to positivize manifest themselves in infinite 

 heterogeneity: so that though things try to localize homogeneous- 

 ness they end up in heterogeneity so great that it amounts to infinite 

 dispersion or indistinguishability. 



So all concepts are little attempted positivenesses, but soon have 

 to give in to compromise, modification, nullification, merging away 

 into indistinguishability unless, here and there, in the world's his- 

 tory, there may have been a super-dogmatist, who, for only an in- 

 finitesimal of time, has been able to hold out against heterogeneity 

 or modification or doubt or "listening to reason," or loss of identity 

 in which case instant translation to heaven or the Positive Ab- 

 solute. 



Odd thing about Spencer is that he never recognized that "homo- 

 geneity," "integration," and "definiteness" are all words for the 

 same state, or the state that we call "positiveness." What we call 



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