I 3 2 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



well as they do now. But there are hundreds of planetary bodies 

 now known that were then not known. So a few hundred worlds 

 more of ours won't make any difference. La Place knew of about 

 only thirty bodies in this solar system: about six hundred are recog- 

 nized now 



What are the discoveries of geology and biology to a theologian? 



His formulas still work out as well as they ever did. 



If the Law of Gravitation could be stated as a real utterance, it 

 might be a real resistance to us. But we are told only that gravita- 

 tion is gravitation. Of course to an intermediatist, nothing can be 

 defined except in terms of itself but even the orthodox, in what 

 seems to me to be the innate premonitions of realness, not founded 

 upon experience, agree that to define a thing in terms of itself is not 

 real definition. It is said that by gravitation is meant the attrac- 

 tion of all things proportionately to mass and inversely as the 

 square of the distance. Mass would mean inter-attraction holding 

 together final particles, if there were final particles. Then, until 

 final particles be discovered, only one term of this expression sur- 

 vives, or mass is attraction. But distance is only extent of mass, 

 unless one holds out for absolute vacuum among planets, a position 

 against which we could bring a host of data. But there is no possi- 

 ble means of expressing that gravitation is anything other than at- 

 traction. So there is nothing to resist us but such a phantom as 

 that gravitation is the gravitation of all gravitations proportionately 

 to gravitation and inversely as the square of gravitation. In a 

 quasi-existence, nothing more sensible than this can be said upon 

 any so-called subject perhaps there are higher approximations to 

 ultimate sensibleness. 



Nevertheless we seem to have a feeling that with the System 

 against us we have a kind of resistance here. We'd have felt so 

 formerly, at any rate: I think the Dr. Grays and Prof. Hitchcocks 

 have modified our trustfulness toward indistinguishability. As to 

 the perfection of this System that quasi-opposes us and the in- 

 fallibility of its mathematics as if there could be real mathematics 

 in a mode cf seeming where twice two are not four we've been told 

 over and over of their vindication in the discovery of Neptune. 



I'm afraid that the course we're taking will turn out like every 

 other development. We began humbly, admitting that we're of the 



damned 



But our eyebrows 



Just a faint flicker in them, or in one of them, every time we 



