CHAPTER XII 



A STRONOMY. 



jt\ And a watchman looking at half a dozen lanterns, where 

 a street's been torn up. 



There are gas lights and kerosene lamps and electric lights in the 

 neighborhood: matches flaring, fires in stoves, bonfires, house afire 

 somewhere; lights of automobiles, illuminated signs 



The watchman and his one little system. 



Ethics. 



And some young ladies and the dear old professor of a verjf 

 "select" seminary. 



Drugs and divorce and rape: venereal diseases, drunkenness, 

 murder 



Excluded. 



The prim and the precise, or the exact, the homogeneous, the 

 single, the puritanic, the mathematic, the pure, the perfect. We can 

 have illusion of this state but only by disregarding its infinite 

 denials. It's a drop of milk afloat in acid that's eating it. The po- 

 sitive swamped by the negative. So it is in intermediateness, where 

 only to "be" positive is to generate corresponding and, perhaps, 

 equal negativeness. In our acceptance, it is, in quasi-existence, pre- 

 monitory, or pre-natal, or pre-awakening consciousness of a real 

 existence. 



But this consciousness of realness is the greatest resistance to 

 efforts to realize or to become real because it is feeling that realness 

 has been attained. Our antagonism is not to Science, but to the 

 attitude of the sciences that they have finally realized; or to be- 

 lief, instead of acceptance; to the insufficiency, which, as we have 

 seen over and over, amounts to paltriness and puerility, of scientific 

 dogmas and standards. Or, if several persons start out to Chicago, 

 and get to Buffalo, and one be under the delusion that Buffalo is 

 Chicago, that one will be a resistance to the progress of the others. 



So astronomy and its seemingly exact, little system 



But data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, 

 and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; 



