220 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



the almanac said, but we should, none of us, have liked to swear to 

 the fact." 



This eclipse had been set down at nine-tenths of totality. The 

 sky was overcast at the time. 



So it is not only that many eclipses unrecognized by astronomers 

 as eclipses have occurred, but that intermediatism, or impositivism, 

 breaks into their own seemingly regularized eclipses. 



Our data of unregularized eclipses, as profound as those that are 

 conventionally or officially? recognized, that have occurred rela- 

 tively to this earth: 



In* Notes and Queries there are several allusions to intense dark- 

 nesses that have occurred upon this earth, quite as eclipses occur, 

 but that are not referable to any known eclipsing body. Of course 

 there is no suggestion here that these darknesses may have been 

 eclipses. My own acceptance is that, if in the nineteenth century 

 any one had uttered such a thought as that, he'd have felt the blight 

 of a Dominant; that Materialistic Science was a jealous god, ex- 

 cluding, as works of the devil, all utterances against the seemingly 

 uniform, regular, periodic; that to defy him would have brought 

 on withering by ridicule shrinking away by publishers con- 

 tempt of friends and family justifiable grounds for divorce that 

 one who would so defy would feel what unbelievers in relics of 

 saints felt in an earlier age; what befell virgins who forgot to keep 

 fires burning, in a still earlier age but that, if he'd almost absolutely 

 hold out, just the same new fixed star reported in Monthly Notices. 

 Altogether, the point in Positivism here is that by Dominants and 

 their correlates, quasi-existence strives for the positive state, aggre- 

 gating, around a nucleus, or dominant, systematized members of a 

 religion, a science, a society but that "individuals" who do not 

 surrender and submerge may of themselves highly approximate to 

 positiveness the fixed, the real, the absolute. 



In Notes and Queries, 2-4-139, there is an account of a darkness 

 in Holland, in the midst of a bright day, so intense and terrifying 

 that many panic-stricken persons lost their lives stumbling into the 

 canals. 



Gentleman's Magazine, 33-414: 



A darkness that came upon London, August 19, 1763, "greater 

 than at the great eclipse of 1748." 



However, our preference is not to go so far back for data. For a 

 list of historic "dark days," see Humboldt, Cosmos, 1-120. 



Monthly Weather Review, March, 1886-79: 



