BOOK OF THE DAMNED 237 



for every one of our expressions there are irreconcilables somewhere 

 that final utterance would include all things. However, of such is 

 the gossip of angels. The final is unutterable in quasi-existence, 

 where to think is to include butfklso to exclude, or be not final. If 

 we admit that for every opinion we have expressed, there must 

 somewhere be an irreconcilable, we are Intermediatists and not 

 positivists; not even higher positivists. Of course it may be that 

 some day we shall systematize and dogmatize and refuse to think 

 of anything that we may be accused of disregarding, and believe 

 instead of merely accepting: then, if we could have a wider system, 

 which would acknowledge no irreconcilables we'd be higher posi- 

 tivists. So long as we only accept, we are not higher positivists, 

 but our feeling is that the New Dominant, even though we have 

 thought of it only as another enslavement, will be the nucleus for 

 higher positivism and that it will be the means of elevating into 

 infinitude a new batch of fixed stars until, as a recruiting instru- 

 ment, it, too, will play out, and will give way to some new medium 

 for generating absoluteness. It is our acceptance that all astron- 

 omers of to-day have lost their souls, or, rather, all chance of at- 

 taining Entity, but that Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and 

 Newton, and, conceivably, Leverrier are now fixed stars. Some day 

 I shall attempt to identify them. In all this, I think we're quite a 

 Moses. We point out the Promised Land, but, unless we be cured 

 of our Intermediatism, will never be reported in Monthly Notices, 

 ourself. 



In our acceptance, Dominants, in their succession, displace pre- 

 ceding Dominants not only because they are more nearly positive, 

 but because the old Dominants, as recruiting mediums, play out. 

 Our expression is that the New Dominant, of Wider Inclusions, is 

 now manifesting throughout the world, and that the old Exclusion- 

 ism is everywhere breaking down. In physics Exclusionism is break- 

 ing down by its own researches in radium, for instance, and in its 

 speculations upon electrons, or its merging away into metaphysics, 

 and by the desertion that has been going on for many years, by 

 such men as Gurney, Crookes, Wallace, Flammarion, Lodge, to 

 formerly disregarded phenomena no longer called "spiritualism" 

 but now "psychic research." Biology is in chaos: conventional Dar- 

 winites mixed up with mutationists and orthogenesists and follow- 

 ers of Wisemann, who take from Darwinism one of its pseudo-bases, 

 and nevertheless try to reconcile their heresies with orthodoxy. The 

 painters are metaphysicians and psychologists. The breaking down 



