BOOK OF THE DAMNED 247 



course, they too are quasi, or but in a relative sense they have 

 an essence of what is called realness. They are derived from expe- 

 rience or from sense-relations, even though grotesque distortions. 

 It seems acceptable that a table that is seen when one is awake 

 is more nearly real than a dreamed table, which, with fifteen or 

 twenty legs, chases one. 



So now, in the twentieth century, with a change of terms, and a 

 change in underlying consciousness, our attitude toward the New 

 Dominant is the attitude of the scientists of the nineteenth century 

 to the Old Dominant. We do not insist that our data and interpre- 

 tations shall be as shocking, grotesque, evil, ridiculous, childish, 

 insincere, laughable, ignorant to nineteenth-centuryites as were their 

 data and interpretations to the medieval-minded. We ask only 

 whether data and interpretations correlate. If they do, they are 

 acceptable, perhaps only for a short time, or as nuclei, or scaffold- 

 ing, or preliminary sketches, or as gropings and tentativenesses. 

 Later, of course, when we cool off and harden and radiate into 

 space most of our present mobility, which expresses in modesty 

 and plasticity, we shall acknowledge no scaffoldings, gropings or 

 tentativenesses, but think we utter absolute facts. A point in Inter- 

 mediatism here is opposed to most current speculations upon 

 Development. Usually one thinks of the spiritual as higher than 

 the material, but, in our acceptance, quasi-existence is a means by 

 which the absolutely immaterial materializes absolutely, and, 

 being intermediate, is a state in which nothing is finally either imma- 

 terial or material, all objects, substances, thoughts, occupying some 

 grade of approximation one way or the other. Final solidification 

 of the ethereal is, to us, the goal of cosmic ambition. Positivism is 

 Puritanism. Heat is Evil. Final Good is Absolute Frigidity. An 

 Arctic winter is very beautiful, but I think that an interest in 

 monkeys chattering in palm trees accounts for our own Interme- 

 diatism. 



Visitors. 



Our confusion here, out of which we are attempting to make 

 quasi-order is as great as it has been throughout this book, because 

 we have not the positivist's delusion of homogeneity. A positivist 

 would gather all data that seem to relate to one kind of visitors 

 and coldly disregard all other data. I think of as many different 

 kinds of visitors to this earth as there are visitors to New York, 

 to a jail, to a church some persons go to church to pick pockets, 

 for instance. 



