The Book of the Damned | Page 3

truth, beauty, justice, perfection,
definiteness --
That all that is called development, progress, or evolution is movement
toward, or attempt toward, this state for which, or for aspects of which,
there are so many names, all of which are summed up in the one word

"positiveness."
At first this summing up may not be very readily acceptable. At first it
may seem that all these words are not synonyms: that "harmony" may
mean "order," but that by "independence," for instance, we do not mean
"truth," or that by "stability" we do not mean "beauty," or "system," or
"justice."
I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, which expresses itself in
astronomic phenomena, and chemic, biologic, psychic, sociologic: that
it is everywhere striving to localize positiveness: that to this attempt in
various fields of phenomena--which are only quasi-different--we give
different names. We speak of the "system" of the planets, and not of
their "government": but in considering a store, for instance, and its
management, we see that the words are interchangeable. It used to be
customary to speak of chemic equilibrium, but not of social equilibrium:
that false demarcation has been broken down. We shall see that by all
these words we mean the same state. As every-day conveniences, or in
terms of common illusions, of course, they are not synonyms. To a
child an earth worm is not an animal. It is to a biologist.
By "beauty," I mean that which seems complete.
Obversely, that the incomplete, or the mutilated, is the ugly.
Venus de Milo.
To a child she is ugly.
When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though,
by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.
A hand thought of only as a hand, may seem beautiful.
Found on a battlefield--obviously a part--not beautiful.
But everything in our experience is only a part of something else that in
turn is only a part of still something else--or that there is nothing

beautiful in our experience: only appearances that are intermediate to
beauty and ugliness--that only universality is complete: that only the
complete is the beautiful: that every attempt to achieve beauty is an
attempt to give the local the attribute of the universal.
By stability, we mean the immovable and the unaffected. But all
seeming things are only reactions to something else. Stability, too, then,
can be only the universal, or that besides which there is nothing else.
Though some things seem to have--or have--higher approximations to
stability than have others, there are, in our experience, only various
degrees of intermediateness to stability and instability. Every man, then,
who works for stability under its various names of "permanency,"
"survival," "duration," is striving to localize in something the state that
is realizable only in the universal.
By independence, entity, and individuality, I can mean only that
besides which there is nothing else, if given only two things, they must
be continuous and mutually affective, if everything is only a reaction to
something else, and any two things would be destructive of each other's
independence, entity, or individuality.
All attempted organizations and systems and consistencies, some
approximating far higher than others, but all only intermediate to Order
and Disorder, fail eventually because of their relations with outside
forces. All are attempted completenesses. If to all local phenomena
there are always outside forces, these attempts, too, are realizable only
in the state of completeness, or that to which there are no outside
forces.
Or that all these words are synonyms, all meaning the state that we call
the positive state --
That our whole "existence" is a striving for the positive state.
The amazing paradox of it all:
That all things are trying to become the universal by excluding other
things.

That there is only this one process, and that it does animate all
expressions, in all fields of phenomena, of that which we think of as
one inter-continuous nexus:
The religious and their idea or ideal of the soul. They mean distinct,
stable entity, or a state that is independent, and not mere flux of
vibrations or complex of reactions to environment, continuous with
environment, merging away with an infinitude of other interdependent
complexes.
But the only thing that would not merge away into something else
would be that besides which there is nothing else.
That Truth is only another name for the positive state, or that the quest
for Truth, is the attempt to achieve positiveness:
Scientists who have thought that they were seeking Truth, but who
were trying to find out astronomic, or chemic, or biologic truths. But
Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it,
nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive,
the complete --
By Truth I mean the Universal.
So chemists have sought the true, or the real,