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The Book of the Damned
·
Charles Fort
312
Or
that
all
things--in
our
intermediate
state--are
phantoms
in
a
super-mind
in
a
dreaming
state--but
striving
to
awaken
to
realness.
Though
in
some
respects
our
own
Intermediatism
is
unsatisfactory,
our
underlying
feeling
is--
That
in
a
dreaming
mind
awakening
is
accelerated--if
phantoms
in
that
mind
know
that
they're
only
phantoms
in
a
dream.
Of
course,
they
too
are
quasi,
or--but
in
a
relative
sense--they
have
an
essence
of
what
is
called
realness.
They
are
derived
from
experience
or
from
senes-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
interpretations
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
scaffolding,
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
Intermediatism
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
immaterial
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
Intermediatism.
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