The Book of the Damned

A crystal lens had been found in the treasure-house at Nineveh. In many of the temples and treasure houses of old civilizations upon this earth have been preserved things that have fallen from the sky--or meteorites. Again we have a Brahmin. This thing is buried alive in the heart of propriety: it is in the British Museum. Carpenter, in The Microscope and Its Revelations, gives two drawings of it. Carpenter argues that it is impossible to accept that optical lenses had ever been made by the ancients. Never occurred to him--someone a million miles or so up in the air--looking through his telescope--lens drops out. This does not appeal to Carpenter: he says that this object must have been an ornament. According to Brewster, it was not an ornament, but "a true optical lens." In that case, in ruins of an old civilization upon this earth, has been found an accursed thing that was, acceptably, not a product of any old civilization indigenous to this earth. 10 Early explorers have Florida mixed up with Newfoundland. But the confusion is worse than that still earlier. It arises from simplicity. Very early explorers think that all land westward is one land, India: awareness of other lands as well as India comes as a slow process. I do not now think of things arriving upon this earth from some especial other world. That was my notion when I started to collect our data. Or, as is a commonplace of observation, all intellection begins with the illusion of homogeneity. It's one of Spencer's data: we see homogeneousness in all things distant, or with which we have small acquaintance. Advance from the relatively homogeneous to the relatively heterogeneous is Spencerian Philosophy--like everything else, so-called: not that it was really Spencer's discovery, but was taken from von Baer, who, in turn, was continuous with preceding evolutionary speculation. Our own expression is that all things are acting to advance to the homogeneous, or are trying to localize Homogeneousness. Homogeneousness is an aspect of the Universal, wherein it is a state that does not merge away into something else. We regard homogeneousness as an aspect of positiveness, but it is our acceptance that infinite frustrations of attempts to positivize manifest themselves in infinite heterogeneity: so that though things try to localize homogeneousness they end up in heterogeneity so great that it amounts to infinite dispersion or indistinguishability.