The Book of the Damned

With dark bodies that are probably external to our own solar system, I have, in the provincialism that no one can escape, not much concern. Dark bodies afloat in outer space would have been damned a few years ago, but now they're sanctioned by Prof. Barnard--and, if he says they're all right, you may think of them without the fear of doing something wrong or ridiculous--the close kinship we note so often between the evil and the absurd--I suppose by the ridiculous I mean the froth of evil. The dark companion of Algol, for instance. Though that's a clear case of celestial miscegenation, the purists, or positivists, admit that's so. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 1915-394, Prof. Barnard writes of an object--he calls it an "object"--in Cephus. His idea is that there are dark, opaque bodies outside this solar system. But in the Astrophysical Journal, 1916-1, he modifies into regarding them as "dark nebulae." That's not so interesting. We accept that Venus, for instance, has often been visited by other worlds, or by super-constructions, from which come ciders and coke and coal; that sometimes these things have reflected light and have been seen from this earth--by professional astronomers. It will be noted that throughout this chapter our data are accursed Brahmins--as, by hypnosis and inertia, we keep on and keep on saying, just as a good many of the scientists of the 19th century kept on and kept on admitting the power of the system that preceded them--or Continuity would be smashed. There's a big chance here for us to be instantaneously translated to the Positive Absolute--oh, well--