The Book of the Damned

But single instances--so an observation by Scott, in the Antarctic. The force of this datum lies in my own acceptance, based upon especially looking up this point, that an eclipse nine-tenths of totality has great effect, even though the sky be clouded. Scott (Voyage of the Discovery, vol. ii, p. 215): "There may have been an eclipse of the sun, Sept. 21, 1903, as the almanac said, but we should, none of us, have liked to swear to the fact." This eclipse had been set down at nine-tenths of totality. The sky was overcast at the time. So it is not only that many eclipses unrecognized by astronomers as eclipses have occurred, but that intermediatism, or impositivism, breaks into their own seemingly regularized eclipses. Our data of unregularized eclipses, as profound as those that are conventionally--or officially?--recognized, that have occurred relatively to this earth: In Notes and Queries there are several allusions to intense darknesses that have occurred upon this earth, quite as eclipses occur, but that are not referable to any known eclipsing body. Of course there is no suggestion here that these darknesses may have been eclipses. My own acceptance is that if in the nineteenth century anyone had uttered such a thought as that, he'd have felt the blight of a Dominant; that Materialistic Science was a jealous god, excluding, as works of the devil, all utterances against the seemingly uniform, regular, periodic; that to defy him would have brought on--withering by ridicule--shrinking away by publishers--contempt of friends and family--justifiable grounds for divorce--that one who would so defy would feel what unbelievers in relics of saints felt in an earlier age; what befell virgins who forgot to keep fires burning, in a still earlier age--but that, if he'd almost absolutely hold out, just the same--new fixed star reported in Monthly Notices. Altogether, the point in Positivism here is that by Dominants and their correlates, quasi-existence strives for the positive state, aggregating, around a nucleus, or dominant, systematized members of a religion, a science, a society--but that "individuals" who do not surrender and submerge may of themselves highly approximate to positiveness--the fixed, the real, the absolute.