The Book of the Damned

And, unless you be polarized by the New Dominant, which is calling for recognition of multiplicities of external things, as a Dominant, dawning new over Europe in 1492, called for recognition of terrestrial externality to Europe--unless you have this contact with the new, you have no affinity for these data--beans that drop from a magnet--irreconcilables that glide from the mind of a Thomson-- Or my own acceptance that we do not really think at all; that we correlate around super-magnets that I call Dominants--a Spiritual Dominant in one age, and responsively to it up spring monasteries, and the stake and the cross are its symbols: a Materialist Dominant, and up spring laboratories, and microscopes and telescopes and crucibles are its ikons--that we're nothing but iron filings relatively to a succession of magnets that displace preceding magnets. With no soul of your own, and with no soul of my own--except that some day some of us may no longer be Intermediatisms, but may hold out against the cosmos that once upon a time thousands of fishes were cast from one pail of water--we have psycho-valency for these data, if we're obedient slaves to the New Dominant, and repulsion to them, if we're mere correlates to the Old Dominant. I'm a soulless and selfless correlate to the New Dominant, myself: I see what I have to see. The only inducement I can hold out, in my attempt to rake up disciples, is that some day the New will be fashionable: the new correlates will sneer at the old correlates. After all, there is some inducement to that--and I'm not altogether sure it's desirable to end up as a fixed star.