The Book of the Damned

That this is the quest; but that it has never been attained; but that Science has acted, ruled, pronounced, and condemned as if it had been attained. What is a house? It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else, if there are no positive differences. A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs' houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos--or a shell is a house to a hermit crab--or was to the mollusk that made it--or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the seashore are seen to be continuous. So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance. It isn't anything, as positively distinguished from heat or magnetism or life. Metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to define life. They have failed, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to define: there is no phenomenon of life that is not, to some degree, manifest in chemism, magnetism, astronomic motions. White coral islands in a dark blue sea. Their seeming of distinctness: the seeming of individuality, or of positive difference one from another--but all are only projections from the same sea bottom. The difference between sea and land is not positive. In all water there is some earth: in all earth there is some water.