A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I haveexhumed, will march. You'll read them—or they'll march. Some of themlivid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering,animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giantsthat will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that aretheorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in armwith the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots.Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some areassassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mereshadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and thepedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and theinsincere, the profound and the puerile.
A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.
The ultra-respectable, but the condemned, anyway.
The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the aggregatevoice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit of the whole is processional.
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, isDogmatic Science.
But they'll march.
The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, andthe clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with theirbuffooneries—but the solidity of the procession as a whole: theimpressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on andkeep on and keep on coming.
The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy,but arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep onpassing.
So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.
But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be the excluding.
Or everything that is, won't be.
And everything that isn't, will be—
But, of course, will be that which won't be—
It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and thatwhich won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called"existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won'tstay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference isthat some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Thenthe sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence theycame.
It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except byattempting to exclude something else: that that which is commonly called"being" is a state that is wrought more or less definitelyproportionately to the appearance of positive difference between thatwhich is included and that which is excluded.
But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: thatall things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouseand a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week,or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese.I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions ofan all-inclusive cheese.
Or that red is not positively different from yellow: is only anotherdegree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of: that red and yelloware continuous, or that they merge in orange.
So then that, if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, Scienceshould attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things asveritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, thedemarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things coloredorange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides o