It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by
attempting to exclude something else: that that which is commonly called
"being" is a state that is wrought more or less definitely
proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that
which is included and that which is excluded.
But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that
all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse
and 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 of
an all-inclusive cheese.
Or that red is not positively different from yellow: is only another
degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of: that red and yellow
are continuous, or that they merge in orange.
So then that, if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, Science
should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things as
veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the
demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored
orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the
attempted borderline.
As we go along, we shall be impressed with this:
That no basis for classification, or inclusion and exclusion, more
reasonable than that of redness and yellowness has ever been conceived
of.
Science has, by appeal to various bases, included a multitude of data.
Had it not done so, there would be nothing with which to seem to be.
Science has, by appeal to various bases, excluded a multitude of data.
Then, if redness is continuous with yellowness: if every basis of
admission is continuous with every basis of exclusion, Science must have
excluded some things that are continuous with the accepted. In redness
and yellowness, which merge in orangeness, we typify all tests, all
standards, all means of forming an opinion--
Or that any positive opinion upon any subject is illusion built upon the
fallacy that there are positive differences to judge by--
That the quest of all intellection has been for something--a fact, a
basis, a generalization, law, formula, a major premise that is positive:
that the best that has ever been done has been to say that some things
are self-evident--whereas, by evidence we mean the support of something
else--
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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