That, if it does so act, it falsely and arbitrarily and futilely and
disastrously acts, just as would one who draws a circle in the sea,
including a few waves, saying that the other waves, with which the
included are continuous, are positively different, and stakes his life
upon maintaining that the admitted and the damned are positively
different.
Our expression is that our whole existence is animation of the local by
an ideal that is realizable only in the universal:
That, if all exclusions are false, because always are included and
excluded continuous: that if all seeming of existence perceptible to us
is the product of exclusion, there is nothing that is perceptible to us
that really is: that only the universal can really be.
Our especial interest is in modern science as a manifestation of this
one ideal or purpose or process:
That it has falsely excluded, because there are no positive standards to
judge by: that it has excluded things that, by its own pseudo-standards,
have as much right to come in as have the chosen.
* * * * *
Our general expression:
That the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a
flow, or a current, or an attempt, from negativeness to positiveness,
and is intermediate to both.
By positiveness we mean:
Harmony, equilibrium, order, regularity, stability, consistency, unity,
realness, system, government, organization, liberty, independence, soul,
self, personality, entity, individuality, truth, beauty, justice,
perfection, definiteness--
That all that is called development, progress, or evolution is movement
toward, or attempt toward, this state for which, or for aspects of
which, there are so many names, all of which are summed up in the one
word "positiveness."
At first this summing up may not be very readily acceptable. At first it
may seem that all these words are not synonyms: that "harmony" may mean
"order," but that by "independence," for instance, we do not mean
"truth," or that by "stability" we do not mean "beauty," or "system," or
"justice."
I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, which expresses itself in
astronomic phenomena, and chemic, biologic, psychic, sociologic: that it
is everywhere striving to localize positiveness: that to this attempt in
various fields of phenomena--which are only quasi-different--we give
different names. We speak of the "system" of the planets, and not of
their "government": but in considering a store, for instance, and its
management, we see that the words are interchangeable. It used to be
customary to speak of chemic equilibrium, but not of social equilibrium:
that false demarcation has been broken down. We shall see that by all
these words we mean the same state. As every-day conveniences, or in
terms of common illusions, of course, they are not synonyms. To a child
an earth worm is not an animal. It is to the biologist.
By "beauty," I mean that which seems complete.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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