It was about as terrifying as the scratch of a match on the seat of some breeches half a mile away.
It was not on time.
Though I have heard that a faint nebulosity, which I did not see, myself, though I looked when I was told to look, was seen in the sky, it appeared several days after the time predicted.
A hypnotized host of imbeciles of us: told to look up at the sky: we did--like a lot of pointers hypnotized by a partridge.
The effect:
Almost everybody now swears that he saw Halley"s comet, and that it was a glorious spectacle.
An interesting circ.u.mstance here is that seemingly we are trying to discredit astronomers because astronomers oppose us--that"s not my impression. We shall be in the Brahmin caste of the h.e.l.l of the Baptists. Almost all our data, in some regiments of this procession, are observations by astronomers, few of them mere amateur astronomers. It is the System that opposes us. It is the System that is suppressing astronomers. I think we pity them in their captivity. Ours is not malice--in a positive sense. It"s chivalry--somewhat. Unhappy astronomers looking out from high towers in which they are imprisoned--we appear upon the horizon.
But, as I have said, our data do not relate to some especial other world. I mean very much what a savage upon an ocean island might vaguely think of in his speculations--not upon some other land, but complexes of continents and their phenomena: cities, factories in cities, means of communication--
Now all the other savages would know of a few vessels sailing in their regular routes, pa.s.sing this island in regularized periodicities. The tendency in these minds would be expression of the universal tendency toward positivism--or Completeness--or conviction that these few regularized vessels const.i.tuted all. Now I think of some especial savage who suspects otherwise--because he"s very backward and unimaginative and insensible to the beautiful ideals of the others: not piously occupied, like the others, in bowing before impressive-looking sticks of wood; dishonestly taking time for his speculations, while the others are patriotically witch-finding. So the other higher and n.o.bler savages know about the few regularized vessels: know when to expect them; have their periodicities all worked out; just about when vessels will pa.s.s, or eclipse each other--explaining that all vagaries were due to atmospheric conditions.
They"d come out strong in explaining.
You can"t read a book upon savages without noting what resolute explainers they are.
They"d say that all this mechanism was founded upon the mutual attraction of the vessels--deduced from the fall of a monkey from a palm tree--or, if not that, that devils were pushing the vessels--something of the kind.
Storms.
Debris, not from these vessels, cast up by the waves.
Disregarded.
How can one think of something and something else, too?
I"m in the state of mind of a savage who might find upon a sh.o.r.e, washed up by the same storm, buoyant parts of a piano and a paddle that was carved by cruder hands than his own: something light and summery from India, and a fur overcoat from Russia--or all science, though approximating wider and wider, is attempt to conceive of India in terms of an ocean island, and of Russia in terms of India so interpreted.
Though I am trying to think of Russia and India in world-wide terms, I cannot think that that, or the universalizing of the local, is cosmic purpose. The higher idealist is the positivist who tries to localize the universal, and is in accord with cosmic purpose: the super-dogmatist of a local savage who can hold out, without a flurry of doubt, that a piano washed up on a beach is the trunk of a palm tree that a shark has bitten, leaving his teeth in it. So we fear for the soul of Dr. Gray, because he did not devote his whole life to that one stand that, whether possible or inconceivable, thousands of fishes had been cast from one bucket.
So, unfortunately for myself, if salvation be desirable, I look out widely but amorphously, indefinitely and heterogeneously. If I say I conceive of another world that is now in secret communication with certain esoteric inhabitants of this earth, I say I conceive of still other worlds that are trying to establish communication with all the inhabitants of this earth. I fit my notions to the data I find. That is supposed to be the right and logical and scientific thing to do; but it is no way to approximate to form, system, organization. Then I think I conceive of other worlds and vast structures that pa.s.s us by, within a few miles, without the slightest desire to communicate, quite as tramp vessels pa.s.s many islands without particularizing one from another. Then I think I have data of a vast construction that has often come to this earth, dipped into an ocean, submerged there a while, then going away--Why? I"m not absolutely sure. How would an Eskimo explain a vessel, sending ash.o.r.e for coal, which is plentiful upon some Arctic beaches, though of unknown use to the natives, then sailing away, with no interest in the natives?
A great difficulty in trying to understand vast constructions that show no interest in us:
The notion that we must be interesting.
I accept that, though we"re usually avoided, probably for moral reasons, sometimes this earth has been visited by explorers. I think that the notion that there have been extra-mundane visitors to China, within what we call the historic period, will be only ordinarily absurd, when we come to that datum.
I accept that some of the other worlds are of conditions very similar to our own. I think of others that are very different--so that visitors from them could not live here--without artificial adaptations.
How some of them could breathe our attenuated air, if they came from a gelatinous atmosphere--
Masks.
The masks that have been found in ancient deposits.
Most of them are of stone, and are said to have been ceremonial regalia of savages--
But the mask that was found in Sullivan County, Missouri, in 1879 (_American Antiquarian_, 3-336).
It is made of iron and silver.
11
One of the d.a.m.nedest in our whole saturnalia of the accursed--
Because it is hopeless to try to shake off an excommunication only by saying that we"re d.a.m.ned by blacker things than ourselves; and that the d.a.m.ned are those who admit they"re of the d.a.m.ned. Inertia and hypnosis are too strong for us. We say that: then we go right on admitting we"re of the d.a.m.ned. It is only by being more nearly real that we can sweep away the quasi-things that oppose us. Of course, as a whole, we have considerable amorphousness, but we are thinking now of "individual"
acceptances. Wideness is an aspect of Universalness or Realness. If our syntheses disregard fewer data than do opposing syntheses--which are often not syntheses at all, but mere consideration of some one circ.u.mstance--less widely synthetic things fade away before us. Harmony is an aspect of the Universal, by which we mean Realness. If we approximate more highly to harmony among the parts of an expression and to all available circ.u.mstances of an occurrence, the self-contradictors turn hazy. Solidity is an aspect of realness. We pile them up, and we pile them up, or they pa.s.s and pa.s.s and pa.s.s: things that bulk large as they march by, supporting and solidifying one another--
And still, and for regiments to come, hypnosis and inertia rule us--
One of the d.a.m.nedest of our data:
In the _Scientific American_, Sept. 10, 1910, Charles F. Holder writes:
"Many years ago, a strange stone resembling a meteorite, fell into the Valley of the Yaqui, Mexico, and the sensational story went from one end to the other of the country that a stone bearing human inscriptions had descended to the earth."
The bewildering observation here is Mr. Holder"s a.s.sertion that this stone did fall. It seems to me that he must mean that it fell by dislodgment from a mountainside into a valley--but we shall see that it was such a marked stone that very unlikely would it have been unknown to dwellers in a valley, if it had been reposing upon a mountainside above them. It may have been carelessness: intent may have been to say that a sensational story of a strange stone said to have fallen, etc.
This stone was reported by Major Frederick Burnham, of the British Army.
Later Major Burnham revisited it, and Mr. Holder accompanied him, their purpose to decipher the inscriptions upon it, if possible.
"This stone was a brown, igneous rock, its longest axis about eight feet, and on the eastern face, which had an angle of about forty-five degrees, was the deep-cut inscription."
Mr. Holder says that he recognized familiar Mayan symbols in the inscription. His method was the usual method by which anything can be "identified" as anything else: that is to pick out whatever is agreeable and disregard the rest. He says that he has demonstrated that most of the symbols are Mayan. One of our intermediatist pseudo-principles is that any way of demonstrating anything is just as good a way of demonstrating anything else. By Mr. Holder"s method we could demonstrate that we"re Mayan--if that should be a source of pride to us. One of the characters upon this stone is a circle within a circle--similar character found by Mr. Holder is a Mayan ma.n.u.script. There are two 6"s.
6"s can be found in Mayan ma.n.u.scripts. A double scroll. There are dots and there are dashes. Well, then, we, in turn, disregard the circle within a circle and the double scroll and emphasize that 6"s occur in this book, and that dots are plentiful, and would be more plentiful if it were customary to use the small "i" for the first personal p.r.o.noun--that when it comes to dashes--that"s demonstrated: we"re Mayan.
I suppose the tendency is to feel that we"re sneering at some valuable archaeologic work, and that Mr. Holder did make a veritable identification.
He writes:
"I submitted the photographs to the Field Museum and the Smithsonian and one or two others, and, to my surprise, the reply was that they could make nothing out of it."
Our indefinite acceptance, by preponderance of three or four groups of museum-experts against one person, is that a stone bearing inscriptions una.s.similable with any known language upon this earth, is said to have fallen from the sky. Another poor wretch of an outcast belonging here is noted in the _Scientific American_, 48-261: that, of an object, or a meteorite, that fell Feb. 16, 1883, near Brescia, Italy, a false report was circulated that one of the fragments bore the impress of a hand.
That"s all that is findable by me upon this mere gasp of a thing.
Intermediatistically, my acceptance is that, though in the course of human history, there have been some notable approximations, there never has been a real liar: that he could not survive in intermediateness, where everything merges away or has its pseudo-base in something else--would be instantly translated to the Negative Absolute. So my acceptance is that, though curtly dismissed, there was something to base upon in this report; that there were unusual markings upon this object.
Of course that is not to jump to the conclusion that they were cuneiform characters that looked like finger-prints.
Altogether, I think that in some of our past expressions, we must have been very efficient, if the experience of Mr. Symons be typical, so indefinite are we becoming here. Just here we are interested in many things that have been found, especially in the United States, which speak of a civilization, or of many civilizations not indigenous to this earth. One trouble is in trying to decide whether they fell here from the sky, or were left behind by visitors from other worlds. We have a notion that there have been disasters aloft, and that coins have dropped here: that inhabitants of this earth found them or saw them fall, and then made coins imitatively: it may be that coins were showered here by something of a tutelary nature that undertook to advance us from the stage of barter to the use of a medium. If coins should be identified as Roman coins, we"ve had so much experience with "identifications" that we know a phantom when we see one--but, even so, how could Roman coins have got to North America--far in the interior of North America--or buried under the acc.u.mulation of centuries of soil--unless they did drop from--wherever the first Romans came from?
Ignatius Donnelly, in _Atlantis_, gives a list of objects that have been found in mounds that are supposed to antedate all European influence in America: lathe-made articles, such as traders--from somewhere--would supply to savages--marks of the lathe said to be unmistakable. Said to be: of course we can"t accept that anything is unmistakable. In the _Rept. Smithson. Inst._, 1881-619, there is an account, by Charles C.
Jones, of two silver crosses that were found in Georgia. They are skillfully made, highly ornamented crosses, but are not conventional crucifixes: all arms of equal length. Mr. Jones is a good positivist--that De Sota had halted at the "precise" spot where these crosses were found. But the spirit of negativeness that lurks in all things said to be "precise" shows itself in that upon one of these crosses is an inscription that has no meaning in Spanish or any other known, terrestrial language: