A Space-Pig on Broadway! -- Charles Fort's New Lands (Part Three)

(NOTE: The quotes below are from the Sacred Texts version of Charles Fort's New Lands. A link to the rights-free version of the book is below.

Charles Fort's New Lands)

One of the biggest frustrations for me with Charles Fort's classic of paranormal studies, Book of the Damned, was that it ended with a discussion of phenomena that seemed very much like they could point to the existence of bigfoot. However, Fort seemed to relate these phenomena to us as an illustration that bigfoot didn't exist and that, in fact, the chances of the actual living presence of strange creatures, either from this world or other worlds, were rather slim.

It seemed to me that Fort was trying to resist the idea of the existence of beings other than natural, earthly beings on earth because he was afraid of the force that could be embodied in paranormal beings. So I hoped that, as Charles Fort's work progressed, he would accept the actual presence of beings into his work.

Throughout New Lands, Fort seems to do this, from time to time. He does this, though, in the form of what he calls "mirages," or phantom forms appearing in the sky. These phantom forms are mainly of soldiers -- sometimes of entire troops of soldiers. But there still isn't a real feeling that we are looking at living presences in the sky. Fort himself is very dodgy on what the phenomena of the sky-mirages could actually be. Reflections? Imaginations? Disguised worlds?

But finally, at the end of the third to last chapter of New Lands, an alien finally appears on earth. This alien is -- that's right -- a space-pig. It's a very strange-looking creature, especially for a pig.

Now, those who have read the book will be quick to remind me that the space-pig Fort has parading down Broadway at the end of his book is "just" a product of Fort's imagination. That is true. Fort structures his book with three main elements: data, in the form, usually, of notes from journals; philosophy, in the form, either of Fort's arguments against the scientists or Fort's own Neo-scientific arguments; and imagination, in the form of Fort's own poetic expressions, inspired by, as opposed to deduced from, the data and philosophy.

But I would also argue that Fort's use of data is more like -- well, like how Joseph Cornell might cut pictures out of magazines and put them into his dioramas; or, again, how Henry Darger might trace pictures of little girls out of coloring books, put tiny, little penises on half of them, and throw them all into adventures the likes of which had never been seen, this side of Japan's magical-girl anime.

Fort's data is used as a kind of "found footage." And Fort uses his data to express, not just his genuine philosophical beliefs about the universe, but -- I really believe this -- his own personal psychological development, from crisis to conversion.

So the fact that Fort sometimes uses his own imagination alongside the data, when it comes to the aspect of psychological development, isn't of much concern to me. And -- it has to be noted -- Charles Fort is extremely thorough in discriminating between the data and his own imagination. His data is always very clearly stated as data. And his imagination is... hard to mistake for anything else.

But the simple fact that Fort would allow, even in his imagination, an alien finally to touch the earth, means that he's probably made a huge step in his psychological development. Finishing the Book of the Damned, I had an idea of where New Lands would go. But I'm not sure how Fort's next book, Lo!, will go, in terms of Fort's own psychological development.

Now, the people who have read my previous posts know that I'm a part-time paraphilic infantilist, or an adult baby. That means that my personal fetish, i.e. what turns me on, is pretending I'm a baby, or a little child.

So, as I finished the first third of Fort's New Lands, I was actually really excited by a passage where he speaks of our so-called Solar System (which Fort eventually begins calling a Geo-System) as a Super-Embryonic System. In other words, the Solar System is just a gigantic womb!

At first, finishing up the first third of the book, I thought that this would simply be another one of Fort's whimsical imaginings, that my adult baby sensibilities had a bit of play, and that I'd go on with the rest of Fort's book. But it turns out that Fort's embryonic analogy continues all throughout the book, forming, I believe, the real substratum to his whole philosophical approach to the book.

I think the obvious reason for the embryo analogy is the fact that if you have hope for the world, you usually believe that the world's coming to consciousness of itself, it's getting smarter. You hear people say things like "dawn of consciousness" all the time. Our world is dawning, or, as the old philosophers may have said, "nascent," or, in the process of being born. So it's easy to imagine the world as fetal or embryonic, if it's nascent, or dawning.

But I think Fort had his own personal reason for making this choice. Fort's Blakean imagination was so strong that, if he had given it enough power, it would really carried him away. Even with the protective measures Fort puts upon himself, he still often risks being carried away right to the skies by his imagination. For instance, he almost explodes with prophetic ecstasy in this Whitman-esque passage:

"Char me the trunk of a redwood tree. Give me the pages of white chalk cliffs to write upon. Magnify me thousands of times, and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania -- then might I write largely enough for our subject."

Plus, I believe, Fort was such a sensitive man -- probably psychically sensitive, as well as emotionally sensitive -- that he could easily have been carried away by the psychic and emotional influences of the world.

If that was the case, and I believe it was, Fort needed as much tying down and binding in as possible. He needed containment -- as *my own* psychiatrist might say. He needed a womb-like atmosphere of security and seclusion, so that his own psychological structure could develop. And this, I believe, is why Fort made the embryonic analogy the real backbone of his theory.

I think there are two really interesting passages that point to the fact that Fort saw himself, in his sensitive condition, as being as vulnerable as an unborn baby or a little child, and in need of either containment or some kind of rational, parental protection. In the first instance, Fort imagines the scene of the rushing, towering, thundering Niagara Falls. But he imagines this scene -- from inside the womb of a pregnant woman!

"A pregnant woman stands over Niagara Falls. There are sounds, and they are vast circumstances; but the cells of an unborn being respond, or vibrate, only as they do to disturbances in their own little environment. Horizons pour into a gulf, and thunder rolls upward: embryonic consciousness is no more than slight perturbances of maternal indigestion. It is exclusionism."

Fort believes that exclusionism, which is the real structure of current science, is necessary, to a degree. It keeps things out of the system which would be too much for the system, at its current stage of development, to process. If the system received too much information at once, it wouldn't be able to process. It would fail. Thus exclusionism, though harmful if overdone, is necessary, to a degree.

Fort likens exclusionism, in its different degrees, as science develops, to the convention parents and teacher have of giving kids certain amounts of knowledge as they develop, and as they are more and more able to process the information given to them. Again, it's easy to imagine Fort, in the following passage, imagining himself in the vulnerable role of the child in need of protection and restraint.

"The story of every industry tells of inventions that were resisted, but that were finally admitted. ... Early astronomers could scarcely have systematized their doctrine had they been bewildered by seven or eight hundred planetary bodies; and that, besides the functions of the astronomers, according to our expressions, there was also their usefulness in breaking down the walls of the older, outlived, orthodoxy. We conceive that it is well that a great deal of experience should be withheld from childrean, and that, any way, in their early years, they are sexually isolated, for instance, and our idea is that our data have been held back by no outspoken conspiracy, but by an inhibition similar to that by which a great deal of biology, for instance, is not taught to children."

In the second to last chapter of New Lands, Fort develops his idea of the embryonic condition of the Geo-system very beautifully. Fort thinks of this so-called Solar System, or Geo-system, as Fort calls it, as an "incubating organism, of which this earth is the nucleus."

Fort makes it clear that the analogy of an embryo is just that: an analogy, and that the Geo-system is "strongly characterized by conditions and features of its own." But it's a good enough analogy, and Fort continues to employ it.

If this Geo-system, of which the earth is the center, while the sun and the planets either revolve around the earth, around the sun, or in other strange orbits, is like a womb, then the meteors act as part of an umbilical system, bringing in nutrition from the outside, the nutrition generally being a form of electricity. Meteors enter the Geo-system through holes in the womb, which we think of as distant stars, which are the other part of the umbilical nutrition system.

Fort expresses his disagreement with the doctrine of evolution. He rather believes this Geo-system, and all of its components, including living organisms, are developing according to a design. But this design is, again, like the "design" that causes an embryo to develop the way it does. There is a "genetics," one might say, to all of the development of our Geo-system. Fort says of this system:

"It is not altogether anti-Darwiniam: the concept of Development replaces the concept of Evolution, but we accept the process of Selection, not to anything loosely known as Environment, but relatively to underlying Schedule and Design, predetermined and supervised, as it were, but by nothing that we conceive of in anthropomorphic terms."

There is a regulating force in the Geo-system, Fort believes, just as there is a regulating force in the development of an embryo, which allows certain actions and materials to increase in harmony with the current development of the embryo, while, at that specific stage, other actions and materials are held back, or inhibited.

Thus, everything has its time. Fort believes that even inventions and ideas, in this Geo-system of ours, have their time.

"There are data for the acceptance that all things, in wider being, are held back as well as protected and prepared for, and not permitted to develop before comes scheduled time. Langley's flying machine makes me think of something of the kind -- that this machine was premature; that it appeared a little before the era of aviation upon this earth, and that therefore Langley could not fly. But this machine was capable of flying, because, some years later, Curtiss did fly in it. Then one thinks that the Wright Brothers were successful, because they did synchronize with a scheduled time."

Now -- two things about this passage really quickly. He mentions the idea of a premature technology. Earlier on in the book, he also talks about premature ideas. So Fort is really talking about premature theory! That's pretty exciting to me, for obvious reasons.

But the other thing about this passage -- even though I *know* Fort knew Marx' and Hegels ideas, I'm pretty sure that he also knew Freud's ideas, and probably Jung's. But I'm sure, in spite of what Fort knew of Jung, Fort came up, in the passage above, with a basic idea of synchronicity, before Jung came up with the developed idea.

Fort then compares the development of human ideologies with the development of the embryo, in that the embryo uses different types of cells in order to reach different levels of development, but that these cells are destryoed by the next phase of cells, which signify the next level of development. Reflecting on this analogy, Fort says:

"Human reason is tropism, or response to stimuli, and reasoning is the trial-and-error process of the most primitive unicellular organisms, a susceptibility to underlying mandates, then a grouping in perhaps all possible distortions until adjustment with underlying requirements is reached.

"The mind that responds, perhaps not to stimulus, but to requirement, which seems to be a negative stimulus, and so conceives, is in adjustment, and reaches the state known as success."

Fort then repeats his belief that isolation is just as important for the healthy development of an embryo -- be it human embryo or Geo-systemic embryo -- as is the process of expansion:

"It is our expression that temporary isolations characterize embryonic growth and super-embryonic growth quite as distincly as do expansions and coordinations. Local centers of development in an egg -- and they are isolated before they sketch out attempting relations. Or in a wider being -- hemisphere isolated from hemisphere, and nation from nation -- then the breaking down of barriers -- the appearance of Japan out of obscurity -- threads of a military plasm are cast across an ocean by the United States."

Fort concludes his embryonic theory with a very beautiful passage -- although I believe that this passage, once again, distorts his ideas regarding the sky-mirages:

"Embryonic heavens that thave dreamed -- and that their mirages will be realized some day. Sounds and an interval; sounds and the same interval; sounds again -- that there is one integrating organism and that we have heard its pulse."

Fort's view of the universe is obviously different from the current scientific view of the universe -- the one which just today, I believe, released documents regarding the probable non-viability of the Kepler planets. One might tend to think of Fort's view of the universe as medieval. But I think if Fort tried to push his view of the universe on the medieval people, he'd suffer a worse fate than Giordano Bruno suffered in enlightened times.

But Fort's ideas are based on three very pre-Copernican ideas. One: the earth is at the center of the Geo-system. Two: the earth neither revolves nor rotates. And three: the force of gravitation either doesn't exist or else is very weak.

It's easy enough to see, from a psychological standpoint, why Fort would be interested in arguing for these three ideas. If the earth is the fetus, it would, hopefully, be the center of the womb, and the most important thing in it. If the earth neither revolves nor rotates, there is less movement to be constantly concerned about. In other words, the fetus can brood in one still place. And if gravitation doesn't exist, but one is in the womb, one could imagine oneself floating in a limited space, but secure within that space.

But I think there's another, less psychoanalytic, reason that Fort would argue for these somewhat archaic seeming ideas. This would be based on an idea I first got from my favorite writer of all, George Bernard Shaw -- to whom, by the way, Fort refers in New Lands, pointing out that Shaw believes the moon is only thirty-seven miles away from the earth!

Shaw said that human technology is outpacing human morality. We are developing technologies at a wildly fast rate. We have the weapons to wipe out civilization in an instant, nowadays. But, Shaw says, we still have the morality of the medieval times. Why aren't we working on improving our morality, Shaw asks, as hard as we are on improving our technology?

Well -- I'm sure that Fort saw the same passage of Shaw that I read. God knows, both Fort and I have spent hours and hours at the New York Public Library -- although Fort's hours dwarf mine. But I think Fort put his characteristic spin on the idea. What I think he did, actually, was put a Forto-Hegelian spin on the idea.

I believe that Fort thought that our morality must, in order to catch up to our technology, first go back, to the point where our morality and our technology separated from each other. And I believe that Fort thought the way for our morality to do that was by taking the science of that time as a basis for the morality of the time. From this point, we, as scientific moralists, could build up a new morality, allow it to make a new progress.

This would be -- I think -- a version of Hegelian sublation: simply put, it would be dropping down a level, in order to go up two levels.

But I also think that, plain and simply, Fort was building a universe out of genuine data, and was building a universe for his imagination. The data, which was genuine and honest, if nothing else, provided evidence for Fort's imagination of the universe. And Fort's imagination of the universe could really expand, could probably expand way beyond the bounds, even, of what a modern conventional scientists would currently think were the bounds of our universe!

So Fort, in order not to get carried away, had to tie himself down to a smaller universe, a systematic universe that his imagination could work with.

But, moving from these ideas, there are some other theories to Fort's work that are very interesting. One is Fort's idea of "difference of potential," which kind of replaces the law of gravitation as a major effective factor in the Geo-system.

Fort takes his idea of difference of potential from the basics of electricity. Very basically, voltage in an electrical system is the measure of difference in electrical potential in a system. One could also think of it as the ability that one end of a system has to receive the flow of electrons from another end of a system.

Fort believes that difference of potential doesn't just have to be electric. If any two systems are placed in proximity, and if they be very similar, with some differences, the differences will create a difference in potential, which will create interaction between the two systems. This interaction will be a flow of whatever elements have created the difference of potential. Fort says:

"Let two objects be generically similar, but specifically different, and a relation that may be known as a difference of potential, though that term is generally confined to electric relations, generates between them. ... Given proximity, we conceive of relations between [objects] other than gravitational."

Fort's objects are generally planets, meteors, or spaceships which approach the earth. When these ships approach the earth closely, Fort claims, phenomena like earthquakes, as well as more anomalous phenomena, such as rains of strange objects down on our earth, or large objects from our own earth being pulled up into the air, occur. This is not due to the gravitation of the two planets, Fort says, but to the interaction of the two systems, as a result of their difference of potential.

Fort believes that Mars passes close enough to earth almost to graze us. The moon is only a couple hundred miles away from us. And these two bodies occasionally take chances to communicate with us. The communications we receive from Mars occur when Mars is closest to us.

One large body of communications we receive from Mars are blinking lights seen to flash on the very surface of Mars. But another series of phenomena we receive are actual concussions in the sky, huge crashings in the sky that sound like cannon fire, or even earthquakes. These sounds usually come in some sort of rhythmic way. Fort knows that these rhythms have been recorded. And he believes that the rhythms can be analyzed, to reveal the messages of the communications. In fact, Fort himself has attempted to analyze some of these rhythms.

Venus, in its passage through the Geo-system, also has moments of close approach to the earth. However, when Venus approaches the earth, it doesn't communicate with the earth. Instead, it actually sends out spacecraft, to visit the earth. These visitations, interestingly enough, according to Fort, don't occur at the closest points of Venus to earth, but usually five weeks before and after that point, when Venus is brightest in the sky.

These visitations are, though, often accompanied by the phenomena usually described as earthquakes. The phenomena usually run -- I think -- in this order: a sighting of an object in the sky, a loud, crashing sound in the sky, and earthquake-like phenomena, as well as events such as rains of strange objects.

But these phenomena aren't just limited to visitations from Venusian spacecraft. They can occur when other celestial bodies pass near us. The difference of potential creates an interaction in the system. And these cataclysmic effects occur.

In the passage below, Fort mentions an event in Michigan, in 1919, and then broadens his statment out to discuss similar occurrences.

"There was a shock in Michigan, November 27, 1919. In many cities, persons rushed from their homes, thinking that there had been an earthquake. But in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, a 'blinding glare' was seen in the sky. Our acceptance is, that this occurrence is, upon a small scale, of the type of many catastrophes in Italy and South America, for instance, where just such 'blinding glares' have been seen in the sky, data of which have been expressed by scientists, or of data which have not impressed conventional scientists."

Fort, in his Book of the Damned, provides some powerful illustrations from his data, of transfers of material between the earth and the spaceships or celestial bodies approaching it. And the theory of a difference of potential as the driving factor is one way of expressing this process.

But I think Fort also provides a more whimsical expression in the passage below, which seems reminiscent to me of the connection romance, I mean passionate romance, has with the exchange of genetic information between two bodies during the reproductive process. Fort imagines an ancient visitation from a spacecraft to earth, which led to a material interaction between the bodies. Fort, by the way, believes that very ancient interactions actually were powerful enough to cause rains of *dinosaurs*.

"If poetry is imagery, and if a flow of images be solid poetry, such a recitation was there in three-dimensional hyperbole that was probably seen, or overheard, and criticized in Mars, and condemned for its extravagance in Jupiter. Some other world, meeting this earth, ransacking his solid imagination and uttering her living metaphors: singing a flood of mastadons, purring her butterflies, bellowing an ardor of buffaloes. Sailing away -- sneaking up close to the planet Venus, murmuring her antelopes, or arching his periphery, and spitting horses at her --

"Poor degenerate times -- nowadays something comes close to this earth and lisps little commonplaces to her --"

Such as, I would suppose, rains of blood or rains of frogs.

I'd like to end this post with a few of the more interesting pieces of data that Fort presents -- including the space-pig episodes.

In my last post, I mentioned two women who were actually injured by matter that had apparently fallen from space. In this final section of New Lands, Fort actually gives a number of instances of men being injured by, and even dying from, contact with these extraterrestrial phenomena.

In this instance, from 1875, a man was struck, and injured, by something he assumed was a musket ball, though he never found the missile which had injured him.

"A man was trundling a cart from Schaffhausen, near Beringen, Germany. His right arm was perforated from front to back, as if by a musket ball. Thisman had two companions. He heard a whirring sound, but his companions had heard nothing. At one side of the road there were laborers in a field, but they were not within gunshot distance. Whatever the missile may have been, it was unfindable."

Fort also lists an instance similar to this, from 1886, where a man, walking toward Pall Mall, in England, had his jacket sizzled on the shoulder -- as if, we'd nowadays think, a laser beam had cut it. He never found out what had done the strange thing to him. But scientists assumed it had been a very small meteorite.

In this instance, from 1886, Fort lists some rather disturbing deaths and disorientations which resulted from a supposed lightning strike.

"A man and his three sons were pulling corn on a farm. Nothing is said of meteorologic conditions, and, for all I know, they may have been pulling corn in a violent thunder storm. Something that is said to have been lightning flashed from the sky. The man was slightly impaired, one son killed, the other seriously injured -- the third had disappeared. 'What has become of him is not known, but it is supposed that he was blinded or crazed by the shock, or wandered away.'"

In the instance below, an entire troop of soldiers was struck by an "unknown force."

"It is said that in 1893, nineteen soldiers were marching near Bourges, France, when they were struck by an unknown force. It is said that in known terms there is no explanation. Some of the men were killed, and others were struck insensible. At the inquest it was testified that there had been no storm, and that nothing had been heard."

Another man, in 1895, attempted to shield himself from the blast of something he saw falling:

"In the period of primary maximum brilliance of Venus, a luminous object, it is said, was seen in the sky, in day time, by someone in Donegal, Ireland. Upon this day, a boy, Robert Alcorn, saw a large luminous object falling from the sky. It exploded near him. The boy... put his hands over his face: there was a second explosion, shattering his fingers."

In 1891, one of these explosions caused a commotion, very near to where I live nowadays!, in Brooklyn:

"Two men, Smith Morehouse and William Owen, were walking in Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, about 2 o'clock, afternoon of March 16th, when a terrific explosioun occurred close to the head of Morehouse, injuring him and stunning Owen, the flash momentarily blinding both. Morehouse's face was covered with marks like powder-marks, and his tongue was pierced."

It was the first, but not the last, pierced tongue in Brooklyn. But let me continue the story.

"With no one else to accuse, the police arrested Owen, but held him upon the technical charge of intoxication. Morehouse was taken to a hospital, where a splinter of metal, considered either brass or copper, but not a fragment of a cartridge, was removed from his tongue. No other material could be found, though an object of considerable size had exploded. Morehouse's hat had been perforated in six places by unfindable substances."

Among the many instances of lights in the sky, either as communication or visitation, there are a few where a really interesting kind of spacecraft is made visible. I'll take this one as a good example, since it kind of relates to the imagery of the space-pig. This sighting occurred in Benton, Texas, in 1897. It was seen at first as a dark object that crossed the moon. But a closer look was obtained:

"It was shaped like a Mexican cigar, large in the middle, and small at both ends, with great wings, resembling those of an enormous butterfly. It was brilliantly illuminated by the rays of two great searchlights, and was sailing in a southeasterly direction, with the velocity of the wind, presenting a magnificent appearance."

This spacecraft was thought to have similarities with a spacecraft seen around the same time, first in Kansas City, Missouri, and then in Chicago, Illinois. The spacecraft was also described as having red, white, and green lights.

And now to what Fort calls the "tragedy of the space-pig," an event that occurred in Llagollen, Wales, in 1905.

"It is an intensely black object, about two miles above the earth's surface, moving at the rate of about 20 miles per hour. [Later, the object was] examined through powerful field-glasses. We are told that it had short wings, and flew, or moved, in a way described as 'casually inclining sideways.' It seemed to have four legs, and looked to be about ten feet long. According to several witnesses it looked like a huge, winged pig, with webbed feet."

After this flying pig (that'll be the day!) passed, Llagollen was showered with a red-purple-colored rain.

So, this is the tragedy of the space-pig, wandering through space. But how does Fort meet tragedy? With triumph! Or... so I believe. Read this poetic passage by Fort, and see if the description of the alien being paraded through the streets of New York City doesn't sound like the space-pig who had been spotted floating over Wales.

The passage relates to one of the pioneer space-explorers Fort imagines will discover the phenomena of the worlds he has posited. The space-explorer is something of a prospector, something of a prophet, and something of a pariah:

"Insulted and abused and finally hounded to his death. But, in the procession, he will lead by the nose an outrageous thing that should not be: about ten feet long, short-winged, waddling on webbed feet. Insult and abuse and death -- he will snap his fingers under the nose of the outrageous thing. It will be worth a great deal to lead that by the nose and demonstrate that such things had been seen in the sky, though they had been supposed to be angels. It will be a great moment for somebody. He will come back to New York, and march up Broadway with his angel."

Getting Past Life -- William S. Beck's Modern Science

For a book on the history of modern biology -- as modern as it can be (William S. Beck's book Modern Science and the Nature of Life was written in 1961) -- there is one surprisingly unconventional aspect about it. The book seems to have been influenced by Charles Fort.

Charles Fort, author of the Book of the Damned, was a man against the exclusionism rampant in science. Fort believed that a number of phenomena, experiences that people all over the world, at a number of different time periods, had, were outside the bounds of recognized science. Because they were outside of these bounds, they were either explained away or ignored. Fort called these phenomena "damned," because they were excluded from the rest of the world of phenomena.

Now, Charles Fort had his own ideas on how to explain these anomalous phenomena. Most of the phenomena that he mentioned were falls from the sky of strange objects -- long rains of red material, for instance, or rains of frogs. Fort mainly attempted to explain these objects by saying that they came from another world or another dimension, or that spaceships brought them.

Fort's main idea was that he took phenomena as he saw them and then tried to tailor explanations to meet them. A new phenomenon would often get a new explanation. Often, this new explanation could be a completely new world, a completely new dimension, and so forth.

I was surprised, then, that a book by a Michigan University educated Medical Doctor who was an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Tutor of Biochemistry at Harvard College, and Chief of Hematology at Massachusetts General Hospital, seemed to espouse some of the ideas that formed the philosophical foundation for Charles Fort's system of thought.

Yet these ideas seem to spring up all through the book. They begin at a "fable" that Beck gives us regarding a man named Sigmund whose one aim in life is to find, with absolute certainty, the secret of life. For everything Sigmund does to ensure that his experiments will have absolute certainty, he finds himself backed into what seems like an even tighter corner of uncertainty.

But finally, Sigmund is determined, with what he feels will be his greatest experiment of all, to finally capture data about the secret of life with complete certainty. The only problem is, as he starts the experiment, something wrong with the electrical wiring in the experiment causes a big fire. Sigmund and the entire laboratory are burnt to the ground. And a physics laboratory, with a brand new cyclotron (!), is built up in its place.

Charles Fort would call the story of Sigmund a legend of translation into the Positive Absolute. When a scientist fights, in the face of increasing odds, for absolute certainty, even though he knows it's likely a losing battle, he will, Fort says, through all his audacity, be translated into the Positive Absolute, or the place where absolute certainty does exist -- though it exists kind of clumped together with everything else.

Fort even says that this translation will occur, for many people who attempt it, in a great fire. For instance, Fort guesses that Elijah, instead of having been driven up to Heaven in a fiery chariot, like the Bible says he was, was actually translated into the Positive Absolute in a fireball that ascended into the sky.

This may be the most obvious insance in Beck's book of coming up with ideas along the lines of Fortean principles. But others follow. For instance, Beck mentions the work of Louis Pasteur to prove that spontaneous generation of living organisms wasn't necessarily the truth of the origin of life.

Beck makes a strong effort to point out that Pasteur did not actually say that spontaneous generation couldn't happen. But by Beck's time, the story of Pasteur's research against spontaneous generation was so well known that even little schoolkids thought the scientists who had believed in spontaneous generation were superstitious and a little silly. So why would Beck make such a point of defending at least the bare possibility of spontaneous generation?

I believe it's because Beck was thinking, at least a little bit, of a science that could include Fortean principles. Now -- I don't know of anything in Fort that mentions spontaneous generation.

In fact, Fort would be much happier to think, for instance, that a nail in a rock had fallen from the sky and had a rock grow around it, than he would be to think that a nail spontaneously generated itself in a rock. But I believe that Fort would rather believe that something spontaneously generated than believe that a scientist's paltry explanation solved matters.

But, later on in Modern Science, Beck mentions the argument of William of Occam, and later, through a more modern re-phrasing, of Bertrand Russell, that correct science does not tend to multiply causes -- or that the simpler an argument is, the better it is. Fort argues the opposite. He argues that the more phenomena there are, the more causes there should be. And Beck, while not disagreeing with the scientific point of view, also makes the point that just because simple looks better, it doesn't always mean that it is better.

Beck seems to have been extremely influenced by Bertrand Russell. A lot of his theoretical or philosophical arguments seem to have been lifted right out of the pages of Russell. But one argument he uses is expressly changed.

Russell has said in one of his books -- I think it might be The Problems of Philosophy, though I wouldn't stand by that for sure -- that everything a human being would do throughout his life could be predicted, step by step, if we had machines that could perform every last necessary computation regarding that person's body and environment.

Beck may have a bit afraid of edging that close to saying men are automata, because he didn't use this argument of Russell's. Now, Russell did not think men were automata, but that the non-material, non-automatic portion of the human psyche was just incredibly small. Nevertheless, Beck shifted this idea from human activity in general to the phenomena of car crashes.

Using car crashes as his subject, Beck said basically the same thing as Russell did: that if there were a machine that could monitor and perform computations about every single car on the road, as well as every single road, with all the surrounding conditions, that this machine could conceivably predict every single car crash that would occur in the United States in a single year.

Only -- Beck warns us -- this isn't the case. Because there would still be anomalous car crashes. For instance, a car crash could occur because -- a meteor fell from the sky and smashed it! Now, that's an absolutely Fortean argument. It assumes a system, with a high degree of internal predictability, interfered with by an external cause. External causes are exactly what Fort is trying to integrate into the system of science. But the fact that in Beck's illustration, the external cause falls from the sky -- well, Fort would be pleased.

And then, toward the end of his book, Beck mentions an effort he believes is worthy: trying to bring the integrative character back into science. Beck says that science has become too segregative, and now science must become more integrated. This would be the same argument Fort uses. Except Fort would say that science has become too exclusionist, rather than too segregative, and that science should become more inclusive, rather than integrated.

Perhaps Beck never read any Fort. Perhaps he only arrived at Fortean ideas after thinking reasonably about the subject of science on his own. Beck had written his Modern Science about fifteen years after becoming an M.D. He'd had plenty of time to see science -- and scientists -- in action. And he often talks, with approval and disapproval, of the religious rite of science: the scientific conference.

But Beck's train of argument regarding science isn't too far removed from his own "fable" of the scientist Sigmund, who was so baffled at every turn with new uncertainties uncovered by his attempts at certainty.

Beck seems to believe, as I understand him, that the real driving force behind science is the hypothesis. The hypothesis is a directing idea. Without the hypothesis, there is no science. Without the hypothesis, there is only observation and classification.

But the hypothesis has a double function, as far as I can tell: it's both creative and limiting. The hypothesis is creative because it takes a series of observations and thinks of a way in which those observations could be tied together. But it's limiting in that it eliminates from the picture of the observations other factors of existence that don't have anything to do with the hypothesis.

Beck goes even farther toward limiting the scope of science. He says that the realm of science is the experiment. But the experiment isolates conditions even more than the hypothesis. The experiment even separates conditions into variables and controls.

The experiment doesn't even attempt to get at the truth of nature, but at what the conditions induced in the environment of variables and controls might imply about nature. If the scientist has developed the conditions of variables and controls so that he might predict the outcome of a situation in that environment, and if the prediction is in line with his hypothesis, then he has achieved his goal. And the matching up of his goal with some natural situation is only of secondary concern.

But the world of science seems to shrink more and more for Beck. Beck, like most philosophers in the Age of Analysis, doesn't believe that definition is definite. Definition is a kind of habit. As we get used to being around certain material while we are ingrained with certain concepts, we begin to define that material in terms of those concepts. And because there is no clear-cut way of making experience universal to everybody, there's no clear-cut way of making a definition universal, absolute, or completely certain.

Beck argues, along these lines, that Einstein's big contribution to science wasn't necessarily the Theory of Relativity, but the implication it made of the importance of "operational analysis," as Beck calls it, or always thinking of scientific ideas in terms of the physical operations by which they've been carried out.

Thus it is the individual operations, the measurements, that are made, that are of the utmost importance to science. How these operations and measurements are made are also of importance. And how well measuring devices are calibrated is important. Nothing in science can be truly explained. But everything that can't be explained measurably in terms of a kind of third-party or well-calibrated frame of reference, shouldn't be thought of as having been explained.

Science has been incredibly reduced through these ideas. It is boggled-over with the need for calibration and external referencing. And this shrinks its actual material for study.

But, at the same time, it makes everything about science so law-oriented, so legalistic, that the language, the terminology, the jargon of science virtually explodes! Every different kind of scientist, it seems, needs a whole new dictionary, just to learn the terminology of his own specific field!

Beck seems to think that expanded language implies the expanded culture of humanity. I disagree. Language in many of the sciences is double-speak, mystification, rather than clarification. It's the language of exclusion and hierarchy, the codes of a corrupt priesthood, rather than the symbols of knowledge.

Nevertheless, there's an interesting parallel here. Beck's subversive line of argument, based on Fortean theories (either through Beck's own thoughts or his own actual reading of Fort), moves from uncertainty, to spontaneous generation, to the occasional need for multiplicity of causes, to external events affecting a system, to the overall goal of an integrative character of science.

At the same time, Beck's main argument runs from a hypothesis, or directing idea, to experiment and isolation, to inferred effects, to the haziness of definition, to operational analysis, to the bounding off of ideas, and finally to the explosion of language and terminology.

So Fort's ideas lead to a multiplicity of causes, while conventional science's ideas lead to a duplicity of language. I think that Beck is trying to find a way to reconcile these two systems. Science needs a creative mind that can come up with original hypotheses. The creative mind may have tendencies more like the mind of Fort, sometimes. But to focus that kind of mind, and limit the spiralling out of control brought on by a multiplicity of causes, the isolation, control, and operational analysis of conventional science are necessary.

Modern Science and the Nature of Life was written, as I said, in 1961. It was written as part of the American Museum of Natural History's Natural History Library series. And Beck himself describes the book as no more than a history of the developments leading up to and constituting modern biology as he knew it.

So the book is really a kind of compendium of ideas. It's easily digestible. It's relatively short -- about 311 pages. But it's full of information. That being said, I'm going to devote the remainder of this post to a quick summary of the contents of the book. I felt that a lot of it was useful.

In fact, I thought the most useful thing about this particular compendium of ideas is that it included Information Theory. I don't think I've read a book from this time period that included Information Theory, especially as a theory important to biology.

However, the book, interestingly, while it mentions a ton of other scientists, historical and modern, by name, does not mention Claude E. Shannon in conjunction with Information Theory. It only mentions Bell Labs. This is odd. Claude E. Shannon did his doctoral work at MIT. Beck was a Bostonian as well. You'd think Beck would have known Shannon. But he only mentions Bell Labs.

The other thing that struck me as interesting was that Beck doesn't mention D'Arcy Wentworth Thomson's idea of linking Brownian motion with the origins of life. Beck mentions so many other scientists. Thomson's Growth and Form is seminal. But Beck doesn't mention it. Why? Well... maybe it wasn't written yet. And, besides, you can't expect a guy to know everything.

I, in particular, can't expect a guy to know everything! I'm as innocent as a premature baby!

Beck begins his book by saying that some people think the world of his day is in a situation of crisis. Beck then defines crisis as a state of misery in the face of cultural potentiality. Beck says that the world could also be thought of as in a state of scientific crisis. Culture is ruled by science. But science is grotesquely ambivalent.

Beck emphasizes the idea that science and culture are not separate. Science is a product of culture, and the subjects of science are the elements of existence which influence culture. In addition, scientists are human beings -- ruled by reason, yes, but also by nature and their own emotions.

Nevertheless, citizens are estranged from science. They feel they are walled off from science because it requires too much specialization to understand. In addition, the scientific information they do get is often oversimplified. There needs to be a re-unification of culture and science.

Every age of history seems to have had a body of science that it focused on. Each age seems to determine what questions a scientist will ask of nature. But individuals themselves may also ask questions of nature, independent of the current of their times.

Individual ideas may have a harder time being accepted than ideas accepted by the whole age. But if the individual scientist's idea is forceful and correct enough, it may eventually find sympathy with the times, either the scientist's times, or a later age.

Beck says that we have achieved a great deal technologically in a short time. So, Beck believes, a question many people might ask is, "Why haven't we got it all figured out yet?" Why don't we just know everything there is to know about life? Beck doesn't give an outright answer to this question. The following arguments of the book seem to be the answer.

Beck sees the history of biology beginning with the first cultivation of land for growing food. The next stage in the development of the sciences, including biology, was the Classical Greek age, where thought was highly developed. This development was brought to a halt in the Middle Ages. Beck argues that the dogmatic influence of the priestly hierarchy stifled the intellectual freedom and growth that would have led to a further development in the sciences.

Beck steps aside from history for a moment to lay the groundwork for the age of modern science. He mainly discusses cumulative versus non-cumulative knowledge. Cumulative knowledge is the basis of science, while non-cumulative knowledge is the basis of art. This is a silly idea, in my opinion. But the idea is that cumulative knowledge is up off of previous knowledge and data -- right or wrong, or thought right and later proven wrong -- and can be tied in with a theoretical system, which may also develop.

Non-cumulative knowledge is the same through all ages. Beck give a really dull example of this, by saying that in Greek times people wrote about emotions, ethics, and the universals of life, and that today people write about emotions, ethics, and the universals of life. So nothing's changed. But -- in my opinion, you *can* make the same argument about science. It's just that our technology's developed.

Beck then begins his discussion of the birth of modern science by explaining rationalism and deduction. Deduction is, according to Beck, the process of logical proof. If all A's are B's and all B'c are C's, then all A's are C's. In this kind of argument, as long as the form is correct, the argument is correct. Deduction is the basis of rationalism.

Rationalism influenced thinkers very heavily at the beginning of the Renaissance, when people were finally breaking free of the dogmatic rule of the church. But thinkers invested the same power in rationalism that they had invested in the dogmatic rule of the church. And rationalism, unfortunately, became all-powerful.

John Locke brought in the idea of empiricism, or making rational arguments from experience. This was called arguing by analogy. Now, deduction wasn't empty and formal. It wasn't A's and B's and C's. It began with nature and experience. But as long as an idea could formally fit one end of the proposition, the other end of the proposition could be just about anything. So people came up with some pretty wild theories of the universe.

But people then tried to work from self-evident axioms, moving back toward the idea of a formal deductive principle. Spinoza and Leibniz tried to build up systems of ethics based on mathematics, for instance.

Descartes was the greatest of all these philosophers. He worked on a principle of doubt. He tried to doubt everything. But the one thing he couldn't doubt was the fact that he thought. So he came up with his axiom, "cogito ergo sum," or, "I think, therefore I am." And he built up a system of philosophy from there.

Galileo seems to have been the first thinker of these times, however, to put a system of thought together based on experience and experiment. Galileo was followed up by Francis Bacon, whose work, the Novum Organon, was a refutation of what he thought was the overly rational system of Aristotle, the Organon.

Bacon's system was really a system of classification of nature, based on "sense impressions." Bacon also used inductive logic instead of deductive logic. Inductive logic is like empiricism, in that it uses actual experience as its basis, instead of a formal argument. But it differs from the deductive empiricism that followed Locke, in that the implications made from experience only relate to those specific elements of experience.

However, this kind of logic can only point to probability of truth, never to absolute certainty. Bacon thought that his system did lead to absolute certainty. And so he stopped with inductive logic and classification of sense impressions, thinking that was all there was to science.

But science, and the scientific method, were further developed, especially with the help of some of the members of Britain's fledgling Royal Society of science. Robert Boyle is thought of as the father of chemistry, since he was the first person really to have done work on the mechanism underlying chemistry.

But the greatest contribution of this time was made by Sir Isaac Newton, who, of course, discovered the three laws of thermodynamics. Newton's discoveries were largely made from a combination of observation, hypothesis, calculation, and testing. He observed things, made generalizations about them, formed hypotheses, made deductions, and proved his ideas. He explained and predicted. These were the basic processes of science, laid out for the first time.

At this point, Beck begins to discuss the history of biology itself. Beck claims that William Harvey is the father of modern biology.

Harvey was around a little bit before Newton, in the early 1600s. He discovered the circulation of the blood, and he largely did this through his own observations. He discovered a number of hitherto unknown facts about the circulation of blood in the body. But he depended too much on Aristotilean theories such as the perfection of a circle being the reason for the seemingly circular flowing of blood through the body.

Andreas Vesalius was also a major figure in biology. He was, Beck claims, the first really detailed anatomist of the human body. He produced a work on anatomy which is still astounding in its craftsmanship, even today.

Robert Hooke, who actually worked a lot with the theory of springs and tension, also did a little work on observing things through magnifying glasses. Hooke was the first person to discover evidence of cells. He saw little dead cells in cork.

Later on, a scientist named Leeuwenhoek expanded on Hooke's observations, using a microscope. But Leeuwenhoek, like a scientist naturally would be, was interested in bodily tissues and fluids. And his experiments, for instance, with semen, were too repulsive for his age to stomach. Microscopic biology died away for a while.

From this point in the book, Beck works back to some broader philosophical issues. He states that Newton's ideas put people back on the road to thinking that everything about nature could be determined with absolute certainty.

Then, however, the philosopher David Hume came along. He said there was no necessary reason to believe in cause and effect. Events were spatially contiguous, and perhaps certain events were repetitively spatially contiguous. But that didn't necessarily mean that one of those events caused the other event.

Beck himself seems to react to this point by giving the idea that science is not about determining truths in nature. It is actually about determining the probability of something happening, and determining this probability through the use of statistical analysis.

But the probabilities determined are not about processes in nature. They are about isolated situations. Experiments are based on observations. But they isolate elements of those observations. They then vary certain other elements to try and produce different conditions in the isolated elements. They attempt to predict, or determine the probability of, those conditions, based on hypothesis, calculated in the form of statistical analysis.

After this detour, Beck skips to the year 1838. He talks about Schleiden and Schwann, who, people claim, first expressed a cell-theory. The cell theory was basically that living structures are formed entirely of cells; that cells are independent living beings, but that they live as a part of a higher organism; and that cells have some kind of mechanism for reproduction.

Beck finds cell-theory (as a hypothesis, I think) is interesting because it came before solid observations of cells. In previous cases in science, observation came before hypothesis. Hypothesis didn't come until there had been a lot of observation.

Beck moves through a discussion of histology, which, I guess, is the practice of observing cells through a process of crystallizing and then dyeing them. I didn't really understand it.

Then Beck talks a bit about the controversy of spontaneous generation. People used to believe that insects, vermin, germs, and other forms of life could come to life spontaneously under certain circumstances.

Spontaneous generation was first disproved by a man named Spallanzani. But it was then proved with much more powerful arguments and instruments by Louis Pasteur. Pasteur made water filters so effective that they filtered out bacteria. He made, basically, purified water. Nothing could grow in it. This proved that the bacteria came from somewhere else, the air, etc. It didn't generate itself spontaneously.

Beck then moves on to discuss evolution. He talks about how Linnaeus invented the first really workable system of classifiation of living organisms. His system used the ideas of genus and species. Beck then talks a bit about Buffon, who, for a few years, anyway, believed in the idea of evolution, and so became its first proponent. He also mentions Lamarck, whose system of evolution was one that almost depended on the "will" of the animal to evolve.

Beck then discusses Charles Darwin, whose theory was not actually one of evolution, but of natural selection. Darwin made a lot of observations of nature. He also observed biology in domestic settings. He noticed that people bred animals. They "selected" characteristics in animals and bred animals to retain those characteristics. Darwin inferred that nature did the same thing.

Darwin then formulated a hypothesis of natural selection. Animals reproduce more than they need to. Numbers will remain constant only if a certain amount of these animals do not survive. There is, then, a struggle for existence, between species and within a species. Animals vary, and animals inherit variations. And animals may survive, in the struggle for existence, due to the variations they've inherited.

Beck believes that Darwin's theory is a great example of stepping from observation to inductive conclusions, to logical, or deductive conclusions.

Beck records a number of resistances to Darwin's theory. But he also records a number of developments upon the theory. He mentions Haeckl's idea that common ancestry plus change equals evolution. He then discusses how the geological record was used to trace the evolution of life on earth. He also discusses the fraud of the Piltdown Man, which taught archaeologists to be more careful in their assumptions.

Beck then discusses Julian Huxley's evolution studies, which, Beck believes, are the zenith of studies on evolution. Huxley asserts the importance of adaptation in evolution. He says that adaptation is the interplay of the organism and the environment.

Huxley also gives a number of different kinds of adaptation. He talks about pre-adaptation, or the change in an organism which permits it to travel into an adjacent environment. And he talks about adaptive radiation, or the way that animals spread out across the world as they evolve. Beck believes that adaptation is the "leitmotif" of the organism.

Beck then digresses into a chapter asking what the meaning of life is. He says that "living" versus "non-living" is a really hazy subject. I agree. I also don't like any of the arguments he uses. I think that from this point, as well, until the point where Beck gets back to talking about cell biology, the book, while sometimes interesting, is generally pretty hazy.

What irks me a little about this chapter is that, while Beck seems to be pretty comfortable saying that the line between "life" and "non-life" is very hazy, he doesn't seem to be so worried about making a division between "matter" and "non-matter." But I think if he were familiar enough with Russell, as he seems to be (given his arguments on definition), he'd at least mention this argument.

Beck starts the next section of the book by talking about the Greeks' "horror infinit," or horror of the infinite, and how it stopped them from making the next step in scientific development. If it hadn't been for the "horror infiniti," Beck seems to assert, we'd have had 20th century technology in Ancient Athens.

Beck also talks about Euclid's idea of parallel lines never touching. Beck mentions that non-Euclidean geometry has disproved this idea.

From this point, Beck moves on into a discussion of Einstein and Relativity. But Beck says that Einstein's real contribution to science was the idea of "operational analysis," or only expressing scientific ideas in terms of the operations or measurements by which they are carried out.

In contrast to Einstein's contribution, Beck mentions a quote by Alfred North Whitehead, where Whitehead says that people think, with the advent of Einstein's theories, that man's imagination has expanded. Whitehead says that the changes in our society, and in our scientific theories, didn't come from an expanded imagination, but from better instrumentation.

Nevertheless, Beck doesn't seem to think much of Whitehead, and this kind of gets to me. If you consider that Whitehead and Russell made the Principia Mathematica, which, with Boole's Laws of Thought and Claude E. Shannon's Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, form the logical basis of all twentieth century thought, it's kind of disturbing that Beck seems to think of Whitehead as a crotchety, old mystic who was afraid of machines.

But Beck then dives into a series of arguments based, I believe, very much on Russell's arguments on language. He proposes that words are "defined" only by habit, and how we connect the sounds or sights of words with the physical or conceptual correlates only through a process of familiarization.

Beck then speaks about propositions and meaning. A meaningful proposition, according to Beck, is one that could potentially be proven true. All other propositions are meaningless.

Beck then discusses the expansion of language in the sciences, which Beck believes is parallel with the expansion of culture. Beck also discusses models in science -- how models serve as a means conceptually to isolate the essentials of a situation so that they can be made more workable. The pitfall to this, Beck says, is that if a model becomes stale, overused, it can become circular, kind of revolve on itself.

Beck then talks about description and definition. Things can only be described, or defined, Beck says, in terms of something external, a kind of third-party. For instance, if one were to define "east," Beck says, one couldn't say, "the place from which the sun rises." Because "the place from which the sun rises" is "east." The definition is circular.

There needs to be a third-party, an outside element, for the two terms of the definition to relate to. Thus Beck says that if one were to say that "east" is the point on the horizon which is 90 degrees to our right as we face toward the north, that would be a correct definition.

This, of course, is baloney.

This baloney is followed up by further baloney, such as how people settled on the word "dog," and a description of "how" polar bears became white which Beck somehow thinks is an explanation of "why" polar bears became white.

Beck is more reasonable when he discusses the laws of science, and remembers the statement of J.B.S. Haldane, that when a law of science doesn't work, the scientists don't say that nature is breaking the law, but that the law has been incorrectly stated.

Beck then mention's Occam's Law and Russell's re-phrasing of it, that simplicity is better than multiplicity in science.

Beck discusses causal determinism, which, unlike fate, which is a kind of anthropomorphic concept implying some kind of cosmic "will," is more based on physical laws and overall probability.

But, Beck says, just because there is such a thing as causal determinism, doesn't make overall probability a matter of complete certainty. Any system we work with is, in some ways, and internal system. And there will always be external influences on the internal system. We probably won't be able to predidt those things.

Beck then gives us another serving of baloney sandwiches when he talks about "universal design" not implying a "universal designer." Of course, I agree that "design" doesn't imply a "designer." But nobody ever seems to give good arguments regarding that point.

Beck then moves on to a discussion of order, which he illustrates by using the information theory. In Information Theory, Beck says, there is a signal of information which is trying to reach us. But it comes through random "noise." The signal-to-noise ratio determines how likely we are to receive the information.

Energy is needed to maintain the integrity of information, because it is constantly fighting against the background randomness, or "noise" of the universe. However, signals often develop energy-saving tricks, such as packing very constant bits of information together. These constant bits of information have low value. Energy is saved for higher-value information, which uses more energy, but provides rare and more important information.

One way this theory manifests itself, Beck seems to believe, is in instruments of measurement. Instruments of measurement are usually calibrated, so that their accuracy is assured. However, as instruments deteriorate, they become less accurate. The best instrument is the one that stays accurate for the longest time.

The best way to calibrate an instrument is by using some "first" unit of measurement that cannot deteriorate under almost any circumstance -- such as the "meter," which is now determined by measuring the emission of a mercury-198 wavelength, as the mercury-198 isotope escapes from gold which has been subjected to neutron bombardment.

Beck gives a short discussion of genius, discovery, and the mind of the scientist. He reiterates the fact that a scientist is a human being, subject to all the same emotional factors as any other human being.

Beck now returns to a discussion of cells. He begins by quickly discussing the gene. He says that all organisms have two processes: reproduction and regulation. In reproduction, an organism creates. In regulation, an organism limits itself.

Organisms also, Beck says, have certain traits, or characteristics. Different species may have certain pronounced characteristics. But within species, these characteristics may vary. Variations can be carried through from the organism's parents. These variations are called genotypes. Or variations can occur through the effects of the environment. These variations are called phenotypes.

Gregor Mendel was the first person to conduct research on heredity and variation. In the 1850s, Mendel investigated how traits carry through from generation to generation. Mendel's research led Mendel to believe that the traits are passed on from one generation to the next by something physical. This physical thing, though it was unknown, was, in 1902, named a "gene" by Wilhelm Johannsen.

Scientists then discovered chromosomes. The idea mutation was also proposed: the factor that could alter the "permanence" of the traits passed on in genes.

A better understanding of genes, Beck claims, was achieved through the study of viruses. In 1876, the scientist named Robert Koch, developed four postulates on viruses. These were postulates for working with viruses in experiments. Koch's postulates were that the virus had to be always associated with a disease; that it had to be kept in a pure culture; that it had to be injected into a healthy creature susceptible to the disease; and that it had to be taken back out of the creature and isolated in a pure culture again.

Louis Pasteur tried to find the cause of rabies by working along Koch's guidelines. But he couldn't. He was trying to see the cause of rabies inside the pure culture dish. It wasn't going to happen. Rabies needed to act on living tissue. In this way it was discovered that one could only see viruses' cause by seeing them acting on living tissue.

As microscopic biology became a part of science again, and as the technology of microscopy developed, scientists could see viruses at work. Scientists watched as viruses entered the nuclei of healthy cells. Twenty-four minutes would elapse. The cell-nuclei would suddenly explode, and huge amounts of new viruses would burst out from the nuclei, moving on and attacking other cells.

Scientists did more work on this, especially with work on viruses that attacked bacteria -- bacterial viruses, or bacteriophages.

From this work, scientists determined that during the twenty-four-minute "eclipse" period, when the bacteria were inside the cell-nuclei, the viruses were actually re-combining with something inside the nuclei. Through this combination, the viruses were reproducing. Once they hit a certain number, they'd explode from the nuclei. Thus the scientists determined that viruses were discrete recombinable genetic units.

Beck moves to a discussion of enzymes, which are chemicals which control the production of chemicals in the body, and basically determine all of the body's structure. Scientists discovered that radiation can affect genes. Genes affect enzymes. Certain radiation effects on single genes affect only certain single enzymes. So scientists developed the "one-gene one-enzyme" theory.

But the new question was, what is the chemical of a gene? Scientists had known about the chemical inside a nucleus, DNA, for a while. But they hadn't thought it was important. However, now that they saw the effects the nucleic chemicals had on viruses, they thought DNA might be of some importance.

It was eventually postulated that DNA is the chemical that provides traits, as well as the transformative principle of the traits, to an organism. Watson and Crick developed their double-helix theory of DNA.

DNA was then also assumed to be a major part in protein production. DNA, residing in the nucleus, was like a master copy of the body's information. DNA would unzip, RNA would attach to one side of DNA, then leave the nucleus. RNA would find protein and enzymes, which it would imprint with its information. The protein and enzymes would then go off and create more building blocks -- cells or cell parts or cell nutrients, I guess -- for the body.

From here Beck moves on to discussions of the origin of life. Most of this is Beck trying to imagine the creation of life in the primordial earth of billions of years ago. Beck starts with the simple chemical elements of earth. He says that somehow the simple chemical elements must have combined to create more complex chemical elements.

The development of complex chemical elements, along with some sort of extremely improbable, but probably unknowable, events, such as some sort of radiation, led to some sort of organization that was like a living organism. This continued to develop and form a living organism.

How did the improbabilities beat out the massive probabilities that, it would seem to Beck, would dictate that life couldn't be created? Well, Beck says, there were one billion years for it to happen. So maybe that was enough time for one improbability to beat all the improbabilities.

Beck then discusses the ideas of complex forms of life. How do complex organisms come to exist? How do smaller forms of life relinquish, it would seem, their control to the larger, singular form of life of which they are a part? How do all these life-forms function together? How do they maintain their homeostasis? How do they remain stable? And how does it come about that one part of the body (the brain, perhaps) seems to control all the other parts of the body?

Beck thankfully doesn't delve too deeply into answering these questions. I'm pretty sure he feels like these are the questions future generations of biologists will either answer or, like him, puzzle over.

However, Beck does give indications of future areas of interest. For interest, the cell-fusion, which seems to complement cell-fission. Cell-fission is the reproductive process of cells. Cells reproduce by splitting. But what makes cells come together? What makes them fuse into a more complex organism?

Beck also seems to be very interested in embryology. Embryology seems to indicate the different phases of evolution which have led up to man in the present. But at certain moments in its development, the embryo is made up of very basic cells, "precursor" cells, which don't seem to be divided into, say, bone cells, blood cells, etc.

These cells could say a lot about how these various types of cells come into being. A cause should come before an effect. And, Beck seems to say, if you study a bone cell once it's a bone cell, you really won't see what caused it to become a bone cell.

Beck discusses a few other areas of possible interest for biology, such as cell duplication, differentiation, and regeneration, as well as a seeming geometrical orientation of the cell. He also seems to think that the purposiveness, or goal-oriented behavior, of simple and complex organisms is of interest.

Beck spends about twelve pages discussing the problems behind the search of modern science for a cure to cancer. He then spends about seven pages discussing the reasons that "mind" as a concept is still an interesting question for the biologist.

Beck ends his book with a discussion of the future of science. He describes how science is looked to nowadays as a performer of all kinds of miracles. People seem to believe science can do anything, Beck says, from making fertilizer or televisions, to ensuring the nation's military security. Beck talks about how various military and government agencies, as well as industrial and corporate entities, have enormous resources devoted to scientific research.

Beck speaks for a while about the possibility of extending human life infinitely. He says it seems like it is possible. If you take all the destructive elements out of life, especially the bacteria, Beck says, you can probably remove a lot of what ages people. Then you would need to find the genes that age people and get rid of those. Then people could probably live a long time, if not forever.

Beck then spends a few pages discussing what the new frontiers for biology are. He finally winds up the book by saying that science is not a parent, and that men are not infants. Man is still a man, and science is still man's creation. Men cannot act like infants in need of care. They will have to care for themselves.

As an adult baby, of course, I find this to be a hell of a note to end a book on.

Seeing through Evil Eyes -- Book of the Damned (Part Two)

(All quotes in this post come from the edition of Book of the Damned on the Project Gutenberg website. This edition is available for free at the link below.

Book of the Damned)

In Charles Fort's expression of a quasi-existent world, there are three kinds of evil. One kind of evil is the things that have been good becoming too old for their time. Another kind of evil is the future good, which is not quite yet ready to be accepted as the good. As Fort says:

"Evil is outlived virtue, or incipient virtue that has not yet established itself, or any other phenomena that is not seeming adjustment, harmony, consistency, with a dominant."

Fort's third description of evil is simply being the use by things of other things for which the first things are useful.

Fort's third description is made in direct reference to the extra-terrestrial beings for whom Fort believes we are property.

This third description of evil is, of course, only evil for the things that are being made use of. In other words, Fort believes that we would see the aliens who "own" us as evil simply because they think of us as their property.

Fort's Book of the Damned is famous for his quote, "I think we're property."

Fort's opinion in this matter is quite serious, and his evidence for anomalous phenomena occurring throughout human history is all directed to point to this expression of his.

Fort doesn't believe things. He "accepts" them. This is a hard thing to remember, as I type.

Fort "accepts" that earth used to be a No-man's land, fought over by beings from a number of different planets. But one alien race has managed to gain control of the planet from other alien races. That alien race fends off all other beings from our planet and has complete control over us.

Fort also accepts that there is a group of human beings that has had contact with this alien race for a long time. He first mentions this group as a "secret society," that chilling phrase of modern history, made even more spine tingling by contemporary conspiracy. Fort hypothesizes that for every anomalous phenomenon reported, one might be able to trace an investigator to the area.

"But," Fort asks, "what if (this investigator) had no anthropological, lapiderian, or meteorological affiliations -- but did belong to a secret society -- It is only a dawning credibility."

Fort later hypotesizes that this secret society might be akin to a cult, guiding humanity through various stages of development.

"All this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received -- from Somewhere else -- in our mysterious usefulness."

Fort has devised this idea, as he says, from the evidence he's found of anomalous phenomena. He has, he tells us again and again, compiled a mass of data. Accumulation of data, in Fort's expression, brings things from a phantomic or ghostly state into a state of substantiality. So as evidence piles up, the phenomena behind the evidence become less deniable and more substantial.

But as Fort compiles more and more data, he seems to have more and more ideas about what kind of existence this data justifies.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book. I'm actually surprised that I'm only this far along. I feel like I've studied my brains out. It's not a big book, and it's actually a lot of fun to read. But I feel like I've read a lot and hardly gotten anywhere.

Anyway, I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book, and already I've encountered the following planets:

Super-Romanimus -- The planet from which all the Romans came.

Super-Israelimus -- The planet from which all the Israelites came.

Azuria -- The planet from which all the Britains came. Azuria, actually, is a planet of blue people. The first Britains were actually blue -- they didn't paint themselves blue. Later on, the humanized Azurians no longer wanted the space-dwelling Azurians controlling them. So the Azurians left the planet. But before they left, they sent down huge rays of electricity to the earth, literally vitrifying a number of stone forts surrounding (but not in) England.

Monstrator -- A gigantic, spindle-shaped planet that has been seen on a number of occasions floating before the sun.

Melanicus -- Not really a planet at all, but a bat-shaped ship -- or a bat-shaped alien -- with wings hundreds of miles long. Actually, Fort's descriptions of Melanicus are so beautiful, I'll quote them:

"Vast dark thing with the wings of a super-bat, or jet-black super-construction; most likely one of the spores of the Evil One.

Fort clarifies the third conception of evil in this second quote on Melanicus:

"That upon the wings of a super-bat, (Melanicus) broods over this earth and over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings, or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tip -- a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful. He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he's a vast, black, brooding vampire."

Vulcan -- which is not a planet at all, but rather a whole bunch of objects which have passed between Mercury and the sun. But many astronomers, including one names Leverrier, have claimed these multiple phenomena to be one planet.

Fort claims that Leverrier believed in these phenomena being one planet so much that, when it was finally proved not to be so, he died. Fort says this was a "translation to the Positive Absolute," a kind of apotheosis a thing in the Fortean realm of quasi-existence (the plane on which we live) can experience when it holds so steadfastly to the things it identifies with that even total prove of its incongruity with reality will not shake its belief.

Incidentally, Fort also expresses that the stars in the sky are fixed, not moving. He says, as well, that stars are something like the souls of entities (human or otherwise) which have translated to the Positive Absolute. Fort says:

"Data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds and worlds in hordes; tremendous worlds and tiny worlds; some of them made of material like the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions made of iron and steel."

One super-celestial entity Fort does not mention in the cosmogoria above is the Super-Sargasso Sea, the vast, formless region in which sits the world of the Genesistrine, from which elements of our earth have been deposited, via sky-borne gelatinous regions, in free-fall.

These worlds seem to keep multiplying themselves. It's an incredible feat. And there's never a minute where I, as a reader, get bored with the experience. And I love all the data. But it seems so overwhelming that, as a new piece of data arises, Fort seems to invent a whole new story around it.

Fort claims to systematize. He even says that he's guilty of excluding, just as much as any of the scientists he berates are. But his universe just keeps on expanding. If a stone falls to the earth -- a new planet appears in Charles Fort's heaven!

I think there's an interesting quote of Fort's that connects both his tendency to multiply worlds and his belief in some kind of conspiracy theory involving humans and aliens:

"Unfortunately for myself, 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 communications with all the inhabitants of this earth. I fit my notions to the data I find."

Fort has plenty of data. And plenty of notions.

But -- in spite of the fact that Fort says he looks out widely but amorphously, indefinitely and heterogeneously, there really is one point where his already bloating fantasy literally fragments. Fort himself commits an act of psycho-tropism, a mental "turning-away" from a subject matter. And not long after he does this, an image occurs in his work, which, although it is an objective piece of evidence, is truly an act of fragmentation.

This is the point where Fort speaks about poltergeists. He -- I should say -- barely speaks about poltergeists: only long enough to reject them.

However, for all the times he -- convincingly! -- shows how the rejections by conventional scientists of the reports of anomalous events are really only flimsy rejections, Fort manages to put up only a flimsy series of rejections against reports of poltergeists.

Fort gives two instances of all the windows of one or two houses being broken: one incident in Bermondsey in 1872, and one in Chiswick in 1841. In both of these incidents, people seem to have been puzzled as to where the stones could have come from. But Fort claims that the stones came from above.

This seems possible to me -- that the stones could have fallen from above. But to fly through windows, and at such an angle that they'd break furniture and even injure people inside the house -- seems like the stones would have to be coming from a much more horizontal than vertical angle.

Fort gives a few different types of conventional-scientific resistances to anomalous trauma, as one might think of it:

1. The thing was always there
2. The thing was swept up in a whirlwind and dropped down somewhere else
3. Complete disregard
4. Fraud
5. Identification with something else (without explaining how something else got there)
6. Amnesia

I would put Fort's resistance to this idea of poltergeists as a kind of counterpart to his second type of resistance. Fort says that if a bunch of stones come from somewhere, they have to come from the sky. They can't possibly have been thrown vertically by, say, poltergeists.

Fort admits that he's excluding, just as a scientist would, in this case. He claims, not long after rejecting poltergeists:

"I have always been in sympathy with the dogmatists and exclusionists: to seem to be is falsely and arbitrarily and dogmatically to exclude."

He then claims that he's rejecting poltergeists because he doesn't want the theories of his cosmology to burgeon into an unsustainable mass of concepts.

"So that this book shall approximate to form, or that our data shall approximate to organization, or that we shall approximate to intelligibility, we have to call ourselves back constantly from wandering off into infinitude."

However, I find it kind of interesting that Fort, right after rejecting the idea of poltergeists throwing rocks through windows, then goes on to rather drastically alter (in my opinion) his theory regarding the gelatinous areas in the sky -- these areas suddenly become vast icy areas in the sky.

Not only do these areas in the sky suddenly become vast icy areas instead of vast gelatinous areas -- but the earth itself becomes flat! The universe itself becomes flat. Fort says there may come a day when people will simply walk to Mars or Jupiter. Fort also envisions a future for aviators, where, at a certain altitude, they'll park their vehicles in something like a winter wonderland:

"Aviators of the future. They fly up and up. Then they get out and walk. The fishing's good: the bait's right there. They find messages from other worlds -- and within three weeks there's a big trade worked up in forged messages."

Not long after this, Fort says:

"We begin to suspect that this is not so much a book we're writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences."

But -- his coincidences, the ones that make his theories -- or the coincidences that the scientists are using to reject the evidence of anomalous phenomena?

What I find more interesting about the "Aviators of the future" quote is that Fort says mentions "forged messages," as if that's a big joke -- that the first thing aviators would be doing would be forging and selling messages after seeing how much demand there was for the actual messages.

This is interesting to me because in one of the sections preceding this one, Fort's topic of investigation was evidence of stones, wedges, other shaped objects, coins, and stone tablets -- all inscribed with characters that appeared to be letters. Fort asserted that these items were objects that had fallen to earth or been left on earth by alien races. But, largely, these items were alleged to be communications, either between aliens and earthlings or aliens and aliens on earth.

After this section, Fort gives a very clear description of Intermediateness, and the reasons that people have for resisting new phenomena in our current state of quasi-existence:

"Intermediateness, where only to "be" positive is to generate corresponding and, perhaps, equal negativeness. In our acceptance, it is, in quasi-existence, premonitory, or pre-natal, or pre-awakening consciousness of a real existence.

"But this consciousness of realness is the greatest resistance to efforts to realize or to become real -- because it is feeling that realness has been attained."

This section moves into a section of evidence relating to the visitation and even population of this earth by giants (or large beings) and fairies (or small beings). Two examples of fairies were extremely interesting to me. One was the phenomenon of "fairy crosses," or formations, in different parts of the world, of small cemetery-like areas of crosses. Another was a cave in Edinburgh, where in 1836, two boys found seventeen very small coffins, with wooden dolls inside.

This section is now followed by another philosophical statement by Fort on how Intermediateness attempts to reach Universal Reality -- or translation to the Positive Absolute -- or Localization of the Universal -- through the two processes of attraction and repulsion.

"'Everything' in Intermediateness is not a thing, but is an endeavor to become something -- by breaking away from its continuity, or merging away with all other phenomena -- is an attempt to break away from the very essence of a relative existence and become absolute -- if have not surrendered to, or become part of, some higher attempt:

"To this process there are two aspects: -- Attraction, or the spirit of everything to assimilate all other things -- if it have not given in and subordinated to -- or have not been assimilated by -- some higher attempted system, unity, entity, harmony, equilibrium -- and -- Repulsion, or the attempt of everything to disregard or exclude the unassimilable."

In other words, Fort, coming into the section where he rejects poltergeists, basically equates the process of individuation from the Absolute with the scientific processes of skepticism. But, in the first third of this book, Fort has equated the process of individuation from the Absolute with "abrupt transitions" from Nature, which assert their Positiveness in this world by defying the very systems wishing to defy their existence.

So -- Fort rejects the poltergeist explanation of the evidence of thrown stones. And, suddenly, the gelatinous areas in the sky become watery areas. The gelatinous areas seem to disappear.

Not long after this, Fort compares current scientific theories to "rag dolls that keep infants occupied and noiseless." He says there's nothing wrong with this. But the problem occurs at "the arrival of rag dolls into maturity."

This idea of rag dolls growing into maturity reminds me of the miniature coffins found by the two boys in Edinburgh. There were wooden dolls inside those coffins. Those dolls, though not rag dolls, hadn't just grown into maturity: they'd grown into old age and death.

But, in the normal course of life, I don't think society would be affected one way or another if a rag doll grew into maturity. In fact -- I think, for some people, rag dolls do grow into maturity. What would be of more harm (in some people's minds -- certainly not mine!) would be if the infant didn't grow out of its infancy. If the rag doll grew while the infant did not.

I think this is the image Fort has, while his metaphor disguises this image for him. Remember that, after he mentions the inscribed stones and coins, he speaks about a new consciousness being "pre-natal" in humanity.

Right after this consciousness is "pre-natal," it becomes composed of races of giants and fairies. Right after these alien beings, who, as far as I can tell, were completely missing, un-present from the earth, being sending writings -- actual writings -- though completely indecipherable -- to Fort's planet, they suddenly appear. But they appear as fairies and giants!

Fort is suddenly unable -- it seems to me -- and I don't know anything about Charles Fort -- so I'm not saying this is a knowledgeable theory -- to deal with actually having beings on this imagined planet of his.

So Fort, through his narrative-manipulation of the data -- causes the beings to disappear. Before he causes them to disappear, he chants a magico-philosophical spell at the giants and narratives: he excludes them, by empowering the scientific dogma for his own purposes. He removes the law of "abrupt transition" from the process of the Absolute becoming the Individual -- and he replaces it with Attraction and Repulsion -- under which fall all the processes of conventional-scientific resistance he'd previously mentioned.

But -- then -- once he has caused his giants and fairies to disappear (I suppose that would be a psycho-tropism), he is left with psychic force in this world of his -- this world of his is this world of his data. And this psychic force still has some sort of humanoid characteristics. But it doesn't have a form. It's invisible again. It's a poltergeist.

But as soon as it acts -- through the data -- Fort has to bind it. The stones can't have been thrown by a poltergeist. They had to have been dropped from the anti-gravity areas in the sky. And so -- the psychic force that began in the sky -- in Fort's description of his world to us -- through his narrative-manipulation of these genuine relations of anomalous experience -- has gone back to the sky.

I think there is a process here. Fort spent quite some time in his book talking about things dropping to the earth. In fact, after he'd gone through his relation of all the natural phenomena falling to earth from this Genesistrine region, through the anti-gravity gelatinous regions of the sky, he suddenly starts giving us evidence of stone objects like rudimentary artifacts falling to the earth.

Then these artifacts start being inscribed with things. But -- suddenly -- Fort's evidence starts finding things buried in the earth. Instead of things falling to the earth, Fort's evidence starts showing up as things -- things of a higher level development, by the way, things like nails, masks, and so forth -- being found buried in the earth.

There is a psychic development here. Objects from the unconscious couldn't reach Fort from the earth -- because he had such a resistance to the earth. But after so much "communication" from the earth, Fort was finally able to start finding objects buried in the earth. The objects themselves moved from being natural objects, vegetation, animals, or refuse, to suddenly being rudimentary artifacts. Then, more developed artifacts were coming up from the earth.

Finally the objects really began communicating with Fort, through the inscribed objects. But the objects led to actually embodied presences of giants and fairies -- or at least their implication. In fact, there was only the idea that these giants and fairies existed.

In the second third of this book, the closest I got to seeing the giants was -- giant bones in the American Museum of Natural History, which Fort says "have been reconstructed into terrifying but 'proper' dinosaurs."

In the second third of this book, the closest I got to seeing the fairies was -- the fairy coffins the boys found in Edinburgh.

So -- Fort, through his narrative-manipulation of the genuine evidence, still didn't even allow these primordially humanoid psychic forces to be completely embodied before he once again banished them to invisibility.

Although it's interesting to note that the fairy-doll still survives in metaphorical form -- threatening to grow up into a "mature" rag-doll, while Fort's side of the metaphor apparently still remains a little baby. (Again -- I don't have any problem with remaining a little baby. I think it's terrific.)

Now Fort has banished his psychic forces from embodiment. He then banishes them from having even the human force of poltergeists.

What's the first thing that happens? The gelatinous region in the sky turns into water. It then stops sending down human-like artifacts. No more coins, masks, nails, wedges, axes, etc. It starts sending down fish and frogs again -- fish and frogs were all that seemed to be sent down from the gelatinous areas, sometimes, in the first third of the book.

After this happens, the next thing to occur is that the watery area in the sky turns into -- ice! Ice starts falling from the sky -- not hail (which had fallen from the sky in the first third of the book), but actual chunks, sometimes even huge blocks, of ice! And sometimes frogs and fish are actually embedded in the ice!

Fort's emotional state is freezing back up -- because of this psycho-tropism he had regarding the psychic forces he was allowing to come forth (in his narrative-manipulation of this genuine data of anomalous experiences).

This ice then develops into large disks of ice floating in the sky. The large disks of ice even eclipse the sun -- which is interesting, considering the following sections of the book are all about bodies being tracked travelling across the sun, the moon, and other planets.

At one point, the disk of ice even fragments -- suddenly bursts into pieces.

Fort quotes the Monthly Weather Review, regarding an event that took place on June 3, 1894, in Portland, Oregon:

"(The sight) gave the impression of a vast field of ice suspended in the atmosphere, and suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand."

For the time being, I would say, Fort's communication has been cut off, at such a close distance, at least, with these unconscious elements which have been exchanging images with him through Fort's own narrative-manipulation of data.

Fort sees an icy area in the sky -- but it no longer has any real integrity. It's sagging in the middle, and it's even forming icicles -- melting. Fort tries to justify this with a philosophical invention:

"A vast field of aerial ice -- it is inter to this earth's gravitation -- but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to the earth, and is susceptible to gravitation -- by cohesion with the main mass, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms icicles -- then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes FALLS IN FRAGMENTS that are protrusive with icicles."

I capitalized the "FALLS IN FRAGMENTS" for emphasis. This is not a whole disk of ice. It's fragmented.

From this, Fort moves directly to a discussion -- which is as far as I've gotten for this post -- and it doesn't show any signs of stopping soon, where I stopped -- of sightings of celestial bodies passing in front of the sun, moon, and planets.

But right as Fort begins to discuss these far away objects (he moved them there himself, through his narrative-manipulation, after their closeness to his own psychic earth became too strong for him to handle), he makes mention of the Spirit of the Era. This, in Fort's theory, is the greater quasi-reality of which we are all a part.

All scientists adhere to a greater system of science. And this science is a product of the age. The age is charged with the Spirit of the Era -- which is the greater attempt at Localization of the Universal, to which, basically, everything in our quasi-existence surrenders itself.

"The dominant spirit of the era -- to which all minds had to equilibrate or be negligible, unheard, submerged. -- The system that was growing up independently of all (individual) astronomers."

In my opinion, Fort has been frightened by his own imagery. I believe he had to insist, at the beginning of his book that everything was falling from the sky (though a lot of it does really seem to have been falling from the sky!) was because he was afraid of the earth, the Dionysian, the feminine, whatever you want to call it. When he got over his fear, elements of the unconscious came to earth, showed up in the earth. But they took on too much power, and Fort had to banish them.

Banishing these forces from earth again, Fort suddenly saw the benefit of excluding things from his system. He started seeing things through the scientists' eyes. He now saw how a psychic life could benefit from excluding things that frightened it, like scientists excluded things that it couldn't handle.

Again, Fort paints a picture of a science that is false, a bubble which is about to pop. But it doesn't pop. Because now it is actually held together by this exclusionary tactic:

"Astronomy and inflation: and by inflation we mean expansion of the attenuated. Or that the science of Astronomy is a phantom-film distended with myth-stuff -- but always our acceptance that it approximates higher to substantiality than did the system that preceded it."

Before this time, Fort had mentioned planets. But the planets he mentioned did not have the personalities that they have after this point. Super-Romanimus, Super-Israelimus, and Azuria are all planets with people on them -- super-missionaries, etc.

But, now, suddenly, the planets themselves are the things with personality -- again, due to Fort's narrative-manipulation of the genuine data.

The first planet that begins to appear is Vulcan -- the most fragmented (so far) of all Fort's creations, but a planet so powerful that it actually manages to kill one of his characters. Leverrier makes all the wrong guesses about Vulcan, thinking it is one planet, when it is really a whole lot of different planets. He's so disappointed by this fact that he dies.

Vulcan is, in one sense, as far away from Fort as it can possibly be. But even at that range, the psychic forces are still felt so powerfully by Fort that they have the power to kill him.

Fort says that, "In a way, at this point occurs the crisis of our whole book."

I'd agree with him there. He continues, "Formulas are against us."

That's interesting. But how does Fort follow up, *after* he introduces another planet -- breaking up and then coming back to his Vulcan story?

"Our acceptance is that Leverrier never did formulate observations. -- That he picked out observations that could be formulated. -- That of this type are all formulas."

If Fort were looking at Leverrier as a part of his own psychic life, he'd see how he had banished the psychic giants and fairies from earth and sent them out to the distant reaches of space. But how this banishment of observations that could not be formulated actually managed to kill him, or to kill him in the character of Leverrier.

Nevertheless, as soon as Fort recognizes that he's gone too far by sending his giants and fairies (or his Monstrator and Vulcans?) all the way out to the sun, he already begins to draw them back in!

I think this is an incredible statement of Fort's psychic strength. And it is interesting that at this point, Fort talks about the physical evolution of life from the reptilian state to the mammalian state -- which I think Jung would attest is a symbol of the healthy psychic development of the personality:

"If, in an embryo, some cells should not live up to the phenomena of their era, the others will sustain the scheduled appearances. Not until an embryo enters the mammalian stage are cells of the reptilian stage false cells."

Again, Fort speaks of a reversal of action. Obviously he experienced a severe psycho-tropism -- a repulsion. His emotions froze, went all the way to the sun, and were powerful enough to kill the image of Leverrier within him. But he's hoping that psychic energy does not have to work according to what people nowadays accept as immutable physical laws:

"Some day some BRAIN will conceive a way of beating Newton's third law -- if every reaction, or resistance, is, or can be, interpretable as stimulus instead of resistance -- if this could be done in mechanics, there's a way open here for someone to own the world."

I emphasized "BRAIN" to make it clear that Fort was talking, at least partially, about a psychic process. Also -- "own the world" would mean take control of one's own world, instead of being property. It would mean allowing the personality to individuate.

Fort goes on to discuss his concept of "dirigible worlds," or planets and super-constructions (world-sized spaceships) without orbits, which can conduct themselves wherever they wish to go. In other words, Fort's pyschic energies may have been banished all the way to the sun. But they can direct themselves, as "dirigible worlds," back to the earth.

Here, Fort makes the extremely exciting statement: "The two great commandments: -- Thou shalt not break Continuity. -- Thou shalt try."

He follows it up with this statement, a kind of condensation of his understanding of the psychic process he's been through so far:

"It is the system that pulls back its variations, as the earth is pulling back the Matterhorn. It is the system that nourishes and rewards, and also freezes out life with the chill of disregard."

But Fort wishes to break free from the system -- and even sees that drifting too far into the system would be a loss of his identity. But he wishes to retain his identity. So he's willing to let his psychic life come back to him, to his "own world," this Fortean realm of imagination compounded of genuine data of anomalous phenomena.

It is at this point that Melanicus -- the Satanic planet described above -- becomes known.

Melanicus and Monstrator may have been planets with personalities. But Melanicus really is a personality. Melanicus is the Devil with wings as large as a planet.

Fort begins discussing the problem of evil at this point -- and, in my opinion, seems to be frightened of a too-humanized image of his pyschic life. He seems to flee from the image of Melanicus, and he drifts into a horribly convoluted discussion of philosophy.

But what's interesting in this discussion is that, whereas before Fort had always made reference to the Absolute as the Absolute -- in his philosophizing, anyway -- he now has a place in his philosophy for the Negative as well as the Positive Absolute.

"It would seem that Intermediateness is a relation between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute. But the Absolute cannot be related."

"It seems thinkable that the Positive Absolute can, by means of Intermediateness, have a quasi-relation, or be only quasi-related, or be the unrelatd, in final terms, or, at least, not be the related, in final terms."

Moving from a discussion of evil, through a discussion of the Negative Absolute (which, I'm pretty sure Fort has brought into his *philosophical* discussions for the first time), Fort now makes this comment about free will:

"In Intermediateness, there is only the paradoxical: that we're free to do what we have to do."

Suddenly, Fort's unconscious is communicating with him again -- through evidence collected of "cup marks," which he takes to be something like electronic lettering actually cut into stone faces, all over the world, "except in the far North, I think." In other words, except in the place full of ice.

At one point these "cup marks" are found all over a Chinese plaza. The people there assume a Devil (Melanicus?) made the marks.

Suddenly -- Fort moves from these communications into Angels -- bright hordes of Angels, which Fort assumes are making a crusade.

How quickly Fort's psyche has moved! It was all the way over in Mercury. Then it was flying to earth in the form of the Devil-Vampire-Planet Melanicus. Now it's already hovering over the earth in the guise of a multiplicity of angels!

"Hordes upon hordes of them. -- Beings massed like the clouds of souls, or the commingling whiffs of spirituality, or the exhalations of souls that Dore pictured so often."

But -- it's obvious here -- that Fort's major form of defense, as it has been all this time, is to fragment identity. He had to fragment his Devil Melanicus to make it into "safe" angels.

Fort seems to be afraid here of the control that the angels would have over him if they were all transmuted back into Melanicus:

"I should say that now we're under cultivation: that we're conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it to all our own nobler and higher instincts."

So the aliens, whose "property" we are, are cultivating us. If Fort weren't afraid (who wouldn't be afraid? I'd be afraid!), he'd realize that the Devil was involved in cultivating his soul. But Fort has to fragment the personality of the Devil into the multiplicity of the angels. He knows he's deluding himself in this.

Fort then relates -- a multiplicity -- of light and dark bodies that cause various levels of obscuration of the sun and moon. Sometimes these bodies are light, then dark, or dark, then light.

Suddenly Melanicus appears again! Fort seems to have allowed Melanicus to re-integrate into one figure. But first Fort asks the reader if *he's* forgotten Melanicus -- as if someone reading Paradise Lost could forget the Devil!

But Fort seems, again, to be serious about allowing the communications to return to him -- and, possibly, for personalities even to return to his earth. He understands the importaince of his work.

"Acceptance either way calls not for mere revision but revolution in the science of astronomy."

However, I think Fort -- who was really brave to let the giants and fairies come to his earth -- now realizes that, since he's living with one psychic structure, he can only develop an integrated personality by changing his currently dominant psychic structure with a different one. And that will take time and effort.

"All intellection is associative -- or that we remember that which correlates with a dominant."

And:

"Our own expression on evolution by successive dominants and their correlates."

However, the following quote is the most interesting statement by Fort so far. He seems to believe that he must change his psychic structure, or else he loses a chance at maintaining the integrity of his personality. But he also makes a comment about the moon -- where Melanicus seems to be hovering at this moment, that is also quite interesting.

"The point in Intermediatism here is: -- Not that to adapt to the conditions of quasi-existence is to have success in quasi-existence, but is to lose one's soul -- But is to lose "one's" chance of attaining soul, self, or identity."

"One indignation quoted from Proctor (an excluding scientist refuting the vision of swarms of angels) interest us: 'What happens on the moon may at any time happen to this earth.' -- That is just the teaching of this department of Advanced Astronomy."

This is the point where Fort gives his descriptions of evil as outlived virtue and incipient virtue.

Fort has developed his sense of evil from one of basically being possessed by the devil to one of either using an outmoded psychic structure in an attempt to integrate his personality, or using a too-young psychic structure in an attempt to integrate his personality.

I'll end this post by letting Fort have the last word. In one quote, he gives a good view of exclusion in science, and why conventional scientists are necessary to the world. In its plain sense, I think it's very good (though kind of cynical). But it also shows the point of view of Fort -- as needing a reinforcing element from his old psychic structure while his new one is developing.

It's also interesting to note that in the first quote, Fort again mentions a "shadow," which is how he recently described the planet-Devil-Vampire Melanicus.

The second quote shows that the new psychic structure, or "new dominant," is developing.

"It's bad for trade to have an intense darkness come upon an unaware community and frighten people out of their purchasing values. -- But if an obscuration be foretold, and if it then occur -- may seem a little uncanny -- only a shadow -- and no one who was about to buy a pair of shoes runs home panic-stricken and saves the money."

"But -- if we are in harmony with a new dominant, or spirit of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be overthrown; if we have data of many obscurations, not only upon the moon, but upon our own earth, as convincing of vast intervening bodies, usually invisible, as is any regularized, predicted eclipse. -- One looks up at the sky. -- It seems incredible that, say, at the distance of the moon, there could be, but be invisible, a solid body, say, the size of the moon."