Ok so I've finally got around to buying the Charles Fort collection. I've been reading Book of the Damned and it is absolutely awesome. The guy has not only a sharp intellect, but a poetic writing style. It's a rare combination and I pretty much only see it in older publications.
Though the reports are interesting, mainly I enjoy his interspersed commentary because his opinions are so much in line with my own.
I'm gonna put up some excerpts that I especially like, hopefully you guys will like them as well:
"It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: Or that red is not positively different from yellow, it is only another degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of: that red and yellow are continuous, or that they merge in orange.
"So then that, if upon the basis of yellowness and redness, science should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things as veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the attempted border-line."
"We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists - that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness. So then, our whole quasi-existence is an intermediate stage between positiveness and negativeness or realness and unrealness. Like purgatory, I think."
After reporting on multiple instances of bizarre things raining down throughout our early history, he had this to say:
"For instance, by the statistic method, I could "prove" that a black rain has fallen regularly every seven months, somewhere upon this earth. To do this, I'd have to include red rains and yellow rains, but conventionally, I'd pick out the black particles in the red substances and yellow substances, and disregard the rest. Then, too, if here and there a black rain should be a week early or a month late - that would be "acceleration" or "retardation". This is considered legitimate in working out the periodicities of comets. If black rains, or red and yellow rains with black particles in them, should not appear at all near some dates - we have not read Darwin in vain - "the records are not complete".
I thought this was a great illustration of how we squeeze the world into fitting within our conceptions. We see what we choose to see, based upon what we are looking for and what we are expecting to find.
Here is another great comment:
"Of course, our Intermediatist acceptance is that had this been the strangest substance conceivable, from the strangest other world that could be thought of; somewhere upon this earth there must be a substance similar to it, or from which it could, at least subjectively, or according to description, not be easily distinguishable."
These are such eloquent descriptions of the flimsy grasp we have upon our world, and how no matter how different the "real" world may be from our imagined picture, the means are readily available to drag ourselves back to the safety of the familiar.
I'd like to hear any of you guys' thoughts on these subjects.
Or if you're digging the quotes, I'll put some more up.
Though the reports are interesting, mainly I enjoy his interspersed commentary because his opinions are so much in line with my own.
I'm gonna put up some excerpts that I especially like, hopefully you guys will like them as well:
"It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: Or that red is not positively different from yellow, it is only another degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of: that red and yellow are continuous, or that they merge in orange.
"So then that, if upon the basis of yellowness and redness, science should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things as veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the attempted border-line."
"We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists - that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness. So then, our whole quasi-existence is an intermediate stage between positiveness and negativeness or realness and unrealness. Like purgatory, I think."
After reporting on multiple instances of bizarre things raining down throughout our early history, he had this to say:
"For instance, by the statistic method, I could "prove" that a black rain has fallen regularly every seven months, somewhere upon this earth. To do this, I'd have to include red rains and yellow rains, but conventionally, I'd pick out the black particles in the red substances and yellow substances, and disregard the rest. Then, too, if here and there a black rain should be a week early or a month late - that would be "acceleration" or "retardation". This is considered legitimate in working out the periodicities of comets. If black rains, or red and yellow rains with black particles in them, should not appear at all near some dates - we have not read Darwin in vain - "the records are not complete".
I thought this was a great illustration of how we squeeze the world into fitting within our conceptions. We see what we choose to see, based upon what we are looking for and what we are expecting to find.
Here is another great comment:
"Of course, our Intermediatist acceptance is that had this been the strangest substance conceivable, from the strangest other world that could be thought of; somewhere upon this earth there must be a substance similar to it, or from which it could, at least subjectively, or according to description, not be easily distinguishable."
These are such eloquent descriptions of the flimsy grasp we have upon our world, and how no matter how different the "real" world may be from our imagined picture, the means are readily available to drag ourselves back to the safety of the familiar.
I'd like to hear any of you guys' thoughts on these subjects.
Or if you're digging the quotes, I'll put some more up.