Free The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

continue to impose its pseudo-positiveness until it be driven out by a higher approximation to realness;
    That the science of chemistry is as impositive as fortune-telling—
    Or no—
    That, though it represents a higher approximation to realness than does alchemy, for instance, and so drove out alchemy, it is still only somewhere between myth and positiveness.
    The attempt at realness, or to state a real and unmodified fact here, is the statement:
    All red rains are colored by sands from the Sahara Desert.
    My own impositivist acceptances are:
    That some red rains are colored by sands from the Sahara Desert;
    Some by sands from other terrestrial sources;
    Some by sands from other worlds, or from their deserts—also from aerial regions too indefinite or amorphous to be thought of as “worlds” or planets—
    That no supposititious whirlwind can account for the hundreds of millions of tons of matter that fell upon Australia, Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean and Europe in 1902 and 1903—that a whirlwind that could do that would not be supposititious.
    But now we shall cast off some of our own wessicality by accepting that there have been falls of red substance other than sand.
    We regard every science as an expression of the attempt to be real. But to be real is to localize the universal—or to make some one thing as wide as all things—successful accomplishment of which I cannot conceive of. The prime resistance to this endeavor is the refusal of the rest of the universe to be damned, excluded, disregarded, to receive Christian Science treatment, by something else so attempting. Although all phenomena are striving for the Absolute—or have surrendered to and have incorporated themselves in higher attempts, simply to be phenomenal, or to have seeming in Intermediateness is to express relations.
    A river.
    It is water expressing the gravitational relation of different levels.
    The water of the river.
    Expression of chemic relations of hydrogen and oxygen—which are not final.
    A city.
    Manifestation of commercial and social relations.
    How could a mountain be without base in a greater body?
    Storekeeper live without customers?
    The prime resistance to the positivist attempt by Science is its relations with other phenomena, or that it only expresses those relations in the first place. Or that a Science can have seeming, or survive in Intermediateness, as something pure, isolated, positively different, no more than could a river or a city or a mountain or a store.
    This Intermediateness—wide attempt by parts to be wholes—which cannot be realized in our quasi-state, if we accept that in it the co-existence of two or more wholes or universals is impossible-high approximation to which, however, may be thinkable—
    Scientists and their dream of “pure science.”
    Artists and their dream of “art for art’s sake.”
    It is our notion that if they could almost realize, that would be almost realness: that they would instantly be translated into real existence. Such thinkers are good positivists, but they are evil in an economic and sociologic sense, if, in that sense, nothing has justification for being, unless it serve, or function for, or express the relations of, some higher aggregate. So Science functions for and serves society at large, and would, from society at large, receive no support, unless it did so divert itself or dissipate and prostitute itself. It seems that by prostitution I mean usefulness.
    There have been red rains that, in the middle ages, were called “rains of blood.” Such rains terrified many persons, and were so unsettling to large populations, that Science, in its sociologic relations, has sought, by Mrs. Eddy’s method, to remove an evil—
    That “rains of blood” do not exist;
    That rains so called are only of water colored by sand from the Sahara Desert.
    My own acceptance is that such assurances, whether fictitious or not, whether the Sahara is a “dazzling white” desert or not,