Charles Fort - The Book of the Damned (1919)

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Science of to-day-the superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow-the superstition of to-day.

Charles Fort
The tornado came wriggling, jumping, whirling like a great green snake, darting out a score of glistening fangs.

Charles Fort
If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.

Charles Fort
A river... is water expressing the gravitational relation of different levels.

Charles Fort
There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

Charles Fort
The great difficulty that authoritativeness has to contend with is some other authoritativeness.

Charles Fort
In 1846, everyone who knew a sine from a cosine was out sining and cosining for a planet beyond Uranus. Two of them guessed right.

Charles Fort
There never is a moment when there is not some comet in the sky. Virtually there is no year in which several new comets are not discovered, so plentiful are they. Luminous fleas on a vast black dog - in popular impressions, there is no realization of the extent to which this solar system is flea-bitten.

Charles Fort
If a comet have not the orbit that astronomers have predicted - perturbed. If - like Halley's comet - it be late - even a year late - perturbed. When a train is an hour late, we have small opinion of the predictions of time tables. When a comet's a year late, all we ask is - that it be explained.

Charles Fort
The theologians have recognized that the ideal is the imitation of God. If we be a part of such an organic thing, this thing is God to us, as I am God to the cells that compose me.

Charles Fort
If the Law of Gravitation could be stated as a real utterance, it might be a real resistance to us. But we are told only that gravitation is gravitation.

Charles Fort
In Continuity, it is impossible to distinguish phenomena at their merging-points, so we look for them at their extremes. Impossible to distinguish between animal and vegetable in some infusoria - but hippopotamus and violet. For all practical purposes they're distinguishable enough.

Charles Fort
I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data.

Charles Fort
Would we if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle? Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relations with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation? I think we're property

Charles Fort
There can be no real science where there are indeterminate variables, but every variable is, in finer terms, indeterminate, or irregular, if only to have the appearance of being in Intermediateness is to express regularity unattained.

Charles Fort
Existence is Appetite: the gnaw of being; the one attempt of all things to assimilate to some higher attempt.

Charles Fort
A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Charles Fort
It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damed; that salvation only precedes perdition.

Charles Fort
Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

Charles Fort
My own pseudo-conclusion: That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences.

Charles Fort
But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete — By Truth, I mean the Universal.

Charles Fort
The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.

Charles Fort
One can't learn much and also be comfortable One can't learn much and let anybody else be comfortable

Charles Fort
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them — or they'll march.

Charles Fort
The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.

Charles Fort
The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest —
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.

Charles Fort