ight or dark, they have been
seen and reported so often that the only important reason for their
exclusion is--that they don't fit in.

With dark bodies that are probably external to our own solar system, I
have, in the provincialism that no one can escape, not much concern.
Dark bodies afloat in outer space would have been damned a few years
ago, but now they're sanctioned by Prof. Barnard--and, if he says
they're all right, you may think of them without the fear of doing
something wrong or ridiculous--the close kinship we note so often
between the evil and the absurd--I suppose by the ridiculous I mean the
froth of evil. The dark companion of Algol, for instance. Though that's
a clear case of celestial miscegenation, the purists, or positivists,
admit that's so. In the _Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science_, 1915-394, Prof. Barnard writes of an object--he calls it an
"object"--in Cephus. His idea is that there are dark, opaque bodies
outside this solar system. But in the _Astrophysical Journal_, 1916-1,
he modifies into regarding them as "dark nebulae." That's not so
interesting.

We accept that Venus, for instance, has often been visited by other
worlds, or by super-constructions, from which come ciders and coke and
coal; that sometimes these things have reflected light and have been
seen from this earth--by professional astronomers. It will be noted that
throughout this chapter our data are accursed Brahmins--as, by hypnosis
and inertia, we keep on and keep on saying, just as a good many of the
scientists of the 19th century kept on and kept on admitting the power
of the system that preceded them--or Continuity would be smashed.
There's a big chance here for us to be instantaneously translated to the
Positive Absolute--oh, well--

What I emphasize here is that our damned data are observations by
astronomers of the highest standing, excommunicated by astronomers of
similar standing--but backed up by the dominant spirit of their era--to
which all minds had to equilibrate or be negligible, unheard, submerged.
It would seem sometimes, in this book, as if our revolts were against
the dogmatisms and pontifications of single scientists of eminence. This
is only a convenience, because it seems necessary to personify. If we
look over _Philosophical Transactions_, or the publications of the Royal
Astronomical Society, for instance, we see that Herschel, for instance,
was as powerless as any boy stargazer, to enfo