tive Absolute. But the
absolute cannot be the related--of course a confession that we can't
really think of it at all, if here we think of a limit to the unlimited.
Doing the best we can, and encouraged by the reflection that we can't do
worse than has been done by metaphysicians in the past, we accept that
the absolute can't be the related. So then that our quasi-state is not a
real relation, if nothing in it is real. On the other hand, it is not an
unreal relation, if nothing in it is unreal. It seems thinkable that the
Positive Absolute can, by means of Intermediateness, have a
quasi-relation, or be only quasi-related, or be the unrelated, in final
terms, or, at least, not be the related, in final terms.

As to free will and Intermediatism--same answer as to everything else.
By free will we mean Independence--or that which does not merge away
into something else--so, in Intermediateness, neither free-will nor
slave-will--but a different approximation for every so-called person
toward one or the other of the extremes. The hackneyed way of expressing
this seems to me to be the acceptable way, if in Intermediateness,
there is only the paradoxical: that we're free to do what we have to do.

I am not convinced that we make a fetish of the preposterous. I think
our feeling is that in first gropings there's no knowing what will
afterward be the acceptable. I think that if an early biologist heard of
birds that grow on trees, he should record that he had heard of birds
that grow on trees: then let sorting over of data occur afterward. The
one thing that we try to tone down but that is to a great degree
unavoidable is having our data all mixed up like Long Island and Florida
in the minds of early American explorers. My own notion is that this
whole book is very much like a map of North America in which the Hudson
River is set down as a passage leading to Siberia. We think of
Monstrator and Melanicus and of a world that is now in communication
with this earth: if so, secretly, with certain esoteric ones upon this
earth. Whether that world's Monstrator and Monstrator's Melanicus--must
be the subject of later inquiry. It would be a gross thing to do: solve
up everything now and leave nothing to our disciples.

I have been very much struck with phenomena of "cup marks."

They look to me like symbols of communication.

But they do not look to me like means of communication between some of
the inhabitants of this earth and othe