lly everything has been found out. Sense of finality and illusion
of homogeneity. But that what is called advancing knowledge is violation
of the sense of blankness.

A drop of water. Once upon a time water was considered so homogeneous
that it was thought of as an element. The microscope--and not only that
the supposititiously elementary was seen to be of infinite diversity,
but that in its protoplasmic life there were new orders of beings.

Or the year 1491--and a European looking westward over the ocean--his
feeling that that suave western droop was unbreakable; that gods of
regularity would not permit that smooth horizon to be disturbed by
coasts or spotted with islands. The unpleasantness of even contemplating
such a state--wide, smooth west, so clean against the sky--spotted with
islands--geographic leprosy.

But coasts and islands and Indians and bison, in the seemingly vacant
west: lakes, mountains, rivers--

One looks up at the sky: the relative homogeneity of the
relatively unexplored: one thinks of only a few kinds of phenomena.
But the acceptance is forced upon me that there are modes and modes
and modes of inter-planetary existence: things as different from
planets and comets and meteors as Indians are from bison and prairie
dogs: a super-geography--or celestiography--of vast stagnant regions,
but also of Super-Niagaras and Ultra-Mississippis: and a
super-sociology--voyagers and tourists and ravagers: the hunted and the
hunting: the super-mercantile, the super-piratic, the super-evangelical.

Sense of homogeneity, or our positivist illusion of the unknown--and the
fate of all positivism.

Astronomy and the academic.

Ethics and the abstract.

The universal attempt to formulate or to regularize--an attempt that can
be made only by disregarding or denying.

Or all things disregard or deny that which will eventually invade and
destroy them--

Until comes the day when some one thing shall say, and enforce upon
Infinitude:

"Thus far shalt thou go: here is absolute demarcation."

The final utterance:

"There is only I."

In the _Monthly Notices of the R.A.S._, 11-48, there is a letter from
the Rev. W. Read:

That, upon the 4th of September, 1851, at 9:30 A.M., he had seen a host
of self-luminous bodies, passing the field of his telescope, some slowly
and some rapidly. They appeared to occupy a zone several degrees in
breadth. The direction of most of them was due east to west, but some
moved