d in Intermediateness, not by real standards, but only by
higher approximations to adjustment, harmony, beauty, organization,
consistency, justice, and so on. Evil is outlived virtue, or incipient
virtue that has not yet established itself, or any other phenomenon that
is not in seeming adjustment, harmony, consistency with a dominant. The
astronomers have functioned bravely in the past. They've been good for
business: the big interests think kindly, if at all, of them. It's bad
for trade to have an intense darkness come upon an unaware community and
frighten people out of their purchasing values. But if an obscuration be
foretold, and if it then occur--may seem a little uncanny--only a
shadow--and no one who was about to buy a pair of shoes runs home
panic-stricken and saves the money.

Upon general principles we accept that astronomers have
quasi-systematized data of eclipses--or have included some and
disregarded others.

They have done well.

They have functioned.

But now they're negatives, or they're out of harmony--

If we are in harmony with a new dominant, or the spirit of a new era, in
which Exclusionism must be overthrown; if we have data of many
obscurations that have occurred, not only upon the moon, but upon our
own earth, as convincing of vast intervening bodies, usually invisible,
as is any regularized, predicted eclipse.

One looks up at the sky.

It seems incredible that, say, at the distance of the moon, there could
be, but be invisible, a solid body, say, the size of the moon.

One looks up at the moon, at a time when only a crescent of it is
visible. The tendency is to build up the rest of it in one's mind; but
the unillumined part looks as vacant as the rest of the sky, and it's of
the same blueness as the rest of the sky. There's a vast area of solid
substance before one's eyes. It's indistinguishable from the sky.

In some of our little lessons upon the beauties of modesty and humility,
we have picked out basic arrogances--tail of a peacock, horns of a stag,
dollars of a capitalist--eclipses of astronomers. Though I have no
desire for the job, I'd engage to list hundreds of instances in which
the report upon an expected eclipse has been "sky overcast" or "weather
unfavorable." In our Super-Hibernia, the unfavorable has been construed
as the favorable. Some time ago, when we were lost, because we had not
recognized our own dominant, when we were still of the unchosen and
likely to be mo