ith
our pseudo-standard. At present we have not the delusions of Absolutism
that may have translated some of the positivists of the nineteenth
century to heaven. We are Intermediatists--but feel a lurking suspicion
that we may some day solidify and dogmatize and illiberalize into higher
positivists. At present we do not ask whether something be reasonable or
preposterous, because we recognize that by reasonableness and
preposterousness are meant agreement and disagreement with a
standard--which must be a delusion--though not absolutely, of
course--and must some day be displaced by a more advanced
quasi-delusion. Scientists in the past have taken the positivist
attitude--is this or that reasonable or unreasonable? Analyze them and
we find that they meant relatively to a standard, such as Newtonism,
Daltonism, Darwinism, or Lyellism. But they have written and spoken and
thought as if they could mean real reasonableness and real
unreasonableness.

So our pseudo-standard is Inclusionism, and, if a datum be a correlate
to a more widely inclusive outlook as to this earth and its externality
and relations with externality, its harmony with Inclusionism admits it.
Such was the process, and such was the requirement for admission in the
days of the Old Dominant: our difference is in underlying
Intermediatism, or consciousness that though we're more nearly real, we
and our standards are only quasi--

Or that all things--in our intermediate state--are phantoms in a
super-mind in a dreaming state--but striving to awaken to realness.

Though in some respects our own Intermediatism is unsatisfactory, our
underlying feeling is--

That in a dreaming mind awakening is accelerated--if phantoms in that
mind know that they're only phantoms in a dream. Of course, they too are
quasi, or--but in a relative sense--they have an essence of what is
called realness. They are derived from experience or from
senes-relations, even though grotesque distortions. It seems acceptable
that a table that is seen when one is awake is more nearly real than a
dreamed table, which, with fifteen or twenty legs, chases one.

So now, in the twentieth century, with a change of terms, and a change
in underlying consciousness, our attitude toward the New Dominant is the
attitude of the scientists of the nineteenth century to the Old
Dominant. We do not insist that our data and interpretations shall be
as shocking, grotesque, evil, ridiculous, childish, insincere