idual
soul within the individual being. That outer universe of suns and
moons and atoms is a secondary affair. It is the death-result of
living individuals. There is a great polarity in life itself. Life
itself is dual. And the duality is life and death. And death is not
just shadow or mystery. It is the negative reality of life. It is what
we call Matter and Force, among other things.

Life is individual, always was individual and always will be. Life
consists of living individuals, and always did so consist, in the
beginning of everything. There never was any universe, any cosmos, of
which the first reality was anything but living, incorporate
individuals. I don't say the individuals were exactly like you and me.
And they were never wildly different.

And therefore it is time for the idealist and the scientist--they are
one and the same, really--to stop his monkey-jargon about the atom and
the origin of life and the mechanical clue to the universe. There
isn't any such thing. I might as well say: "Then they took the cart,
and rubbed it all over with grease. Then they sprayed it with white
wine, and spun round the right wheel five hundred revolutions to the
minute and the left wheel, in the opposite direction, seven hundred
and seventy-seven revolutions to the minute. Then a burning torch was
applied to each axle. And lo, the footboard of the cart began to
swell, and suddenly as the cart groaned and writhed, the horse was
born, and lay panting between the shafts." The whole scientific theory
of the universe is not worth such a tale: that the cart conceived and
gave birth to the horse.

I do not believe one-fifth of what science can tell me about the sun.
I do not believe for one second that the moon is a dead world
spelched off from our globe. I do not believe that the stars came
flying off from the sun like drops of water when you spin your wet
hanky. I have believed it for twenty years, because it seemed so
ideally plausible. Now I don't accept any ideal plausibilities at all.
I look at the moon and the stars, and I know I don't believe anything
that I am told about them. Except that I like their names, Aldebaran
and Cassiopeia, and so on.

I have tried, and even brought myself to believe in a clue to the
outer universe. And in the process I have swallowed such a lot of
jargon that I would rather listen now to a negro witch-doctor than to
Science. There is nothing in the world that is true except empiric
discov