omposition flying thither
and returning, as fine grains of iron would fly to an intense magnet,
or better, as the draught in a room veers towards the fire, attracted
infallibly, as a moth towards a candle. The moth is drawn to the
candle as the draught is drawn to the fire, in the absolute spell of
the material polarity of fire. And air escapes again, hot and
different, from the fire. So is the sun.

Fire, we say, is combustion. It is marvelous how science proceeds like
witchcraft and alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has no
earthly sense. Pray, what is combustion? You can try and answer
scientifically, till you are black in the face. All you can say is
that it is _that which happens_ when matter is raised to a certain
temperature--and so forth and so forth. You might as well say, a word
is that which happens when I open my mouth and squeeze my larynx and
make various tricks with my throat muscles. All these explanations are
so senseless. They describe the apparatus, and think they have
described the event.

Fire may be accompanied by combustion, but combustion is not
necessarily accompanied by fire. All A is B, but all B is not A. And
therefore fire, no matter how you jiggle, is not identical with
combustion. Fire. FIRE. I insist on the absolute word. You may say
that fire is a sum of various phenomena. I say it isn't. You might as
well tell me a fly is a sum of wings and six legs and two bulging
eyes. It is the fly which has the wings and legs, and not the legs and
wings which somehow nab the fly into the middle of themselves. A fly
is not a sum of various things. A fly is a fly, and the items of the
sum are still fly.

So with fire. Fire is an absolute unity in itself. It is a dynamic
polar principle. Establish a certain polarity between the
moon-principle and the sun-principle, between the positive and
negative, or sympathetic and volitional dynamism in any piece of
matter, and you have fire, you have the sun-phenomenon. It is the
sudden flare into the one mode, the sun mode, the material sympathetic
mode. Correspondingly, establish an opposite polarity between the
sun-principle and the water-principle, and you have decomposition into
water, or towards watery dissolution.

There are two sheer dynamic principles in our universe, the
sun-principle and the moon-principle. And these principles are known
to us in immediate contact as fire and water. The sun is not fire. But
the principle of fire is the sun-