Charles Fort

“ The inhabitants of Monstrator and Elvera were primitives, I think, at the time of their occasional visits to this earth—though, of course, in a quasi-existence, anything that we semi-phantoms call evidence of anything may be just as good evidence of anything else. Logicians and detectives and jurymen and suspicious wives and members of the Royal Astronomic Society recognize this indeterminateness, but have the delusion that in the method of agreement there is final, or real evidence. ”

“ So archæologists, in their medieval dread of excommunication, have tried to explain vitrified forts in terms of terrestrial experience. We find in their insufficiencies the same old assimilating of all that could be assimilated, and disregard for the unassimilable, conventionalizing into the explanation that vitrified forts were made by prehistoric peoples who built vast fires—often remote from wood-supply—to melt externally, and to cement together, the stones of their constructions. But negativeness always: so within itself a science can never be homogeneous or unified or harmonious. ”

“ I suspect that, after all, we're useful—that among contesting claimants, adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more primitive, owners of us—all others warned off—that all this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received—from Somewhere else—in our mysterious usefulness. ”

“ Azuria, whence came the blue Britons, whose descendants gradually diluting, like blueing in a wash-tub, where a faucet's turned on, have been most emphasized of sub-tutelarians, or assimilators ever since.
Worlds that were once tutelarian worlds—before this earth became sole property of one of them—their attempts to convert or assimilate—but then the state that comes to all things in their missionary-frustrations—unacceptance by all stomachs of some things; rejection by all societies of some units ”

“ Or Science and some of our cursed hard-shelled data.
One speaks of the tutelarian as if it were something distinct in itself. So one speaks of a tree, a saint, a barrel of pork, the Rocky Mountains. One speaks of missionaries, as if they were positively different, or had identity of their own, or were a species by themselves. To the Intermediatist, everything that seems to have identity is only attempted identity, and every species is continuous with all other species, or that which is called the specific is only emphasis upon some aspect of the general. ”

“ The method is good enough for an "existence" that is only semi-real, but also it is the method of reasoning by which witches were burned, and by which ghosts have been feared. I'd not like to be so unadvanced as to deny witches and ghosts, but I do think that there never have been witches and ghosts like those of popular supposition. ”

“ If there are cats, they're only emphasis upon universal felinity. There is nothing that does not partake of that of which the missionary, or the tutelary, is the special. Every conversation is a conflict of missionaries, each trying to convert the other, to assimilate, or to make the other similar to himself. ”

“ Cow grazing, pig rooting, tiger stalking: planets trying, or acting, to capture comets; rag pickers and the Christian religion, and a cat down headfirst in a garbage can; nations fighting for more territory, sciences correlating the data they can, trust magnates organizing, chorus girl out for a little late supper—all of them stopped somewhere by the unassimilable. Chorus girl and the broiled lobster. If she eats not shell and all she represents universal failure to postivize. ”

“ But I accept that, in the past, before proprietorship was established, inhabitants of a host of other worlds have—dropped here, hopped here, wafted, sailed, flown, motored—walked here, for all I know—been pulled here, been pushed; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers ”

“ But, of course, by the reasonable we mean that for which the equally reasonable, but opposing, has not been found out—except that we modify that by saying that, though nothing's finally reasonable, some phenomena have higher approximations to Reasonableness than have others. Against the notion of toys, the higher approximation is that where "pigmy flints" are found, all flints are pigmies—at least so in India, where, when larger implements have been found in the same place, there are separations by strata. ”

“ Or, if several persons start out to Chicago, and get to Buffalo, and one be under the delusion that Buffalo is Chicago, that one will be a resistance to the progress of the others.
So astronomy and its seemingly exact, little system——
But data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks;
world linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in hordes: tremendous worlds and tiny worlds: some of them made of material like the material of this earth ”

“ Of course there's nothing to that mystery if we don't take so seriously the notion—that we must be interesting. It's probably for moral reasons that they stay away—but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them. ”

“ Science of to-day—the superstition of to-morrow. ”

“ When we can specially take up that subject, one of our leading ideas, or credulities, will be that near approach by another world to this world would be catastrophic: that navigable worlds would avoid proximity; that others that have survived have organized into protective remotenesses, or orbits which approximate to regularity, though by no means to the degree of popular supposition. ”

“ So, if Stonehenge is a large, but only roughly geometric construction, the inattention to details by its builders—signifies anything you please—ambitious dwarfs or giants—if giants, that they were little more than cave men, or that they were post-impressionist architects from a very far-advanced civilization. ”

“ The wrath of Azuria, because the other peoples of this earth would not turn blue to suit her.
History is a department of human delusion that interests us. We are able to give a little advancement to history. In the vitrified forts of a few parts of Europe, we find data that the Humes and Gibbons have disregarded.
The vitrified forts surrounding England, but not in England.
The vitrified forts of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia. ”

“ That there never were giants upon this earth, because gigantic footprints are more gigantic than prints made by men who are not giants.
We think of giants as occasional visitors to this earth. Of course—Stonehenge, for instance. ”