Fort's principle: "People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."– Colin Wilson, on Charles Fort
"Of course high among virtues are the honorable lies of Governments. Whether virtuously said, or accurately reported, I don't know:
... if anybody could ever distinguish between righteousness and exploitation and tyranny.
One of the engaging paradoxes of our existence – which strip mathematics of meaning – is that a million times a crime is patriotism. ...If we could have new abominations, so unmistakably abominable as to hush the lubricators, who plan murder to stop slaughter – but that is only dreamery, here in our existence of the hyphen, which is the symbol of hypocrisy...
And almost all liars are conventionalists.
The one quality that the lower animals have not in common with human beings is creative imagination. Neither a man, nor a dog, nor an oyster ever has had any. Of course there is another view, by which is seen that there is in everything a touch of creativeness. I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either. Though I have classed myself with some noted fictionists, I have to accept that the absolute fictionist never has existed. There is fictional coloration to everybody's account of an "actual occurrence," and there is at least the lurk somewhere of what is called the "actual" in everybody's yarn. There is the hyphenated state of truth-fiction. Out of dozens of reported pearls in stews, most likely there have been instances; most likely once upon a time an old fiddle did turn out to be a Stradivarius; and it could be that once upon a time somebody did get a ring back fishwise.
But when I come upon the unconventional repeating, in times and places far apart, I feel – even though I have no absolute standards to judge by – that I am outside the field of ordinary liars...
"GOOD MORNING!" said the dog. He disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor.
I have this record, upon newspaper authority.
It can't be said – and therefore will be said – that I have a marvellous credulity for newspaper yarns.
But I am so obviously offering everything in this book, as fiction. That is, if there is fiction. But this book is fiction in the sense that Pickwick Papers, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin of Species, Genesis, Gulliver's Travels, and mathematical theorems, and every history of the United States, and all other histories, are fictions. A library-myth that irritates me most is the classification of books under "fiction" and "non-fiction."
And yet there is something about the yarns that were told by Dickens that set them apart, as it were, from the yarns that were told by Euclid. There is much in Dickens' grotesqueries that has the correspondence with experience that is called "truth," whereas such Euclidean characters as "mathematical points" are the vacancies that might be expected from a mind that had had scarcely any experience. That dog-story is axiomatic. It must be taken on faith. And, even though with effects that sometimes are not much admired, I ask questions...
Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native. There are scientific dervishes who whirl amok, brandishing startling statements; but mostly they whirl not far from their origins, and their excitements are exaggerations of old-fashioned complacencies...
It seems that my reasoning is that, under some circumstances, if something is highly unlikely, it is probable. John Stuart Mill missed that...
Said Dr. Hastings H. Hart, of the Russell Sage Foundation, as reported in the newspapers, May 10, 1931: "Morons for the most part can be the most useful citizens, and a great deal of the valuable work being done in the United States is being done by such mentally deficient persons."
Dr. Hart has given very good newspaper space for this opinion, which turned out to be popular. One can't offend anybody with any statement that is interpreted as applying to everybody else. Inasmuch as my own usefulness has not been very widely recognized, I am a little flattered, myself. To deny, ridicule, or reasonably explain away occurrences that are the data of this book, is what I call useful. A general acceptance that such things are would be unsettling. I am an evil one, quite as was anybody, in the past, who collected data that were contrary to the orthodoxy of his time. Some of the most useful work is being done in the support of Taboo. The break of Taboo in any savage tribe would bring on perhaps fatal disorders. As to the taboos of savages, my impressions are that it is their taboos that are keeping them from being civilized; that, consequently, one fetish is worth a hundred missionaries.
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