Charles Fort: Thing

“If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin”

Charles Fort book Lo!

Pt 1, Ch. 1 http://www.resologist.net/lo101.htm
Lo! (1931)
Context: If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

“My liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things.”

Charles Fort

Ch. 2 http://www.resologist.net/talent02.htm
Wild Talents (1932)
Context: My liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidences?

“If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things.”

Charles Fort book Lo!

Pt 1, Ch. 4 http://www.resologist.net/lo104.htm
Lo! (1931)
Context: If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree can not find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root. It needs no base of its own, because the relative wholeness of the plant is relative baseness to its parts. At the same time, in the midst of this theory of submergence, I do not accept that human minds are absolute nonentities, just as I do not accept that a leaf, or a root, of a plant, though so dependent upon a main body, and so clearly only a part, is absolutely without something of an individualizing touch of its own.
It is the problem of continuity-discontinuity, which perhaps I shall have to take up sometime.

“The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest —
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."”

Charles Fort

Darwinism:
That survivors survive.
Source: The Book of The Damned (1919), Ch. 3, part 1 at resologist.net

Stupidity , Way

“Existence is Appetite: the gnaw of being; the one attempt of all things to assimilate to some higher attempt.”

Charles Fort

Source: The Book of The Damned (1919), Ch. 5, part 1 at resologist.net

“I conceive of nothing, in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.”

Charles Fort

Ch. 22 http://www.resologist.net/talent22.htm; sometimes paraphrased "I can conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is anything more than the proper thing to wear, for a while."
Wild Talents (1932)

Religion , Science

“Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on.”

Charles Fort

Ch. 4 http://www.resologist.net/talent04.htm
Wild Talents (1932)

Lie , Feeling , Time , Joy

“By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into something else, and that which is not partly something else: that which is not a reaction to, or an imitation of, something else. By a real hero, we mean one who is not partly a coward, or whose actions and motives do not merge away into cowardice. But, if in Continuity, all things do merge, by Realness, I mean the Universal, besides which there is nothing with which to merge.”

Charles Fort

Source: The Book of The Damned (1919), Ch. 1, part 9 at resologist.net

Motivation , Universe