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ROLAND The survivals from the past are pathetic monsters. Pathetic phalluses. It seems to me that the very points which are their strength are also their weakness: separate and coincident. I have remarked this peculiarity of man as a tool-making animal before, but here the same peculiarity seems to inhere in an animal antecedent to man by millennia. They lie there stretched out on the squares of black marble by the rosy hues of the stain on the white radiance of Eternity. Sequential thought ‘stretched out’ what it purports to describe. But may it not be a peculiarity of thought, of the deductive system which has become detached and confused with the reality that approximates it? If so, it could be an illusion like some foreign, alien object not really part of the thing-in-itself, the noumenon. A book is written in pages; the print goes from the top of the page to the bottom and the sentences conform to a particular grammatical structure; the print is disposed in order from left to right. These patterns are dictated by the need to conform to rules of English composition and typographical lay-out. These dispositions have not only been imposed by the culture, but have imposed themselves on the phenomena being observed without criticism. Is the supposition that the reptilian age is antecedent to Hitler correct, or is it a feature of our thinking process which has become an aberration which has not been considered, but has become part of what is observed? Suppose the reality is a meaningless chaos. The appearance of order and coherence may be peculiar to the human observer's deductive system and reported as if it were a feature of a ‘constant conjunction’, observed from without. Further, what is ‘within’ and what ‘without’? Herodotus put forward the suggestion that fossil shells detected in rock might support the belief that the sea once covered that land. Towards the beginning of this century an educated
man again revived Herodotus' conjecture about fossils without be