uth is the attempt to achieve positiveness:

Scientists who have thought that they were seeking Truth, but who were
trying to find out astronomic, or chemic, or biologic truths. But Truth
is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to
question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the
complete--

By Truth I mean the Universal.

So chemists have sought the true, or the real, and have always failed in
their endeavors, because of the outside relations of chemical
phenomena: have failed in the sense that never has a chemical law,
without exceptions, been discovered: because chemistry is continuous
with astronomy, physics, biology--For instance, if the sun should
greatly change its distance from this earth, and if human life could
survive, the familiar chemic formulas would no longer work out: a new
science of chemistry would have to be learned--

Or that all attempts to find Truth in the special are attempts to find
the universal in the local.

And artists and their striving for positiveness, under the name of
"harmony"--but their pigments that are oxydizing, or are responding to a
deranging environment--or the strings of musical instruments that are
differently and disturbingly adjusting to outside chemic and thermal and
gravitational forces--again and again this oneness of all ideals, and
that it is the attempt to be, or to achieve, locally, that which is
realizable only universally. In our experience there is only
intermediateness to harmony and discord. Harmony is that besides which
there are no outside forces.

And nations that have fought with only one motive: for individuality, or
entity, or to be real, final nations, not subordinate to, or parts of,
other nations. And that nothing but intermediateness has ever been
attained, and that history is record of failures of this one attempt,
because there always have been outside forces, or other nations
contending for the same goal.

As to physical things, chemic, mineralogic, astronomic, it is not
customary to say that they act to achieve Truth or Entity, but it is
understood that all motions are toward Equilibrium: that there is no
motion except toward Equilibrium, of course always away from some other
approximation to Equilibrium.

All biologic phenomena act to adjust: there are no biologic actions
other than adjustments.

Adjustment is another name for Equilibrium. Equilibrium is the
Universal, or that which has noth