Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Fort

Fort’s move here is a classic intellectual feint: he borrows the stern, sermon-like cadence of science to smuggle in a metaphysical claim. “All biologic phenomena act to adjust” sounds like sober physiology, the kind of line you’d expect in a textbook. Then he tightens the noose with absolutism: “there are no biologic actions other than adjustments.” That totalizing sweep isn’t evidence; it’s a rhetorical power play, meant to make dissent feel like heresy against Nature itself.

The subtext is Fort’s favorite pressure point: the boundary between explanation and worldview. By equating adjustment with “Equilibrium,” and then inflating equilibrium into “the Universal,” he turns biology into a spiritual doctrine of self-correction. The delicious irony is that Fort, the patron saint of anomalies, is also tempted by the most comforting story of all: that life’s messiness is secretly organized around balance. He’s not describing cells so much as trying to domesticate uncertainty.

Context matters: Fort built his career cataloging the “damned” data that institutions ignored - odd rains, weird lights, unclassifiable events. This quote reads like the philosophical scaffolding behind that project. If the universe is equilibrium, then anomalies aren’t mere mistakes or chaos; they’re signals of an adjustment in progress, evidence that our categories are the unstable part. “That which has nothing external to derange it” is a quietly barbed line, too: it implies that what we call “external causes” are just placeholders for ignorance. Fort isn’t offering comfort. He’s offering a trapdoor under certainty.