[Extollager]

JDW and Nigourath, thanks for the comments.

The discussion of the Tao/objective morality was a tangent (well worthwhile). It had been suggested that Lovecraft argued that man ought not to think too highly of himself. My response was that he could not make such a claim without transgressing his own premise, that mechanistic materialism is a wholly satisfactory key for accounting for ourselves and the universe; one cannot derive an "ought" from a premise that nature, in principle wholly explicable in materialist terms, is all that there is. I wasn't contending, of course, that philosophical materialists are all bad people. I contend that when they act, against their own interest, as they ought, they are happily inconsistent with their philosophy.

Would it be appropriate either to return to my main point in this first thread -- the pretty crass category error that I have contended Lovecraft was guilty of, in confusing the quantitative and the qualitative? Or would it be well to move on to my second and third threads?