The Book of the Damned

Our notion is that rustics and savages call wedge-shaped objects that fall from the sky, "axes": that scientific men, when it suits their purposes, can resist temptations to prolixity and pedantry, and adopt the simple: that they can be intelligible when derisive. All of which lands us in a confusion, worse, I think, than we were in before we so satisfactorily emerged from the distresses of--butter and blood and ink and paper and punk and silk. Now it's cannon balls and axes and disks--if a "lapstone" be a disk--it's a flat stone, at any rate. A great many scientists are good impressionists: they snub the impertinences of details. Had he been of a coarse, grubbing nature, I think Dr. Bodding could never have so simply and beautifully explained the occurrence of stone wedges in tree trunks. But to a realist, the story would be something like this: A man who needed a tree, in a land of jungles, where, for some unknown reason, everyone's very selfish with his trees, conceives that hammering stone wedges makes less noise than does the chopping of wood: he and his descendants, in a course of many years, cut down trees with wedges, and escape penalty, because it never occurs to a prosecutor that the head of an ax is a wedge. The story is like every other attempted positivism--beautiful and complete, until we see what it excludes or disregards; whereupon it becomes the ugly and incomplete--but not absolutely, because there is probably something of what is called foundation for it. Perhaps a mentally incomplete Santal did once do something of the kind. Story told to Dr. Bodding: in the usual scientific way, he makes a dogma of an aberration.