The Book of the Damned

Nature, 35-36: A block of metal found in coal, in Austria, 1885. It is now in the Salsburg museum. This time we have another expression. Usually our intermediatist attack upon provincial positivism is: Science, in its attempted positivism takes something such as "true meteoritic material" as a standard of judgment; but carbonaceous matter, except for its relative infrequency, is just as veritable a standard of judgment; carbonaceous matter merges away into such a variety of organic substances, that all standards are reduced to indistinguishability: if, then, there is no real standard against us, there is no real resistance to our own acceptances. Now our intermediatism is: Science takes "true meteoritic material" as a standard of admission; but now we have an instance that quite as truly makes "true meteoritic material" a standard of exclusion; or, then, a thing that denies itself is no real resistance to our own acceptances--this depending upon whether we have a datum of something of "true meteoritic material" that orthodoxy can never accept fell from the sky. We're a little involved here. Our own acceptance is upon a carved, geometric thing that, if found in a very old deposit, antedates human life, except, perhaps, very primitive human life, as an indigenous product of this earth: but we're quite as much interested in the dilemma it made for the faithful. It is of "true meteoritic material." L'Astronomie, 1887-114, it is said that, though so geometric, its phenomena so characteristic of meteorites exclude the idea that it was the work of man.