The Book of the Damned

It's as commendable as anything ever has been--by which I mean it's intermediate to the commendable and the censurable. It's virginal. Meteorites, data of which were once of the damned, have been admitted, but the common impression of them is only a retreat of attempted exclusion: that only two kinds of substance fall from the sky: metallic and stony: that the metallic objects are of iron and nickel-- Butter and paper and wool and silk and resin. We see, to start with, that the virgins of science have fought and wept and screamed against external relations--upon two grounds: There in the first place; Or up from one part of this earth's surface and down to another. As late as November, 1902, in Nature Notes, 13-231, a member of the Selborne Society still argued that meteorites do not fall from the sky; that they are masses of iron upon the ground "in the first place," that attract lightning; that the lightning is seen, and is mistaken for a falling, luminous object-- By progress we mean rape. Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it. 3 So then, it is our expression that Science relates to real knowledge no more than does the growth of a plant, or the organization of a department store, or the development of a nation: that all are assimilative, or organizing, or systematizing processes that represent different attempts to attain the positive state--the state commonly called heaven, I suppose I mean.