The Book of the Damned

Intermediateness in its mineralogic aspect of positivism--or Iron that strove to break away from Sulphur and Oxygen, and be real, homogeneous Iron--failing, inasmuch as elemental iron exists only in text-book chemistry: Intermediateness in its biologic aspect of positivism--or the wild, fantastic, grotesque, monstrous things it conceived of, sometimes in a frenzy of effort to break away abruptly from all preceding types--but failing, in the giraffe-effort, for instance, or only caricaturing an antelope-- All things break one relation only by the establishing of some other relation-- All things cut an umbilical cord only to clutch a breast. So the fight of the exclusionists to maintain the traditional--or to prevent abrupt transition from the quasi-established--fighting so that here, more than a century after meteorites were included, no other notable inclusion has been made, except that of cosmic dust, data of which Nordenskiold made more nearly real than data in opposition. So Proctor, for instance, fought and expressed his feeling of the preposterous, against Sir W.H. Thomson's notions of arrival upon this earth of organisms on meteorites-- "I can only regard it as a jest" (Knowledge, 1-302). Or that there is nothing but jest--or something intermediate to jest and tragedy: That ours is not an existence but an utterance; That Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive--like characters in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree take their affairs away from the novelist-- That Momus is imagining us and our arts and sciences and religions, and is narrating or picturing us as a satire upon the gods' real existence.