rrendered, being now
quasi-incorporated in a higher approximation to system:

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.

Because--with many of our data of coal that has fallen from the sky as
accessible then as they are now, and with the scientific pronouncement
that coal is fossil, how, in a real existence, by which we mean a
consistent existence, or a state in which there is real intelligence, or
a form of thinking that does not indistinguishably merge away with
imbecility, could there have been such a row as that which was raised
about forty years ago over Dr. Hahn's announcement that he had found
fossils in meteorites?

Accessible to anybody at that time:

_Philosophical Magazine_, 4-17-425:

That the substance that fell at