as Moses or Darwin or Lyell ever "proved"
anything.

* * * * *

We substitute acceptance for belief.

Cells of an embryo take on different appearances in different eras.

The more firmly established, the more difficult to change.

That social organism is embryonic.

That firmly to believe is to impede development.

That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate.

* * * * *

But:

Except that we substitute acceptance for belief, our methods will be the
conventional methods; the means by which every belief has been
formulated and supported: or our methods will be the methods of
theologians and savages and scientists and children. Because, if all
phenomena are continuous, there can be no positively different methods.
By the inconclusive means and methods of cardinals and fortune tellers
and evolutionists and peasants, methods which must be inconclusive, if
they relate always to the local, and if there is nothing local to
conclude, we shall write this book.

If it function as an expression of its era, it will prevail.

* * * * *

All sciences begin with attempts to define.

Nothing ever has been defined.

Because there is nothing to define.

Darwin wrote _The Origin of Species_.

He was never able to tell what he meant by a "species."

It is not possible to define.

Nothing has ever been finally found out.

Because there is nothing final to find out.

It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that
never was--

But that all scientific attempts really to find out something, whereas
really there is nothing to find out, are attempts, themselves, really to
be something.

A seeker of Truth. He will never find it. But the dimmest of
possibilities--he may himself become Truth.

Or that science is more than an inquiry:

That it is a pseudo-construction, or a quasi-organization: that it is an
attempt to break away and locally establish harmony, stability,
equilibrium, consistency, entity--

Dimmest of possibilities--that it may succeed.

* * * * *

That ours is a pseudo-existence, and that all appearances in it partake
of its essential fictitiousness--

But that some appearances approximate far more highly to the positive
state than do others.

We conceive of all "things" as occupying gradations, or steps in series
between positiveness and nega