,
laughable, ignorant to nineteenth-centuryites as were their data and
interpretations to the medieval-minded. We ask only whether data and
interpretations correlate. If they do, they are acceptable, perhaps only
for a short time, or as nuclei, or scaffolding, or preliminary sketches,
or as gropings and tentativenesses. Later, of course, when we cool off
and harden and radiate into space most of our present mobility, which
expresses in modesty and plasticity, we shall acknowledge no
scaffoldings, gropings or tentativenesses, but think we utter absolute
facts. A point in Intermediatism here is opposed to most current
speculations upon Development. Usually one thinks of the spiritual as
higher than the material, but, in our acceptance, quasi-existence is a
means by which the absolutely immaterial materializes absolutely, and,
being intermediate, is a state in which nothing is finally either
immaterial or material, all objects, substances, thoughts, occupying
some grade of approximation one way or the other. Final solidification
of the ethereal is, to us, the goal of cosmic ambition. Positivism is
Puritanism. Heat is Evil. Final Good is Absolute Frigidity. An Arctic
winter is very beautiful, but I think that an interest in monkeys
chattering in palm trees accounts for our own Intermediatism.

Visitors.

Our confusion here, out of which we are attempting to make quasi-order,
is as great as it has been throughout this book, because we have not the
positivist's delusion of homogeneity. A positivist would gather all data
that seem to relate to one kind of visitors and coldly disregard all
other data. I think of as many different kinds of visitors to this earth
as there are visitors to New York, to a jail, to a church--some persons
go to church to pick pockets, for instance.

My own acceptance is that either a world or a vast
super-construction--or a world, if red substances and fishes fell from
it--hovered over India in the summer of 1860. Something then fell from
somewhere, July 17, 1860, at Dhurmsalla. Whatever "it" was, "it" is so
persistently alluded to as "a meteorite" that I look back and see that I
adopted this convention myself. But in the London _Times_, Dec. 26,
1860, Syed Abdoolah, Professor of Hindustani, University College,
London, writes that he had sent to a friend in Dhurmsalla, for an
account of the stones that had fallen at that place. The answer:

"... divers forms and sizes, many of which bore great res