That, at the meeting of the British Association, 1853, Sir David
Brewster had announced that he had to bring before the meeting an object
"of so incredible a nature that nothing short of the strongest evidence
was necessary to render the statement at all probable."
A crystal lens had been found in the treasure-house at Nineveh.
In many of the temples and treasure houses of old civilizations upon
this earth have been preserved things that have fallen from the sky--or
meteorites.
Again we have a Brahmin. This thing is buried alive in the heart of
propriety: it is in the British Museum.
Carpenter, in _The Microscope and Its Revelations_, gives two drawings
of it. Carpenter argues that it is impossible to accept that optical
lenses had ever been made by the ancients. Never occurred to
him--someone a million miles or so up in the air--looking through his
telescope--lens drops out.
This does not appeal to Carpenter: he says that this object must have
been an ornament.
According to Brewster, it was not an ornament, but "a true optical
lens."
In that case, in ruins of an old civilization upon this earth, has been
found an accursed thing that was, acceptably, not a product of any old
civilization indigenous to this earth.
10
Early explorers have Florida mixed up with Newfoundland. But the
confusion is worse than that still earlier. It arises from simplicity.
Very early explorers think that all land westward is one land, India:
awareness of other lands as well as India comes as a slow process. I do
not now think of things arriving upon this earth from some especial
other world. That was my notion when I started to collect our data. Or,
as is a commonplace of observation, all intellection begins with the
illusion of homogeneity. It's one of Spencer's data: we see
homogeneousness in all things distant, or with which we have small
acquaintance. Advance from the relatively homogeneous to the relatively
heterogeneous is Spencerian Philosophy--like everything else, so-called:
not that it was really Spencer's discovery, but was taken from von Baer,
who, in turn, was continuous with preceding evolutionary speculation.
Our own expression is that all things are acting to advance to the
homogeneous, or are trying to localize Homogeneousness. Homogeneousness
is an aspect of the Universal, wherein it is a state that does not merge
away into something else. We regard homogeneousness as an aspect of
positiveness, but it is our acceptance that infinite frustrations of
attempts to positivize manifest themselves in infinite heterogeneity: so
that though things try to localize homogeneousness they end up in
heterogeneity so great that it amounts to infinite dispersion or
indistinguishability.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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