I accept that, though we're usually avoided, probably for moral reasons,
sometimes this earth has been visited by explorers. I think that the
notion that there have been extra-mundane visitors to China, within what
we call the historic period, will be only ordinarily absurd, when we
come to that datum.
I accept that some of the other worlds are of conditions very similar to
our own. I think of others that are very different--so that visitors
from them could not live here--without artificial adaptations.
How some of them could breathe our attenuated air, if they came from a
gelatinous atmosphere--
Masks.
The masks that have been found in ancient deposits.
Most of them are of stone, and are said to have been ceremonial regalia
of savages--
But the mask that was found in Sullivan County, Missouri, in 1879
(_American Antiquarian_, 3-336).
It is made of iron and silver.
11
One of the damnedest in our whole saturnalia of the accursed--
Because it is hopeless to try to shake off an excommunication only by
saying that we're damned by blacker things than ourselves; and that the
damned are those who admit they're of the damned. Inertia and hypnosis
are too strong for us. We say that: then we go right on admitting we're
of the damned. It is only by being more nearly real that we can sweep
away the quasi-things that oppose us. Of course, as a whole, we have
considerable amorphousness, but we are thinking now of "individual"
acceptances. Wideness is an aspect of Universalness or Realness. If our
syntheses disregard fewer data than do opposing syntheses--which are
often not syntheses at all, but mere consideration of some one
circumstance--less widely synthetic things fade away before us. Harmony
is an aspect of the Universal, by which we mean Realness. If we
approximate more highly to harmony among the parts of an expression and
to all available circumstances of an occurrence, the self-contradictors
turn hazy. Solidity is an aspect of realness. We pile them up, and we
pile them up, or they pass and pass and pass: things that bulk large as
they march by, supporting and solidifying one another--
And still, and for regiments to come, hypnosis and inertia rule us--
One of the damnedest of our data:
In the _Scientific American_, Sept. 10, 1910, Charles F. Holder writes:
"Many years ago, a strange stone resembling a meteorite, fell into the
Valley of the Yaqui, Mexico, and the sensational story went from one end
to the other of the country that a stone bearing human inscriptions had
descended to the earth."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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