That theological pronouncements are as much open to doubt as ever they
were, but that, by a hypnotizing process, they became dominant over the
majority of minds in their era:
That, in a succeeding era, the laws, dogmas, formulas, principles, of
materialistic science never were proved, because they are only
localizations simulating the universal; but that the leading minds of
their era of dominance were hypnotized into more or less firmly
believing them.
Newton's three laws, and that they are attempts to achieve positiveness,
or to defy and break Continuity, and are as unreal as are all other
attempts to localize the universal:
That, if every observable body is continuous, mediately or immediately,
with all other bodies, it cannot be influenced only by its own inertia,
so that there is no way of knowing what the phenomena of inertia may be;
that, if all things are reacting to an infinitude of forces, there is no
way of knowing what the effects of only one impressed force would be;
that if every reaction is continuous with its action, it cannot be
conceived of as a whole, and that there is no way of conceiving what it
might be equal and opposite to--
Or that Newton's three laws are three articles of faith:
Or that demons and angels and inertias and reactions are all
mythological characters:
But that, in their eras of dominance, they were almost as firmly
believed in as if they had been proved.
* * * * *
Enormities and preposterousnesses will march.
They will be "proved" as well 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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