The Book of the Damned | Page 8

to investigate a report that a stone

had fallen from the sky at Luce, France. Of all attempts at positiveness,
in its aspect of isolation, I don't know of anything that has been fought
harder for than the notion of this earth's unrelatedness. Lavoisier
analyzed the stone of Luce. The exclusionists' explanation at that time
was that stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may
seem to fall, and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous
object seemingly had landed--only lightning striking a stone, heating,
even melting it.
The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion.
Lavoisier's analysis "absolutely proved" that this stone had not fallen:
that it had been struck by lightning.
So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned. The stock means of
exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike
something--that had been upon the ground in the first place.
But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement. It is not
customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a
sentence of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did--or data of them
bombarded the walls raised against them --
Monthly Review, 1796-426:
"The phenomenon which is the subject of the remarks before us will
seem to most persons as little worthy of credit as any that could be
offered. The falling of large stones from the sky, without any
assignable cause of their previous ascent, seems to partake so much of
the marvellous as almost entirely to exclude the operation of known
and natural agents. Yet a body of evidence is here brought to prove that
such events have actually taken place, and we ought not to withhold
from it a proper degree of attention."
The writer abandons the first, or absolute, exclusion, and modifies it
with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in
Tuscany, June 16, 1794, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius --

Or that stones do fall from the sky, but that they are stones that have
been raised to the sky from some other part of the earth's surface by
whirlwinds or by volcanic action.
It's more than one hundred and twenty years later. I know of no aerolite
that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestial origin.
Falling stones had to be undamned--though still with a reservation that
held out for exclusion of outside forces.
One may have the knowledge of a Lavoisier, and still not be able to
analyze, not be able even to see, except conformably with the hypnoses,
or the conventional reactions against hypnoses, of one's era.
We believe no more.
We accept.
Little by little the whirlwind and volcano explanations had to be
abandoned, but so powerful was this exclusion-hypnosis, sentence of
damnation, or this attempt at positiveness, that far into our own times
some scientists, notably Prof. Lawrence Smith and Sir Robert Ball,
continued to hold out against all external origins, asserting that nothing
could fall to this earth, unless it had been cast up or whirled up from
some other part of the earth's surface.
It's as commendable as anything ever has been--by which I mean it's
intermediate to the commendable and the censurable.
It's virginal.
Meteorites, data of which were once damned, have been admitted, but
the common impression of them is only a retreat of attempted exclusion:
that only two kinds of substance fall from the sky: metallic and stony:
that the metallic objects are of iron and nickel --
Butter and paper and wool and silk and resin.
We see, to start with, that the virgins of science have fought and wept

and screamed against external relations--upon two grounds:
There in the first place;
Or up from one part of this earth's surface and down to another.
As late as November, 1902, in Nature Notes, 13-231, a member of the
Selborne Society still argued that meteorites do not fall from the sky;
that they are masses of iron upon the ground "in the first place," that
attract lightning; that the lightning is seen, and is mistaken for a falling,
luminous object --
By progress we mean rape.
Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it.

Book of the Damned Chapter III
SO then, it is our expression that Science relates to real knowledge no
more than does the growth of a plant, or the organization of a
department store, or the development of a nation: that all are
assimilative, or organizing, or systematizing processes that represent
different attempts to attain the positive state--the state commonly called
heaven, I suppose I mean.
There can be no real science where there are indeterminate variables,
but every variable is, in finer terms, indeterminate, or irregular, if only
to have the appearance of being in Intermediateness is to express
regularity