relation of reaction against theologic
dogma, and has no more to do with Truth than has a wave that bounds back
from a shore. Or, if a shop girl, or you or I, should pull out a piece
of chewing gum about a yard long, that would be quite as scientific a
performance as was the stretching of this earth's age several hundred
millions of years.

All "things" are not things, but only relations, or expressions of
relations: but all relations are striving to be the unrelated, or have
surrendered to, and subordinated to, higher attempts. So there is a
positivist aspect to this reaction that is itself only a relation, and
that is the attempt to assimilate all phenomena under the materialist
explanation, or to formulate a final, all-inclusive system, upon the
materialist basis. If this attempt could be realized, that would be the
attaining of realness; but this attempt can be made only by disregarding
psychic phenomena, for instance--or, if science shall eventually give in
to the psychic, it would be no more legitimate to explain the immaterial
in terms of the material than to explain the material in terms of the
immaterial. Our own acceptance is that material and immaterial are of a
oneness, merging, for instance, in a thought that is continuous with a
physical action: that oneness cannot be explained, because the process
of explaining is the interpreting of something in terms of something
else. All explanation is assimilation of something in terms of something
else that has been taken as a basis: but, in Continuity, there is
nothing that is any more basic than anything else--unless we think that
delusion built upon delusion is less real than its pseudo-foundation.

In 1829 (Timb's _Year Book_, 1848-235) in Persia fell a substance that
the people said they had never seen before. As to what it was, they had
not a notion, but they saw that the sheep ate it. They ground it into
flour and made bread, said to have been passable enough, though insipid.

That was a chance that science did not neglect. Manna was placed upon a
reasonable basis, or was assimilated and reconciled with the system that
had ousted the older--and less nearly real--system. It was said that,
likely enough, manna had fallen in ancient times--because it was still
falling--but that there was no tutelary influence behind it--that it was
a lichen from the steppes of Asia Minor--from one place in a whirlwind
and down in another place. "In the _American Almanac_, 1833-