are more likely to be right than are scientists: a
host of biologic and meteorologic fallacies of peasants rises against
us.

I should say that our "existence" is like a bridge--except that that
comparison is in static terms--but like the Brooklyn Bridge, upon which
multitudes of bugs are seeking a fundamental--coming to a girder that
seems firm and final--but the girder is built upon supports. A support
then seems final. But it is built upon underlying structures. Nothing
final can be found in all the bridge, because the bridge itself is not a
final thing in itself, but is a relationship between Manhattan and
Brooklyn. If our "existence" is a relationship between the Positive
Absolute and the Negative Absolute, the quest for finality in it is
hopeless: everything in it must be relative, if the "whole" is not a
whole, but is, itself, a relation.

In the attitude of Acceptance, our pseudo-base is:

Cells of an embryo are in the reptilian era of the embryo;

Some cells feel stimuli to take on new appearances.

If it be of the design of the whole that the next era be mammalian,
those cells that turn mammalian will be sustained against resistance, by
inertia, of all the rest, and will be relatively right, though not
finally right, because they, too, in time will have to give way to
characters of other eras of higher development.

If we are upon the verge of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be
overthrown, it will avail thee not to call us base-born and frowsy
peasants.

In our crude, bucolic way, we now offer an outrage upon common sense
that we think will some day be an unquestioned commonplace:

That manufactured objects of stone and iron have fallen from the sky:

That they have been brought down from a state of suspension, in a region
of inertness to this earth's attraction, by atmospheric disturbances.

The "thunderstone" is usually "a beautifully polished, wedge-shaped
piece of greenstone," says a writer in the _Cornhill Magazine_, 50-517.
It isn't: it's likely to be of almost any kind of stone, but we call
attention to the skill with which some of them have been made. Of
course this writer says it's all superstition. Otherwise he'd be one of
us crude and simple sons of the soil.

Conventional damnation is that stone implements, already on the
ground--"on the ground in the first place"--are found near where
lightning was seen to strike: that are supposed by astonished rustics,
or by intelligence of a