uded a multitude of data.
Then, if redness is continuous with yellowness: if every basis of
admission is continuous with every basis of exclusion, Science must have
excluded some things that are continuous with the accepted. In redness
and yellowness, which merge in orangeness, we typify all tests, all
standards, all means of forming an opinion--

Or that any positive opinion upon any subject is illusion built upon the
fallacy that there are positive differences to judge by--

That the quest of all intellection has been for something--a fact, a
basis, a generalization, law, formula, a major premise that is positive:
that the best that has ever been done has been to say that some things
are self-evident--whereas, by evidence we mean the support of something
else--

That this is the quest; but that it has never been attained; but that
Science has acted, ruled, pronounced, and condemned as if it had been
attained.

What is a house?

It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished
from anything else, if there are no positive differences.

A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes
houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is
a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we
speak of dogs' houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of
Eskimos--or a shell is a house to a hermit crab--or was to the mollusk
that made it--or things seemingly so positively different as the White
House at Washington and a shell on the seashore are seen to be
continuous.

So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance.
It isn't anything, as positively distinguished from heat or magnetism or
life. Metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to define
life. They have failed, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing
to define: there is no phenomenon of life that is not, to some degree,
manifest in chemism, magnetism, astronomic motions.

White coral islands in a dark blue sea.

Their seeming of distinctness: the seeming of individuality, or of
positive difference one from another--but all are only projections from
the same sea bottom. The difference between sea and land is not
positive. In all water there is some earth: in all earth there is some
water.

So then that all seeming things are not things at all, if all are
inter-continuous, any more than is the leg of a table a thing in itself,