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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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.
    Because there is nothing final to find out.
    It’s like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was—
    But that all scientific attempts really to find out something, whereas really there is nothing to find out, are attempts, themselves, really to be something.
    A seeker of Truth. He will never find it. But the dimmest of possibilities—he may himself become Truth.
    Or that science is more than an inquiry:
    That it is a pseudo-construction, or a quasi-organization: that it is an attempt to break away and locally establish harmony, stability, equilibrium, consistency, entity—
    Dimmest of possibilities—that it may succeed.

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    That ours is a pseudo-existence, and that all appearances in it partake of its essential fictitiousness—
    But that some appearances approximate far more highly to the positive state than do others.
    We conceive of all “things” as occupying gradations, or steps in series between positiveness and negativeness, or realness and unrealness: that some seeming things are more nearly consistent, just, beautiful, unified, individual, harmonious, stable—than others.
    We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists—that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness.
    So then:
    That our whole quasi-existence is an intermediate stage between positiveness and negativeness or realness and unrealness.
    Like purgatory, I think.
    But in our summing up, which was very sketchily done, we omitted to make clear that Realness is an aspect of the positive state.
    By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into something else, and that which is not partly something else: that which is