Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/59

Rh 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 can not 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—"up from one place in a whirlwind and down in another place." In the American Almanac, 1833-71, it is said that this substance—"unknown to the inhabitants of the region"—was "immediately recognized" by scientists who examined it: and that "the chemical analysis also identified it as a lichen."

This was back in the days when Chemical Analysis was a god. Since then his devotees have been shocked and disillusioned. Just how a chemical analysis could so botanize, I don't know—but it was Chemical Analysis who spoke, and spoke dogmatically. It seems to me that the ignorance of inhabitants, contrasting with the local knowledge of foreign scientists, is overdone: if there's anything good to eat, within any distance conveniently covered by a whirlwind—inhabitants know it. I have data of other falls, in Persia and Asiatic Turkey, of edible substances. They are all dogmatically