Monthly Review of Literature. 83 



obscurity among the convolutions of the brain. Now this is what our friends 

 in the south seem to have no patience for. Their characteristic is not subtlety 

 of discrimination on the powers and principles of the mind, but often admi- 

 rable soundness and sagacity in the direct application of their powers to the 

 practical object of coming to a right judgment on all important questions. Dr. 

 Paley stands forth in full dimensions as an exemplar of this class. Strong 

 and healthful in his faculties, he turns them to the immediate business before 

 him without one reflex look at the faculties themselves. He bestows on the 

 argument of Hume a few touches of his sagacity^but soon flings it as if in 

 distaste or intolerance away from him. We hold this to have been the general 

 reception of it in our sister kingdom; and while taken in grave and philosophic 

 style by Campbell, and Brown, and Murray, and Cook, and Somerville, and 

 the Edinburgh Reviewers, it seems to have made comparatively little impres- 

 sion on the best authors of England on Penrose for example, who bestows 

 on it but a slight and cursory notice, and Le Bas, who almost thinks it enough 

 to have barely characterized it as a wretched fallacy. 



" Paley concludes his preparatory considerations to his book on the Eviden- 

 ces with the following short practical answer to Hume's essay : ' But the 

 short consideration which, independently of every other, convinces me that 

 there is no solid foundation in Mr. Hume's conclusion is the following. 

 When a theorem is proposed to a mathematician, the first thing he does with 

 it is to try it upon a simple case ; and if it produce a false result, he is sure 

 that there must be some mistake in the demonstration. Now to proceed in 

 this way with what may be called Mr. Hume's theorem : If twelve men whose 

 probity and good sense I had long known, should seriously and circumstan- 

 tially relate to me an account of a miracle wrought before their eyes, and in 

 which it was impossible that they should be deceived, if the governor of the 

 country, hearing a rumour of this account, should call these men into his 

 presence, and offer them a short proposal, either to confess the imposture, or 

 submit to be tied up to a gibbet, if they should refuse with one voice to 

 acknowledge that there existed any falsehood or imposture in the case, if this 

 threat were communicated to them separately, yet with no different effect, if 

 it was at last executed, if I myself saw them, one after another, consenting 

 to be racked, burnt, or strangled, rather than give up the truth of their account, 

 still, if Mr. Hume's rule be my guide, I am not to believe them. Now I un- 

 dertake to say that there is not a sceptic in the world who would not believe 

 them, or who would defend such incredulity.' There is something nationally 

 characteristic in their respective treatments of the same subject by the 

 Scottish Hume and the English Paley. It exhibits a contest between sound 

 sense and subtle metaphysics. Paley is quite right in his concluding deliver- 

 ance. The falsehood of the twelve men, in the circumstances and with the 

 characteristics which he ascribes to them, would be more improbable than all 

 the miracles put together of the New Testament. It is a correct judgment 

 that he gives ; but he declines to state the principles of the judgment. Nor is 

 it necessary in ten thousand instances, that a man should be able to assign the 

 principles of his judgment, in order to make that judgment a sound and unex- 

 ceptionable l,one. There is many a right intellectual process undergone 

 by those, who never once reflect upon the process nor attempt the description 

 of it. The direct process is one thing ; the reflex view of it is another. Paley 

 sees most instantly and vividly the falsehood of Hume's theorem in a parti- 

 cular case ; and this satisfies him of a mistake in the demonstration. But 

 this is a different thing from undertaking to show the fallacy of the demon- 

 stration on its own general principles, as different as were the refutation of 

 a mathematical proposition by the measurement of a figure constructed in the 

 terms of that proposition from the general and logical refutation of it grounded 

 on the import of the terms themselves. This is certainly a desirable thing to 

 be done ; and all we have to say at present is, that this is what Paley has 

 failed to accomplish." 



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