MARINE AND TERRESTRIAL. 237 



amount of evidence, founded on a solid experience, which the 

 argument demands. 



But to leave the experience argument in exactly the state 

 in which it was left by Hume and La Place, would be doinc' 

 no real justice to our subject. It is in that state quite suf- 

 ficient to establish the fact, that there can be no real escape 

 from belief in acts of creation never witnessed by man, to 

 processes of development never witnessed by man, seeing that 

 a presumed law beyond the cognizance of experience must 

 be as certainly rejected, on the principle of the argument, as 

 a presumed miracle beyond that cognizance. It places the 

 presumed law and the presumed miracle on exactly the same 

 level But there is a palpable flaw in the anti-miraole argu- 

 ment. It does not prove that miracles may not have taken 

 place^ but that miracles, whether they have taken place or 

 no, are not to he credited^ and this simply because they are 

 miracles, i. e. violations of the established laws of nature. 

 And if it be possible for events to take place which man, on 

 certain principles, is imperatively required not to credit, these 

 principles must of course serve merely to establish a discre- 

 pancy between the actual state of things, and what is to be 

 believed regarding it And thus, instead of serving purposes 

 of truth, they are made to subserve purposes of error ; for 

 the existence of truth in the mind is neither more nor less 

 than the existence of certain conceptions and beliefs, ade- 

 quately representative of what actually is, or what really lias 

 taken place. 



I cannot better illustrate this direct tendency of the anti- 

 miracle argument to destroy truth in the mind, by bringing 

 the mental beliefs into a state of nonconformity with the pos- 

 sible and actual, than by a quotation from La Place himself 

 " We would not, ' he says, " give credit to a man who would 

 affirm that he savr a hundred dice thrown into the air, and 

 that they all fell on the same faces. If we had ourselves been 



