Ill SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE 95 



preacher was answering an objection which has 

 now been generally abandoned." Either the 

 preacher knew this or he did not know it. It 

 seems to me, as a mere lay teacher, to be a pity 

 that the " great dome of St. Paul's " should have 

 been made to " echo " (if so be that such stentorian 

 effects were really produced) a statement which, 

 admitting the first alternative, was unfair, and, 

 admitting the second, was ignorant. 1 



Having thus sacrificed one half of the preacher's 

 arguments, the Duke of Argyll proceeds to make 

 equally short work with the other half. It ap- 

 pears that he fully accepts my position that the 

 occurrence of those events, which the preacher 

 speaks of as catastrophes, is no evidence of dis- 

 order, inasmuch as such catastrophes may be 

 necessary occasional consequences of uniform 

 changes. Whence I conclude, his Grace agrees 

 with me, that the talk about royal laws "wrecking " 



1 The Duke of Argyll speaks of the recent date of the demon- 

 stration of the fallacy of the doctrine in question. " Recent" 

 is a relative term, but I may mention that the question is fully 

 discussed in my book on Hume ; which, if I may believe my 

 publishers, has been read by a good many people since it ap- 

 peared in 1879. Moreover, I observe, from a note at page 89 of 

 The lli'ign of Law, a work to which I shall have occasion to 

 advert by and by, that the Duke of Argyll draws attention to 

 the circumstance that, so long ago as 1866, the views which I 

 hold on this subject were well known. The Duke, in fact, 

 writing about this time, says, after quoting a phrase of mine : 

 "The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all 

 hands to be simply a questi'-n of evidence." In science, we 

 think that a teacher who ignores views which have been 

 discussed coram populo for twenty years, is hardly up to the 

 mark. 



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