200 POSSIBILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES vi 



was dead is even more remarkable than the 

 insufficiency of the testimony as to his coming to 

 life again. 



It may be urged, however, that there is, at any 

 rate, one miracle certified by all three of the 

 Synoptic Gospels which really does " imply a con- 

 tradiction/' and is, therefore, " impossible " in the 

 strictest sense of the word. This is the well- 

 known story of the feeding of several thousand 

 men, to the complete satisfaction of their hunger, 

 by the distribution of a few loaves and fishes 

 among them; the wondrousness of this already 

 somewhat surprising performance being intensified 

 by the assertion that the quantity of the fragments 

 of the meal, left over, amounted to much more than 

 the original store. 



Undoubtedly, if the operation is stated in its 

 most general form ; if it is to be supposed that a 

 certain quantity, or magnitude, was divided into 

 many more parts than the whole contained ; and 

 that, after the subtraction of several thousands of 

 such parts, the magnitude of the remainder 

 amounted to more than the original magnitude, 

 there does seem to be an a priori difficulty about 

 accepting the proposition, seeing that it appears 

 to be contradictory of the senses which we attach 

 to the words " whole " and " parts " respectively. 

 But this difficulty is removed if we reflect that 

 we are not, in this case, dealing with magnitude 

 in the abstract, or with " whole " and " parts " in 



