1890-91 THE FLOOD MYTH 187 



tablets of Assnrbanipal — a simpler and less ex- 

 aggerated form as befits an earlier version, and in its 

 physical details keeping much nearer to the bounds 

 of probability. 



The greater part of the article, however, is 

 devoted to a wider question — How far does geological 

 and geographical evidence bear witness to the con- 

 sequences which must have ensued from a universal 

 flood, or even from one limited to the countries of 

 Mesopotamia ? And he comes to the conclusion that 

 these very countries have been singularly free from 

 any great changes of the kind for long geological 

 periods. 



The sarcastic references in this article to those 

 singular reasoners who take the possibility of an 

 occurrence to be the same as scientific testimony to 

 the fact of its occurrence, lead up, more or less, to 

 the subject of an essay, "Possibilities and Im- 

 possibilities," which appeared in the Agnostic Annual 

 for 1892, actually published in October 1891, and to 

 be found in Collected Essays, v. 192. 



This was a restatement of the fundamental 

 principles of the agnostic position, arising out of the 

 controversies of the last two years upon the demon- 

 ology of the New Testament. The miraculous is not 

 to be denied as impossible ; as Hume said, " What- 

 ever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived 

 implies no contradiction, and can never be proved 

 false by any demonstrative argument or abstract 

 reasoning a priori" and these combinations of phen- 



