188 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY cHAP. viil 



omena are perfectly conceivable. Moreover, in the 

 progress of knowledge, the miracles of to-day may 

 be the science of to-morrow. Improbable they are, 

 certainly, by all experience, and therefore they 

 require specially strong evidence. But this is pre- 

 cisely what they lack ; the evidence for them, when 

 examined, turns out to be of doubtful value. 



I am anxious (he says) to bring about a clear under- 

 standing of the ditference between " impossibilities " and 

 "improbabilities," because mistakes on this point lay us 

 open to the attacks of ecclesiastical apologists of the type 

 of the late Cardinal Newman. . . . 



When it is rightly stated, the Agnostic view of 

 " miracles " is, in my judgment, unassailable. We are not 

 justified in the a priori assertion that the order of nature, 

 as experience has revealed it to us, cannot change. In 

 arguing about the miraculous, the assumption is illegiti- 

 mate, because it involves the whole point in dispute. 

 Furthermore, it is an assumption which takes us beyond 

 the range of our faculties. Obviously, no amount of past 

 experience can warrant us in anything more than a 

 correspondingly strong expectation for the present and 

 future. We find, practically, that expectations, based 

 upon careful observations of past events, are, as a rule, 

 trustworthy. We should be foolish indeed not to follow 

 the only guide we have through life. But, for all that, 

 our liighest and surest generalisations remain on the level 

 of justifiable expectations ; that is, very high prob- 

 abilities. For my part, I am unable to conceive of an 

 intelligence shaped on the model of that of men, however f 

 superior it might be, which could be any better off than 

 our own in this respect ; that is, which could possess 

 logically justifiable grounds for certainty about the 

 constancy of the order of things, and therefore be in a 

 position to declare that such and such events are im- 



