Belief In the Miraculous 257 



of human convictions. And it must be admitted to be a 

 reasonable request, if we ask those who would have us put 

 faith in the actual occurrence of interruptions of that order, 

 to produce evidence in favour of their view, not only equal, 

 but superior, in weight, to that which leads us to adopt ours." 



But otit of the month of Hume himself he declared 

 against making the recorded experience of man, how- 

 ever lengthy and impressive, a necessary ground fur 

 rejecting the possibility of the miraculous. Hume 

 had said, "Whatever is intelligible and can be dis- 

 tinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can 

 never be proved false by any demonstration, argument, 

 or reasoning, a priori.'" This or the like applies to 

 most of the recorded miracles. Huxle)^ was extremely 

 careful not to assert that they were incredible merely 

 because they might involve conditions otitside our 

 existing experience. It is a vulgar mistake, for which 

 science certaiuly gives no warrant, to assert that 

 things are impossible because they contradict our ex- 

 perience. In such a sense many of the most com- 

 mon modern conveniences of life would have seemed 

 impossible a centtiry ago. To travel with safety sixty 

 miles an hour, to talk through the telephone with a 

 friend an hundred miles away, to receive intelligible 

 messages across the Atlantic b}^ a cable, and, still more, 

 to communicate b}'- wireless telegraphy would have 

 seemed impossible imtil recently. At the present 

 time, the conversion of a baser metal into gold would 

 be called impossible hy everyone with a little know- 

 ledge of elementary chemistr}'. This last example 

 leads admirabl}^ to a right understanding of the sci- 

 entific view of impossibility. The older alchemists, 

 partly from ignorance and partly from credulity, be- 

 lieved absolutely in the possibility of transmuting the 

 17 



