192 INDUCTION. 



marvellous, in persons strongly susceptible of it. 

 When none of these or similar circumstances exist to 

 account for the apparent strength of the testimony; 

 and where the assertion is not in contradiction either 

 to those universal laws which know no counteraction 

 or anomaly, or to the generalizations next in compre- 

 hensiveness to them, but would only amount, if 

 admitted, to the existence of an unknown cause or an 

 anomalous Kind, in circumstances not so thoroughly 

 explored but that it is credible that things hitherto 

 unknown may still come to light ; a cautious person 

 will neither admit nor reject the testimony, but will 

 wait for confirmation at other times and from other 

 unconnected sources. Such ought to have been the 

 conduct of the King of Siam when the Dutch travel- 

 lers affirmed to him the existence of ice. But an 

 ignorant person is as obstinate in his contemptuous 

 incredulity as he is unreasonably credulous. Any- 

 thing unlike his own narrow experience he disbelieves, 

 if it flatters no propensity; any nursery tale is swal- 

 lowed implicitly by him if it does. 



4. Before concluding this inquiry, we must 

 advert to a very serious misapprehension of the prin- 

 ciples of the subject, which has been committed by 

 some of the writers against Hume's Essay on Miracles, 

 in their anxiety to destroy what appeared to them a 

 formidable weapon of assault against the Christian 

 religion; and to which, with entirely different views 

 on the religious question, Laplace, in his Essay on 

 Probabilities, has been led to give his sanction ; the 

 effect in both cases being, entirely to confound the 

 doctrine of the Grounds of Disbelief. The mistake 

 consists in overlooking the distinction between (what 

 may be called) improbability before the fact, and im- 



