240 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



doing of something impossible to any being but God. 

 Worst of all, the whole argument rests upon the tacit 

 assumption that the entire connexion of sequences in 

 Nature reposes on nothing but the ivill of God — a 

 basis of reasoning that has not borne, and will not 

 bear, the light of our maturcr and more deliberate 

 thought, grown critical and more exact in the course 

 of human culture. 



Thus it becomes plain that in the last resort 

 testimony has nothing but other testimony for its 

 support, human judgment other human judgment; 

 and never by any means or method at our command 

 do we succeed in getting past our human faculties, 

 so as to come directly upon the infallible and imme- 

 diate fact of God speaking in his own person. Here, 

 for the sake of argument, I purposely reason on the 

 assumption of that comparatively loose and super- 

 ficial philosophy which treats miracles as real possi- 

 bilities, capable of proof by testimony, quite as the 

 normal events in Nature are. But even granting 

 this, we see by the analysis just presented how futile 

 a circle there inevitably is in the argument from 

 miracle, and how it must perpetually come short 

 of any authority directly Divine. In any proposed 

 external communication from God, the channels of 

 human faculty are never to be got rid of; so, if they 

 do not in their own native quality constitute divine 

 vouchers, they must operate as barriers to any com- 



