160 HUME vn 



In such a case, I could, of course, entertain no 

 doubt of the good faith of the witness; it would 

 be only his competency, which unfortunately has 

 very little to do with good faith, or intensity of con- 

 viction, which I should presume to call in question. 



Indeed, I hardly know what testimony would 

 satisfy me of the existence of a live centaur. To 

 put an extreme case, suppose the late Johannes 

 Miiller, of Berlin, the greatest anatomist and 

 physiologist among my contemporaries, had barely 

 affirmed that he had seen a live centaur, I should 

 certainly have been staggered by the weight of an 

 assertion coming from such an authority. But I 

 could have got no further than a suspension of 

 judgment. For, on the whole, it would have been 

 more probable that even he had fallen into some 

 error of interpretation of the facts which came 

 under his observation, than that such an animal 

 as a centaur really existed. And nothing short of 

 a careful monograph, by a highly competent 

 investigator, accompanied by figures and measure- 

 ments of all the most important parts of a 

 centaur, put forth under circumstances which 

 could leave no doubt that falsification or misinter- 

 pretation would meet with immediate exposure, 

 could possibly enable a man of science to feel that 

 he acted conscientiously, in expressing his belief 

 in the existence of a centaur on the evidence of 

 testimony. 



This hesitation about admitting the existence 



