But allowed him to suppose them fictions, and required now that he should show them to be absurd.
Your ladyship, returned he, has, I find, too much understanding to struggle against demonstration, and too much veracity to deny your convictions: therefore some of the arguments by which I intended to show the falsehood of these narratives may be now used to prove their absurdity.
You grant them, madam, to be fictions?
Sir, interrupted Arabella eagerly, you are again infringing the laws of disputation.
You are not to confound a supposition of which I allow you only the present use, with an unlimited and irrevocable concession.
I am too well acquainted with my own weakness to conclude an opinion false, merely because I find myself unable to defend it.
But I am in haste to hear the proof of the other positions, not only because they may perhaps supply what is deficient in your evidence of the first, but because I think it of more importance to detect corruption than fiction.
Though indeed falsehood is a species of corruption, and what falsehood is more hateful than the falsehood of history?
Since you have drawn me back, madam, to the first question, returned the doctor, let me know what arguments your ladyship can produce for the veracity of these books.
That there are many objections against it, you yourself have allowed, and the highest moral evidence of falsehood appears when there are many arguments against an assertion, and none for it.