"Upon my principle! Do not say upon my principle, unless you mean to deny that you too embrace it; if you give up that principle, you lay yourself open at once to the retort that your position is insecure; that you have taken your experience as a sufficient criterion of the possibilities of events, when it is in fact merely a measure of such as have fallen under your own observation."
"Perhaps," said Fellowes, "I should say that the prince in question was justified at first in rejecting the fact, but that when he found other men, whose veracity he could not suspect, coming from the same regions of the world, and affirming the same phenomenon, it was his business to correct his experience, and to admit that the fact was so."
"I am surprised to hear you say so; you are again ruining our principle. Do you admit that the assertion that there was a place on earth at which water in large quantities became solid, was apparently as great a violation of all the experience of this man, as what is ordinarily called a miracle is of ours?"
"I cannot deny that it was so."
"But yet you think, that, though justified in disbelieving it at first, he would not be so when others, whose veracity and motives he had no reason to suspect, told him the same tale?"
"Yes."
"Why, then, is not this plainly to make a belief of such events depend upon testimony, and do we not give up altogether our sufficient principle of rejection of all such testimony? You are yielding, without doubt, the principle of our opponents, who affirm that there is no event so improbable that a certain combination of testimony would not be sufficient to warrant your reception of it; because, as they say, that testimony might be given under such circumstances,—so variously certified, and so above suspicion,—that it would be more improbable that the statement to which it applied (however strange) should be false, than that the testimony should not be true; in other words, that the falsehood of the testimony would be the greater miracle of the two. And they say this, because (as they assert) the uniform experience on which we found our objection to any miraculous narrative is no less applicable to the world of mind than to the world of matter; that there is not indeed an absolute uniformity of experience in the former, as neither is there in the latter; but neither in one nor in the other is there any absolute bouleversement of the principles and constitution of nature; which, they say, would be implied, if under all conceivable circumstances testimony might prove false. And yet now you seem to admit the very thing for which they contend; and in contending for it, you give up your case. Doing so, you certainly get rid of the paradoxical conclusions which my wretched scepticism sometimes suggests to me, as throwing a doubt on the integrity of our principle. I say your admission gets rid of it; but then it is with the ruin of the principle itself."
"What was that paradox?"
"It is this; that, if we adhere to our principle, we must deny that any amount of testimony is sufficient to warrant the belief of a miracle."
"That is what we do maintain."