"I give up the reasoning on this point," said Fellowes, "but how,
I should like to know, do you retort the argument upon him?"
"Thus; you see that we maintain that a miracle is incredible per se, because impossible; not to be believed, therefore, on any evidence."
"Certainly."
"If, then, we saw what seemed a miracle, we should distrust our senses; we should say that it was most likely that they deceived us. Hear what Voltaire says in one of his letters to D'Alembert: 'Je persiste a penser que cent mille hommes qui ont vu ressusciter un mort, pourraient bien etre cent mille hommes qui auraient la berlue.' And what he says of their bad eyes, there is no doubt he would say of his own, if he had been one of the hundred thousand."
"I think so, certainly."
"And Strauss, and Hume, and Voltaire, and you and I, and all who hold a miracle impossible, would distrust our senses, and fall back upon that testimony from the general experience of others, which alone could correct our own halting and ambiguous experience."
"Certainly."
"It appears, then, my good fellow, that the position of those who deny and those who assert miracles is exactly the reverse of Hume's statement. The man who believes 'Transubstantiation' distrusts his senses, and rather believes testimony: and even so would he who has fully made up his mind, on our sublime principle as to the impossibility of miracles, when any thing which has that appearance crosses his path; he is prepared to deny his senses and to trust to testimony,—to that general experience of others which comes to him, and can come to him, only in that shape. It is we, therefore, and not our adversaries, who are liable to be reached by this unlucky illustration."
Fellowes himself seemed much amused by finding the tables thus turned. For my part, I had difficulty in repressing a chuckle over this display of sceptical candor and subtilty.
"There is perhaps another paradox which may be as well mentioned," resumed Harrington. "It is a little trying to my scepticism, but perhaps will not be to your faith. I mean this. We are constrained to believe from our 'uniform-experience' criterion that no miracle has ever occurred, or ever will; in short, it is, as we say, impossible. Now the principle which undoubtedly leads us to the conclusion we may regard as a principle of our nature, if ever there was one; that is, we are so constituted as to infer the perpetual uniformity of certain sequences of phenomena from our observation of that uniformity."