And it must
be admitted to be a reasonable request, if we ask those who would
have us put faith in the actual occurrence of interruptions of
that order, to produce evidence in favour of their view, not only
equal, but superior, in weight, to that which leads us to adopt
ours."
But out of the mouth of Hume himself he declared against making the
recorded experience of man, however lengthy and impressive, a
necessary ground for rejecting the possibility of the miraculous. Hume
had said, "Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived
implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any
demonstration, argument, or reasoning, _a priori_." This or the like
applies to most of the recorded miracles. Huxley was extremely careful
not to assert that they were incredible merely because they might
involve conditions outside our existing experience. It is a vulgar
mistake, for which science certainly gives no warrant, to assert that
things are impossible because they contradict our experience. In such
a sense many of the most common modern conveniences of life would have
seemed impossible a century ago. To travel with safety sixty miles an
hour, to talk through the telephone with a friend an hundred miles
away, to receive intelligible messages across the Atlantic by a cable,
and, still more, to communicate by wireless telegraphy would have
seemed impossible until recently.
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