iefly, but
by itself; I mean the objective occurrence of the supernatural. In
another chapter I have indicated the fallacy of the ordinary supposition
that the world must be impersonal because it is orderly. A person is
just as likely to desire an orderly thing as a disorderly thing. But my
own positive conviction that personal creation is more conceivable than
material fate, is, I admit, in a sense, undiscussable. I will not call
it a faith or an intuition, for those words are mixed up with mere
emotion, it is strictly an intellectual conviction; but it is a
_primary_ intellectual conviction like the certainty of self or the good
of living. Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God
merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief
that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at
all; I believe in them upon human evidence as I do in the discovery of
America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only
requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary
idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly
and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection
with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in
miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence
for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly)
because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic
thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a
miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony
to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word
about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the
landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy
agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with
evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it
comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony
in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one
of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either
because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That
is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the
main principle of materialism--the abstract impossibility of miracle.
You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are