with exceedingly ill-sitting sanctimoniousness, to have no
better answer than that such belief, being impious, must be absurd and
cannot be true. It did not suit his purpose to point out that the
volitions of Omnipotence itself, equally with human volitions, are
necessary effects of causes--the causes in their case being the other
attributes with which Omnipotence is conjoined--and that as it is
nevertheless impossible for the volitions of Omnipotence to be otherwise
than absolutely free and uncontrolled, so there is no reason why human
volitions likewise should not, in spite of the same objection, be as
thoroughly free as our own feelings assure us they are.

Hume's sudden conversion, so amazing at first sight, from flattest
denial to positivest assertion of causal power, becomes intelligible
when he is seen immediately afterwards using his newly adopted creed as
a fulcrum whereon to rest his argumentative lever in his assault upon
Miracles. About that celebrated piece of reasoning, startling as the
avowal may sound, there is, to my mind, nothing more remarkable than its
celebrity, for, on close inspection, it will be found to be entirely
made up of (1) the demonstration of a truism, and (2) the inculcation of
a confessedly misleading rule. Not far from its commencement will be
found a definition which, if correct, would leave nothing to dispute
about. A miracle, we are told, is 'a violation of the laws of nature,'
of laws which a firm and unalterable experience has established. But if
so, _cadit quaestio_. Of course, there can be no alteration of the
unalterable. No need, of course, of further words to prove that a
miracle thus defined is an impossibility.

Let us suppose, however, the word _unalterable_ to have been used here
by a slip of the pen instead of _unaltered_, and that Hume really meant
by a miracle any alteration of what had previously appeared to be the
constant course of nature. Even so, we shall have him contending that no
amount, however great, of testimony however unimpeachable, ought to be
accepted as adequate proof of such an alteration. Of what he urges in
support of this position much may be at once dismissed as altogether
irrelevant. That the most honest witness may be the dupe of optical or
auricular illusion, or of a distorting or magnifying imagination; that
there is in many minds a natural predisposition to believe in the
marvellous, and that the love of astonishing often gives exaggerated
e