xpression to the exaggerations of the fancy; that self-interest and
religious zeal often furnish additional motives for mendacity, and that
testimony, even when sincere at first, is apt to become corrupted at
every stage as it passes from hand to hand, or is committed to
paper--all this, together with any further enumeration of circumstances
calculated to invalidate testimony, is quite beside the real question.
It merely proves what no one needs to have proved, the propriety, viz.,
of weighing evidence and balancing adverse probabilities; and even
though it proved in addition that of all the so-styled miracles on
record, there is not a single one the evidence for which is sufficient,
it would still prove nothing to the purpose. For Hume is arguing against
the credibility, not of any miracles in particular, but of all miracles
in general, those included the witnesses for which are of indisputable
intelligence and undisputed veracity. Be the quality of the testimony
what it may, no quantity of it, according to him, can be sufficient.
This is the essence of his thesis, the only part of it in which there
is any novelty, and in behalf of this part all that he has to say may be
resolved into a sophism, followed by a repetition of the same begging of
the question, as is involved in his afore-cited definition of a miracle.
In substance it runs as follows. All testimony is at best but a
description of the results of sensible experience--of observations of
the senses--but the most faithful description must needs be a less vivid
presentation of truth than the reality described. A single original is
better evidence than any number of copies. Your own personal experience
is more trustworthy than any number of mere records of the experience of
other people, and where the two conflict, the former always deserves
preference. Now the personal experience of each one of us assures us
that many sets of natural phenomena take place in perfectly invariable
sequences, in sequences so invariable as to appear to be, and to be
familiarly spoken of as, manifestations or operations of certain
inflexible laws of nature. Within our experience there has never been a
single deviation from any such law. Wherefore, though all the rest of
mankind should unite in asserting that they have observed such a
deviation, we ought not to believe them. Even though, for example--the
example, however, being not Hume's, but my own--we were, on leaving home
some morning