vinced is
stable. Will you see with me whether there is any fair mode of
escaping from them? I should be very glad if I could do so."

"What are they?"

"Why, first, I am afraid it must be said, that we must entirely
justify a man in the condition of the Eastern prince mentioned by Hume,
who could not be induced to believe that there was such a thing as ice.
I am afraid that he was quite in the right; and yet we know that in fact
he was wrong."

"You are not, then, satisfied with Hume's own solution?"

"So far from it, that I cannot see, upon the principles on which we
refuse to believe miracles, that it is even intelligible. We agree,
do we not, that, from the experience we have (and, so far as we can
ascertain, from every body else's) of the uniform course of events,
of the established order of sequences, we are to reject any assertion
of a violation of those sequences; as, for example, of a man's coming
into the world in any preternatural manner, or, when he has once gone
out of it, coming into it again; and that we are entitled to do
this without any examination of the witnesses to any such fact,
merely on the strength of the principles aforesaid?"

"I admit that we have agreed to this."

"Now was not the assertion that in a certain quarter of the world
water became solid as stone, could be cut into pieces, and be put
into one's pockets, contrary, in a similar manner, to all the phenomena
which the said prince had witnessed, and also to the uniform experience
of all about him from his earliest years?"

"It certainly was."

"He was right, then, in rejecting the fact; that is, he was right in
rejecting the possibility of such an occurrence," said Harrington.

"But did we not ourselves say, with Hume, that, as we see that there
is not an absolute uniformity in the phenomena of nature, but that
they are varied within certain limits in different climates and
countries, so it does not become us to say that a phenomenon, though
somewhat variable, is a violation of the usual order of sequences?"

"We did; but we also agreed, I think, that those variations were to
be within invariable limits, as tested by the whole of our experience;
we did not include within those variations what is diametrically
contrary (as in the present case) to all our own experience and
that of every body about us. If it is to extend to such variations,
what do we say but this,--that the order of nature is uniform and
invariable, except w