here--it is the reverse? and, as it seems it
sometimes is so, see what comes of the admission. A man asserts the
reality of a miracle which you reject at once as simply impossible, as
contrary to your experience and that of every one whose experience
you can test. It will be easy for him to say, and upon Hume's evasion
he will say, that it was performed, for aught you know, under conditions
so totally different from those which ordinarily obtain in relation
to the same order of events, that you are no adequate judge as to
whether it was possible or not. He acknowledges that a miracle is a
very rare occurrence; that it is performed for special ends; is strictly
limited to time and place, like those phenomena the Indian prince was
asked to believe; and that your experience cannot embrace it, nor
is warranted in pronouncing upon it. I really fear that, if our
incredulous prince is to be condemned, our principle will be ruined. I
am anxious for his safe deliverance, I assure you."

"Still I cannot see that we can deny that phenomena may be manifested,
in virtue of the laws of nature, totally different from those which we
have ever seen or heard of."

"What! so different that the phenomena in question shall be a total
departure from that order of nature of which alone we and all about
us are cognizant; in fact, all but the one man, who tells us the
strange thing, we being at the same time totally incapable of testing
his experience?"

"Yes," said Fellowes; "I must grant it."

"I see," said Harrington, "you are bent on the destruction of our
criterion. Do you not perceive that, if our experience and that of
the immense majority, or of all about us, be not a sufficient
criterion of the laws of nature, our argument falls to the ground?
'Your principle,' our adversaries will say, 'is a fallacious one;
Nature has her laws, no doubt, which apply to miracles as to every
other phenomenon; but in assuming your experience to be a sufficient
criterion of these laws, you have been, not interpreting her laws,
but imposing upon her your own.' If unknown powers of nature may
thus reverse our experience and the experience of all those whose
experience, under the given conditions, we have opportunities of
testing, we ought to abstain from saying that some unknown powers may
not also have wrought miracles. Let us then affirm consistently the
sufficiency of our criterion; and the prince aforesaid must do the
same; and it warranted him, I