conditions outside our existing experience. It is a vulgar
mistake, for which science certainly gives no warrant, to assert that
things are impossible because they contradict our experience. In such
a sense many of the most common modern conveniences of life would have
seemed impossible a century ago. To travel with safety sixty miles an
hour, to talk through the telephone with a friend an hundred miles
away, to receive intelligible messages across the Atlantic by a cable,
and, still more, to communicate by wireless telegraphy would have
seemed impossible until recently. At the present time, the conversion
of a baser metal into gold would be called impossible by everyone with
a little knowledge of elementary chemistry. This last example leads
admirably to a right understanding of the scientific view of
impossibility. The older alchemists, partly from ignorance and partly
from credulity, believed absolutely in the possibility of transmuting
the metals. The advance of chemical science led to definite
conceptions of the differences between compounds and elementary
bodies, and of the independence of these elements. The methods and
reasoning of the alchemists became absurd, and no one would attempt
seriously to transmute the metals on their lines. These advances,
however, do not give us the right to assume that the elements are
absolutely independent, and that transmutation is therefore
impossible. Some of the most recent progress in chemistry has opened
up the suggestion that the elements themselves are different
combinations of a common substance. Huxley applied this particular
argument to the miracle at the marriage of Cana.

"You are quite mistaken in supposing that anybody who is
acquainted with the possibilities of physical science will
undertake categorically to deny that water may be turned into
wine. Many very competent judges are inclined to think that the
bodies which we have hitherto regarded as elementary are really
composite arrangements of the particles of a uniform primitive
matter. Supposing that view to be correct, there would be no more
theoretical difficulty about turning water into alcohol, ethereal
and colouring matters, than there is, at this present moment, any
practical difficulty in working other such miracles; as when we
turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid, glycerine, and succinic
acid; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes rarer than