as always expecting it would. The only
wonder, to me, was its going on."

269. But even assuming the demonstrable uniformity of the laws or
customs of Nature which are known to us, it remains a difficult question
what manner of interference with such law or custom we might logically
hold miraculous, and what, on the contrary, we should treat only as
proof of the existence of some other law, hitherto undiscovered.

For instance, there is a case authenticated by the signatures of several
leading physicists in Paris, in which a peasant girl, under certain
conditions of morbid excitement, was able to move objects at some
distance from her without touching them. Taking the evidence for what it
may be worth, the discovery of such a faculty would only, I suppose,
justify us in concluding that some new vital energy was developing
itself under the conditions of modern bodily health; and not that any
interference with the laws of Nature had taken place. Yet the generally
obstinate refusal of men of science to receive any verbal witness of
such facts is a proof that they believe them contrary to a code of law
which is more or less complete in their experience, and altogether
complete in their conception; and I think it is therefore their province
to lay down for us the true principle by which we may distinguish the
miraculous violation of a known law from the sudden manifestation of an
unknown one.

270. In the meantime, supposing ourselves ever so incapable of defining
law, or discerning its interruption, we need not therefore lose our
conception of the one, nor our faith in the other. Some of us may no
more be able to know a genuine miracle, when we see it, than others to
know a genuine picture; but the ordinary impulse to regard, therefore,
all claim to miraculous power as imposture, or self-deception, reminds
me always of the speech of a French lady to me, whose husband's
collection of old pictures had brought unexpectedly low prices in the
auction-room,--"How can you be so senseless," she said, "as to attach
yourself to the study of an art in which you see that all excellence is
a mere matter of opinion?" Some of us have thus come to imagine that
the laws of Nature, as well as those of Art, may be matters of opinion;
and I recollect an ingenious paper by Mr. Frederic Harrison, some two
years ago, on the "Subjective Synthesis,"--which, after proving, what
does not seem to stand in need of so elaborate proof, that we can only