Page:A budget of paradoxes (IA cu31924103990507).pdf/15

 A BUDGET

If I had before me a fly and an elephant, having never seen more than one such magnitude of either kind; and if the fly were to endeavour to persuade me that he was larger than the elephant, I might by possibility be placed in a difficulty. The apparently little creature might use such arguments about the effect of distance, and might appeal to such laws of sight and hearing as I, if unlearned in those things, might be unable wholly to reject. But if there were a thousand flies, all buzzing, to appearance, about the great creature; and, to a fly, declaring, each one for himself, that he was bigger than the quadruped; and all giving different and frequently contradictory reasons; and each one despising and opposing the reasons of the others—I should feel quite at my ease. I should certainly say, My little friends, the case of each one of you is destroyed by the rest. I intend to show flies in the swarm, with a few larger animals, for reasons to be given.

In every age of the world there has been an established system, which has been opposed from time to time by isolated and dissentient reformers. The established system has sometimes fallen, slowly and gradually: it has either been upset by the rising influence of some one man, or it has been sapped by gradual change of opinion in the many.

I have insisted on the isolated character of the dissentients, as an element of the à priori probabilities of the case. Show me a schism, especially a growing schism, and it is another thing. The homœopathists, for instance, shall be, if any one so think, as