Page:A philosophical essay on probabilities Tr. Truscott, Emory 1902.djvu/128

118 be at least a hundred and eighty thousand times greater than the preceding one. One sees by this how much, in the first case, the reappearance at the second draw of the white ball drawn at the first draw, the extraordinary conclusion of the two testimonies decreases the value of it.

We would give no credence to the testimony of a man who should attest to us that in throwing a hundred dice into the air they had all fallen on the same face. If we had ourselves been spectators of this event we should believe our own eyes only after having carefully examined all the circumstances, and after having brought in the testimonies of other eyes in order to be quite sure that there had been neither hallucination nor deception. But after this examination we should not hesitate to admit it in spite of its extreme improbability; and no one would be tempted, in order to explain it, to recur to a denial of the laws of vision. We ought to conclude from it that the probability of the constancy of the laws of nature is for us greater than this, that the event in question has not taken place at all—a probability greater than that of the majority of historical facts which we regard as incontestable. One may judge by this the immense weight of testimonies necessary to admit a suspension of natural laws, and how improper it would be to apply to this case the ordinary rules of criticism. All those who without offering this immensity of testimonies support this when making recitals of events contrary to those laws, decrease rather than augment the. belief which they wish to inspire; for then those recitals render very probable the error or the falsehood of their authors.