Page:A philosophical essay on probabilities Tr. Truscott, Emory 1902.djvu/129

Rh But that which diminishes the belief of educated men increases often that of the uneducated, always greedy for the wonderful.

There are things so extraordinary that nothing can balance their improbability. But this, by the effect of a dominant opinion, can be weakened to the point of appearing inferior to the probability of the testimonies; and when this opinion changes an absurd statement admitted unanimously in the century which has given it birth offers to the following centuries only a new proof of the extreme influence of the general opinion upon the more enlightened minds. Two great men of the century of Louis XIV.—Racine and Pascal—are striking examples of this. It is painful to see with what complaisance Racine, this admirable painter of the human heart and the most perfect poet that has ever lived, reports as miraculous the recovery of Mile. Perrier, a niece of Pascal and a day pupil at the monastery of Port-Royal; it is painful to read the reasons by which Pascal seeks to prove that this miracle should be necessary to religion in order to justify the doctrine of the monks of this abbey, at that time persecuted by the Jesuits. The young Perrier had been afflicted for three years and a half by a lachrymal fistula; she touched her afflicted eye with a relic which was pretended to be one of the thorns of the crown of the Saviour and she had faith in instant recovery. Some days afterward the physicians and the surgeons attest the recovery, and they declare that nature and the remedies have had no part in it. This event, which took place in 1656, made a great sensation, and "all Paris rushed," says Racine, "to Port-Royal. The