Page:Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion - Hume (1779).djvu/55

 Are these, which have hitherto been so much insisted on by philosophers, all fallacy, all sophism? Can we reach no farther in this subject than experience and probability? I will not say, that this is betraying the cause of a Deity: But surely, by this affected candor, you give advantages to Atheists, which they never could obtain by the mere dint of argument and reasoning.

I chiefly scruple in this subject, said, is not so much that all religious arguments are by reduced to experience, as that they appear not to be even the most certain and irrefragable of that inferior kind. That a stone will fall, that fire will burn, that the earth has solidity, we have observed a thousand and a thousand times; and when any new instance of this nature is presented, we draw without hesitation the accustomed inference. The exact similarity of the