Page:Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte 11th ed - Richard Whately (1874).djvu/32

 Accordingly, in the tenth Essay, his use of the term "miracle," after having called it a "transgression of a law of nature," plainly shows that he meant to include human nature: "no testimony," says he, "is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a nature that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." The term "prodigy " also (which he all along employs as synonymous with "miracle") is applied to testimony, in the same manner, immediately after: "In the foregoing reasoning we have supposed that the falsehood of that testimony would be a kind of prodigy." Now had he meant to confine the meaning of "miracle," and "prodigy," to a violation of the laws of matter, the epithet "miraculous," applied even thus hypothetically, to false testimony, would be as unmeaning as the epithets "green " or "square;" the only possible sense in which we can apply to it, even in imagination, the term "miraculous," is that of "highly improbable,"—"contrary to those laws of nature which respect human conduct;" and in this sense accordingly he uses the word in the very next sentence: "When any one tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other."—Hume's Essay on Miracles, pp. 176, 177, 12mo.; p. 182, 8vo. 1767; p. 115, 8vo. 1817. See also a passage above quoted from the same Essay, where he speaks of "the miraculous accounts of travellers;" evidently using the word in this sense. Perhaps it was superfluous to cite authority for applying the term "miracle" to whatever is "highly improbable;" but it is important to the students of Hume, to be fully aware that he uses those two expressions as synonymous; since otherwise they would mistake the meaning of that passage which he justly calls "a general maxim worthy of our attention." Nay, there is this additional circumstance which renders the contradiction of experience more glaring in this case than in that of the miraculous histories which ingenious sceptics have held up to contempt. All the advocates of miracles admit that they are rare exceptions to the course of nature; but contend that they must needs be so, on account of the rarity of those extraordinary occasions which are the reason of their being performed. "A miracle," they say, "does not happen every day, because a Revelation is not given every day." It would be foreign to the present purpose to seek for arguments against this answer; I leave it to those who are engaged in the controversy, to find a reply to it; but my present object is, to point out that this solution does not at all apply in the present