Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/828

806 antecedence and consequence. "Suppose," he said, that "every Englishman, by invoking St. Thomas of Canterbury, could put his hand into the fire without injury. Why, the very fact, that in order to avoid injury he must invoke the saint's name, would ever keep fresh and firm in his mind the conviction that fire does naturally burn. He would therefore as unquestioningly in all his physical researches assume this to be the natural property of fire as though God had never wrought a miracle at all. In fact, from the very circumstances of the case, it is always one of the most indubitable laws of Nature which a miracle overrides, and those who wish most to magnify the miracle are led by that very fact to dwell with special urgency on the otherwise universal prevalence of the law." There was a short pause when Dr. Ward had concluded his paper, which was soon ended by Professor Huxley, who broke off short in a very graphic sketch he had been making on his sheet of foolscap as he listened.

Dr. Ward, said Professor Huxley, had told us with perfect truth that the uniformity of Nature was only held, by even the most thoroughgoing of clear-minded physicists, as a fruitful working hypothesis, the assumption of which had led to a vast number of discoveries, which could not have been effected without it. If they could not assume that under heat the vapor of water would expand one day as it had expanded the previous day, no locomotive would be of any use; if they could not assume that under certain given conditions the majority of seeds put into the ground would spring up and reproduce similar seed, no fields would be sown and no harvest would be reaped. In innumerable cases where the same antecedents had apparently not been followed by the same consequents, thinking men had taken for granted that they must have been mistaken in supposing the antecedents to be the same, and had found that they were right, and that the difference in the antecedents had really been followed by the difference in the consequents. He, for his part, should not object at all to examine into any presumptive case of miracle sufficiently strong to prove that in a substantial number of cases Englishmen had been enabled to thrust their hands into the fire without injury, by adopting so simple a safeguard as calling on St. Thomas of Canterbury. But the truth was, that asserted miracles were too sparse and rare, and too uniformly accompanied by indications of either gross credulity or bad faith, to furnish an investigator jealous of his time, and not able to waste his strength on futile inquiries, with a sufficient basis for investigation. Men of science were too busy in their fruitful vocation to hunt up the true explanation of cases of arrested miracle, complicated as they generally were with all sorts of violent prepossessions and confusing emotions. He, for his part, did not pretend that the physical uniformity of Nature could be absolutely proved. He was content to know that his "working hypothesis" had been proved to be invaluable by the test of innumerable discoveries, which could never have