Page:The Works of Samuel Johnson ... A journey to the Hebrides. The vision of Theodore, the hermit of Teneriffe. The fountains. Prayers and meditations. Sermons.v. 10-11. Parliamentary debates.pdf/233

 in this case can be accounted for only by a supposition of its truth. It is evidently a far greater improbability, that witnesses so numerous, so dispersed, and unconnected, should concur in forging so extraordinary a relation, than that such a relation, extraordinary as it is, should be true. For though the several objects we meet in the world be in general formed according to observably stated laws; yet anomalies in nature may occur, and their occurrence has been occasionally asserted and believed on less accumulated attestation. We now at length have ceased to question the supernatural stature of the Patagonians; why, then, are we so unwilling to admit the more amply witnessed existence of apparitions? because the degree of prodigiousness implied in the supposition of a visible spirit strikes the imagination as too stupendous for belief. This is the effect of measuring the credibility of the attested achievements of nature by our own narrow experience, not by the power of Him, who is the author of nature, and to whom ''all things, even the investing spirits with visibility, are possible''. We have constant assurance of other natural processes not less difficult to account for than this, which we contemplate with such indignant mistrust. Nor can it on reflection appear more surprising or incomprehensible, that a spirit should assume a visible shape, than that it should animate and move a material body. The wonders we see may soften our incredulity to patience of those which we have not seen, but which all tradition attests. Nothing possible in itself, and proved by sufficient evidence, can be too prodigious for rational belief.

But even the evidence of our own senses is disputed by some reasoners, who pronounce every believed view of these unsubstantial forms to be a mere illusion of the fancy, engendered by disease, indigestion, and other bodily affections. Bodily affections, it is certain, have been known to bewilder the views of the mind; and instances enough may be produced of men not generally supposed insane, who have been deluded and possessed with the most extravagant conceptions, by the vapours of distempered health. But by what token do these philosophers discover, that the witnesses of the fact in question, whom