“I am quite of your mind.”

“You think, with me, that our experience,—­the experience of those about us,—­the experience of all whose experience we have the means of testing,—­is sufficient to settle the question as to the experience of those whose experience we have not the means of testing; who lived, for example, a thousand years before we were born; or in a distant part of the world, where we have never been?”

“Certainly:  why should we hesitate so to apply it?”

“I am sure I know not; and you see I am not unwilling so to apply it.  Only I asked the question, because we must not forget that many say it is begging the question; for, as a ‘miracle’ has not been exerted on us to give us a vision of the past experience of man, or his present experience in any part of the world we never visited, our opponents affirm, that to say that the experience we trust to has been and is the universal experience of man, is a clear petitio principii.”

“Surely,” said Fellowes, “it may be said that the general experience of mankind has been of such a character.”

“Exactly so, as a postulate from our experience, as a generalized assumption that our experience may be taken as a specimen and criterion of all experience.  We assume that,—­we do not prove it.  It is just as in any other case of induction; we say, ’Because this is true in twenty or thirty or a hundred instances (as the case may be), which we can test, —­therefore it is generally or universally true’; we do not say, because this is true in these instances, and because it is also generally or universally true, therefore it is so!  No; our true premise is restricted to what alone we know from our experience and the experience of all whose experience we can test if we please.  This is our real ground on which we are to justify our rejection of all miracles, and let us adhere to it.  As to your general experience, you see, the advocate of miracles easily gets over that.  He says, ’Why, no one pretends that miracles are as “plenty as blackberries”; otherwise they would no longer be miracles; these are comparatively rare events, of course; and, being rare, are necessarily at variance with general experience’; and, for my part, I should not know how to answer the objection.”

“Well, then,” said Fellowes. “let us adhere to that which is our real ground of objection, and let us consistently apply it.”

“With all my heart,” said Harrington; “we agree then, that our own uniform experience,—­that of all our neighbors and friends,—­in fact, of all whose experience we can test, is a sufficient criterion of a law of nature, and justifies us in at once rejecting as possible any alleged fact which violates it.”

“Certainly.”

“For example, if it were asserted that last year that the sun never rose on a certain day, or, rather, for twenty-four hours the rotation of the earth ceased, we should instantly reject the story, without examination of witnesses, or any such thing.”