The true philosopher will see that, with his limited
experience and that of all his contemporaries, he has no right to
dogmatise about all that may have been permitted or will be permitted
in the Divine administration of the universe; he will see that those
who with one voice denied, about half a century ago, the existence of
aerolites, and summarily dismissed all the alleged facts as a silly
fable, because it contradicted their experience,--that those who refused
to admit the Copernican theory because, as they said, it manifestly
contradicted their experience,--that the schoolboy who refuses to admit
the first law of motion because, as he says, it gives the lie to all
his experience,--that the Oriental prince (whose scepticism Hume vainly
attempts, on his principle, to meet) who denied the possibility of ice
because it contradicted his experience,--and, in the same manner, that
the men who, with Dr. Strauss, lay down the dictum that a miracle
is impossible and a contradiction because it contradicts their
experience,--have all been alike contravening the first principles of
the modest philosophy of Bacon, and have fallen into one of the most
ordinary illusions against which he has warned us namely, that that
cannot be true which seems in contradiction to our own experience.
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