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Persian Talisman.

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH.

CAN EVIDEnce be depENDED UPON ?-EXAMINATION OF HUme's reasoNING.

UR evidence for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses; because, even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater. It is evident it must diminish in passing from them to their disciples; nor can any one rest such confidence in their testimony as in the immediate object of his senses."

This is wrong. The testimony of some men is more valid than is the evidence of the senses of some others. All depends upon the power of the mind judging.

"It is a general maxim, that no objects have any discoverable connection together. All the inferences which we can draw from one to another are founded merely on our experience of their constant and regular conjunction. It is evident that we ought not to make an exception to this maxim in favour of human testimony, whose connection with any event seems in itself as little necessary as any other."

It may be put to any person who carefully considers Hume's previous position as to the fixedness of the proofs of the senses, whether this last citation does not upset what he previously affirms.

MIRACLES AND EXPERIENCE.

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"The memory is tenacious to a certain degree. Men commonly have an inclination to truth and a principle of probity. They are sensible to shame when detected in a falsehood. These are qualities in human nature."

This is a mistake; for they are not qualities in human nature. They are the qualities of grown men, because they are reflective of the state of the man when he is living in community, not as man.

"Contrariety of evidence, in certain cases, may be derived from several different causes: from the opposition of contrary testimony-from the character or number of the witnesses-from the manner of their delivering their testimony -or from the union of all these circumstances. We entertain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact when the witnesses contradict each other-when they are but few, or of a doubtful character-when they have an interest in what they affirm-when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or, on the contrary, with too violent asseverations. There are many other particulars of the same kind, which may diminish or destroy the force of any argument derived from human testimony."

Now, we contest these conclusions; and we will endeavour to meet them with a direct overthrowing answer. The recognition of likelihood-not to say of truth-is intuitive, and does not depend on testimony. In fact, sometimes our belief goes in another direction than the testimony, though. it be even to matters of fact.

Hume resumes with his cool, logical statements: "The reason why we place any credit in witnesses and historians is not derived from any connection which we perceive à priori between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them."

Just so we would add to this,-" because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them."

We are now arrived at the grand dictum of cool-headed, self-possessed Hume, who thought that by dint of his logical clearness, and by his definitions, he had exposed the impossibility of that unaccountable thing which men call a miracle,

and upon the possibility or the non-possibility of which religion will be ultimately found to wholly depend, because religion is entirely opposed to laws of "must be" and "must not be."

"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature," he declares.

Not so, we will rejoin. It is only a violation of the laws of our nature. A very different thing. We have no right to set our nature up as the measure of all nature. This is merely the mind's assumption; and it is important to expose its real emptiness, because all Hume's philosophy turns upon this, which he imagines to be a rigid axiom, to which all argument must recur.

"A firm and unalterable experience has established the laws of nature. The proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined." So says Hume.

But experience has nothing to do with a miracle, because it is a sense not comprised in the senses, but an unexperienced sensation or perception, exposing the senses as dreams, and overriding their supposed certainty and totality by a new dream, or apparent certainty, contradicting the preceding. If this were not possible, then the senses, or the instantaneous judgment which comes out of their sum-or the thing "conviction," as we call it—would be the measure of everything past, present, and to come,-which we know it is not.

Hume, or any philosopher, is wrong in dogmatising at all, because he only speaks from his own experience; and individual experience will in no wise assist towards the discovery of real truth. In philosophy, no one has a right to lay down any basis, and to assume it as true. The philosopher must always argue negatively, not affirmatively. The moment he adopts the latter course, he is lost. Hume presupposes all his Treatise on Miracles in this single assumption that nature itself has laws, and not laws only to our faculties. The mighty difference between these two great facts will be at once felt by a thinker; but we will

IDEAS AND EMOTIONS.

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not permit Hume to assume anything where he has no right, and so to turn the flank of his adversary by artfully putting forward unawares and carrying an assumption. Nature is only nature in man's mind, but not true otherwise, any more than that the universe exists out of the mind-or out of the man, who has in thinking to make it. Take away, therefore, the man in whom the idea of it is, and the universe disappears. We will question Hume, the disbelieving philosopher, as to his right to open his lips, because it is very doubtful if language, which is the power of expression, any more than that which we call consistent thought, is inseparably consistent to man, who is all inconsistence in his beginning, middle, and end-in his coming here and in his going hence from here, out of this strange world; to which he does not seem really to belong, and in which world he seems to have been somehow obtruded, as something not of it—strange as this seems.

As to the philosophy of Hume, granting the ground, you have, of course, all the basis for the constructions raised upon that ground. But suppose we, who argue in opposition to Hume, dispute his ground?

Hume, in his Treatise on Miracles, only begs the question; and there is therefore no wonder that, having first secured his position by consent or negligence of the opponent, he may deal from it the shot of what artillery he pleases; and his opponent, having once allowed the first ground,—or the capacity to argue, has unwittingly let in all the ruinous results which follow; these philosophically are indisputable. We would urge that Hume has no capacity to argue in this way, inasmuch as he has taken the "human mind" as the capacity of arguing. Either reason or miracle must be first removed, because you can admit either; for they are opposites, and cannot camp in the same mind: one is idea, the other is no idea-in this world; and as we are in this world, we can only judge as in this world. In another world, Hume the philosopher may himself be an impossibility, and therefore be a miracle, through his own philosophy, and the application of it.

Hume is the man of ideas, and is therefore very correct, as a philosopher, if philosophy were possible; but we deny that it is possible in regard to any speculation out of this world. Ideas-that is, philosophical ideas-may be described as the steps of the ladder by which we philosophically descend from God. Emotions are also the steps by which alone we can ascend to Him. Human reason is a possibility, from the line drawn by which either ascent or descent may be made. The things Necessity, or Fate, and Free Will, passing into the mind of man (both may be identical in their nature, though opposite in their operation), dictate from the invisible, but persuade from the visible.

Hume asserts that "a uniform experience amounts to a proof." It does not do so, any more than "ninety-nine" are a "hundred."

He also says that "there is not to be found in all history any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men to be believed." Now, we will rejoin to this, that a public miracle is a public impossibility; for the moment it has become public, it has ceased to be a miracle. "In the case of any particular assumed miracle," he further says, "there are not a sufficient number of men of such unquestioned good sense, education, and learning as to secure us against all delusion in themselves of such undoubted integrity as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others." Now, to this our answer is, that our own senses deceive us ; and why, then, should not the asseverations of others?

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Hume adduces a number of circumstances which, he insists, are requisite to give us a full assurance in the testimony of men ;" but nothing can give us this assurance in other men's testimony that he supposes. We judge of circumstances ourselves, upon our own ideas of the testimony of men-not upon the testimony itself; for we sometimes believe that which the witnesses, with the fullest reliance upon themselves, deny. We judge upon our own silent convictions, that is, upon all abstract points. It is for this reason that assurances even by angels, in Scripture, have not been believed by the persons to whom the