robable, or not to any great degree, to be a fair answer to the
whole objection.

But since it is an objection which stands in the very threshold our
argument, and, if admitted, is a bar to every proof, and to all future
reasoning upon the subject, it may be necessary, before we proceed
further, to examine the principle upon which it professes to be founded;
which principle is concisely this, That it is contrary to experience
that a miracle should be true, but not contrary to experience that
testimony should be false.

Now there appears a small ambiguity in the term "experience," and in the
phrases, "contrary to experience," or "contradicting experience," which
it may be necessary to remove in the first place. Strictly speaking, the
narrative of a fact is then only contrary to experience, when the fact
is related to have existed at a time and place, at which time and place
we being present did not perceive it to exist; as if it should be
asserted, that in a particular room, and at a particular hour of a
certain day, a man was raised from the dead, in which room, and at the
time specified, we, being present and looking on, perceived no such
event to have taken place. Here the assertion is contrary to experience
properly so called; and this is a contrariety which no evidence can
surmount. It matters nothing, whether the fact be of a miraculous
nature, or not. But although this be the experience, and the
contrariety, which Archbishop Tillotson alleged in the quotation with
which Mr. Hume opens his Essay, it is certainly not that experience, nor
that contrariety, which Mr. Hume himself intended to object. And short
of this I know no intelligible signification which can be affixed to the
term "contrary to experience," but one, viz., that of not having
ourselves experienced anything similar to the thing related, or such
things not being generally experienced by others. I say "not generally"
for to state concerning the fact in question, that no such thing was
ever experienced, or that universal experience is against it, is to
assume the subject of the controversy.

Now the improbability which arises from the want (for this properly is a
want, not a contradiction) of experience, is only equal to the
probability there is, that, if the thing were true, we should experience
things similar to it, or that such things would be generally
experienced. Suppose it then to be true that miracles were wrought on
the first promulgation of