nsensical as if you were to talk of a proposition of Euclid being
the cause of the diagram which illustrates it, or of the integral
calculus interfering with the rule of three. Your question really
implies that we pretend to complete knowledge not only of all past and
present phenomena, but of all that are possible in the future, and we
leave all that sort of thing to the adepts of esoteric Buddhism. Our
pretensions are infinitely more modest. We have succeeded in finding
out the rules of action of a little bit of the universe; we call these
rules "laws of nature," not because anybody knows whether they bind
nature or not, but because we find it is obligatory on us to take them
into account, both as actors under nature, and as interpreters of
nature. We have any quantity of genuine miracles of our own, and if
you will furnish us with as good evidence of your miracles as we have
of ours, we shall be quite happy to accept them and to amend our
expression of the laws of nature in accordance with the new facts.

As to the particular cases adduced, we are so perfectly fair-minded as
to be willing to help your case as far as we can. You are quite
mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the
possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny
that water may be turned into wine. Many very competent judges are
already inclined to think that the bodies, which we have hitherto
called elementary, are really composite arrangements of the particles
of a uniform primitive matter. Supposing that view to be correct,
there would be no more theoretical difficulty about turning water into
alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this
present moment, any practical difficulty in working other such
miracles; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid,
glycerine, and succinic acid; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes
rarer than musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple. If the so-called
"elements," oxygen and hydrogen, which compose water, are aggregates
of the same ultimate particles, or physical units, as those which
enter into the structure of the so-called element "carbon," it is
obvious that alcohol and other substances, composed of carbon,
hydrogen, and oxygen, may be produced by a rearrangement of some of
the units of oxygen and hydrogen into the "element" carbon, and their
synthesis with the rest of the oxygen and hydrogen.

Theoretically, therefore, we can have no sort of o