f an "impossibility" except a contradiction in terms. There are
impossibilities logical, but none natural. A "round square," a
"present past," "two parallel lines that intersect," are
impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the predicates, _round,
present, intersect_, are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the
subjects, _square, past, parallel_. But walking on water, or turning
water into wine, or procreation without male intervention, or raising
the dead, are plainly not "impossibilities" in this sense.

In the affirmation, that a man walked upon water, the idea of the
subject is not contradictory of that in the predicate. Naturalists are
familiar with insects which walk on water, and imagination has no more
difficulty in putting a man in place of the insect than it has in
giving a man some of the attributes of a bird and making an angel of
him; or in ascribing to him the ascensive tendencies of a balloon, as
the "levitationists" do. Undoubtedly, there are very strong physical
and biological arguments for thinking it extremely improbable that a
man could be supported on the surface of the water as the insect is;
or that his organisation could be compatible with the possession and
use of wings; or that he could rise through the air without mechanical
aid. Indeed, if we have any reason to believe that our present
knowledge of the nature of things exhausts the possibilities of
nature, we might properly say that the attributes of men are
contradictory of walking on water, or floating in the air, and
consequently that these acts are truly "impossible" for him. But it is
sufficiently obvious, not only that we are at the beginning of our
knowledge of nature, instead of having arrived at the end of it, but
that the limitations of our faculties are such that we never can be in
a position to set bounds to the possibilities of nature. We have
knowledge of what is happening and of what has happened; of what will
happen we have and can have no more than expectation, grounded on our
more or less correct reading of past experience and prompted by the
faith, begotten of that experience, that the order of nature in the
future will resemble its order in the past.

The same considerations apply to the other examples of supposed
miraculous events. The change of water into wine undoubtedly implies a
contradiction, and is assuredly "impossible," if we are permitted to
assume that the "elementary bodies" of the chemists are, now an