tion the connection between these two--It _has_ happened so,
it _will_ happen so; then may I reject a new reported fact which
has _not_ happened so as an impossibility. But if I do not see the
connection between these two by a certain perception, or by any
perception, I cannot. For a miracle to be rejected as such, there
must, at any rate, be some proposition in the mind of man which is
opposed to it; and that proposition can only spring from the
quarter to which we have been referring--that of elementary
experimental reasoning. But if this experimental reasoning is of
that nature which philosophy describes it as being of, i.e. if
it is not itself a process of reason, how can there from an
irrational process of the mind arise a proposition at all,--to
make which is the function of the rational faculty alone? There
cannot; and it is evident that the miraculous does not stand in
any opposition whatever to reason....

Thus step by step has philosophy loosened the connection of the
order of nature with the ground of reason, befriending, in exact
proportion as it has done this, the principle of miracles. In the
argument against miracles the first objection is that they are
against _law_; and this is answered by saying that we know nothing
in nature of law in the sense in which it prevents miracles. Law
can only prevent miracles by _compelling_ and making necessary the
succession of nature, i.e. in the sense of causation; but
science has itself proclaimed the truth that we see no causes in
nature, that the whole chain of physical succession is to the eye
of reason a rope of sand, consisting of antecedents and
consequents, but without a rational link or trace of necessary
connection between them. We only know of law in nature in the
sense of recurrences in nature, classes of facts, _like_ facts in
nature--a chain of which, the junction not being reducible to
reason, the interruption is not against reason. The claim of law
settled, the next objection in the argument against miracles is
that they are against _experience_; because we expect facts _like_
to those of our experience, and miracles are _unlike_ ones. The
weight, then, of the objection of unlikeness to experience depends
on the reason which can be produced for the expectation of
likeness; and to this call philosophy has replied