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 by the summary confession that we have no reason.  Philosophy, then, could not have overthrown more thoroughly than it has done the order of nature as a necessary course of things, or cleared the ground more effectually for the principle of miracles.

Nor, he argues, does this instinct change its nature, or become a necessary law of reason, when it takes the form of an inference from induction.  For the last step of the inductive process, the creation of its supposed universal, is, when compared with the real standard of universality acknowledged by reason, an incomplete and more or less precarious process; “it gets out of facts something more than what they actually contain”; and it can give no reason for itself but what the common faith derived from experience can give, the anticipation of uniform recurrence.  “The inductive principle,” he says, “is only the unreasoning impulse applied to a scientifically ascertained fact, instead of to a vulgarly ascertained fact....  Science has led up to the fact, but there it stops, and for converting the fact into a law a totally unscientific principle comes in, the same as that which generalises the commonest observations in nature.”

The scientific part of induction being only the pursuit of a particular fact, miracles cannot in the nature of the case receive any blow from the scientific part of induction; because the existence of one fact does not interfere with the existence of another dissimilar fact.  That which does resist the miraculous is the unscientific part of induction, or the instinctive generalisation upon this fact....  It does not belong to this principle to lay down speculative positions, and to say what can or cannot take place in the world.  It does not belong to it to control religious belief, or to determine that certain acts of God for the revelation of His will to man, reported to have taken place, have not taken place.  Such decisions are totally out of its sphere; it can assert the universal as a law, but the universal as a law and the universal as a proposition are wholly distinct.  The one asserts the universal as a fact, the other as a presumption; the one as an absolute certainty,