of every reflecting mind testifies.  What, then, is the secret of its force?  In a lecture of singular power Mr. Mozley gives his answer.  What tells beforehand against miracles is not reason, but imagination.  Imagination is often thought to favour especially the supernatural and miraculous.  It does do so, no doubt.  But the truth is, that imagination tells both ways—­as much against the miraculous as for it.  The imagination, that faculty by which we give life and body and reality to our intellectual conceptions, takes its character from the intellectual conceptions with which it is habitually associated.  It accepts the miraculous or shrinks from it and throws it off, according to the leaning of the mind of which it is the more vivid and, so to speak, passionate expression.  And as it may easily exaggerate on one side, so it may just as easily do the same on the other.  Every one is familiar with that imaginative exaggeration which fills the world with miracles.  But there is another form of imagination, not so distinctly recognised, which is oppressed by the presence of unchanging succession and visible uniformity, which cannot shake off the yoke of custom or allow anything different to seem to it real.  The sensitiveness and impressibility of the imagination are affected, and unhealthily affected, not merely by strangeness, but by sameness; to one as to the other it may “passively submit and surrender itself, give way to the mere form of attraction, and, instead of grasping something else, be itself grasped and mastered by some dominant idea.”  And it is then, in one case as much as in the other, “not a power, but a failing and weakness of nature.”

The passive imagination, then, in the present case exaggerates a practical expectation of the uniformity of nature, implanted in us for practical ends, into a scientific or universal proposition; and it does this by surrendering itself to the impression produced by the constant spectacle of the regularity of visible nature.  By such a course a person allows the weight and pressure of this idea to grow upon him till it reaches the point of actually restricting his sense of possibility to the mould of physical order....  The order of nature thus stamps upon some minds the idea of its immutability simply by its repetition.  The imagination we usually indeed associate with the acceptance of the supernatural rather than with the denial of it; but the passive imagination is in truth neutral; it only increases the force and tightens the hold of any impression upon us, to whatever class the impression may belong, and surrenders itself to a superstitious or a physical idea, as it may be.  Materialism itself is the result of imagination, which is so impressed by matter that it cannot realise the existence of spirit.

The great opponent, then, of miracles, considered as possible occurrences, is not reason, but something which on other great subjects is continually found on the opposite side to reason, resisting and counteracting