There are two classes of these people:  those who are ready to believe in any miracle so long as it is guaranteed by ecclesiastical authority; and those who are ready to believe in any miracle so long as it has some different guarantee.  The believers in what are ordinarily called miracles—­those who accept the miraculous narratives which they are taught to think are essential elements of religious doctrine—­are in the one category; the spirit-rappers, table-turners, and all the other devotees of the occult sciences of our day are in the other:  and, if they disagree in most things they agree in this, namely, that they ascribe to science a dictum that is not scientific; and that they endeavour to upset the dictum thus foisted on science by a realistic argument which is equally unscientific.

It is asserted, for example, that, on a particular occasion, water was turned into wine; and, on the other hand, it is asserted that a man or a woman “levitated” to the ceiling, floated about there, and finally sailed out by the window.  And it is assumed that the pardonable scepticism, with which most scientific men receive these statements, is due to the fact that they feel themselves justified in denying the possibility of any such metamorphosis of water, or of any such levitation, because such events are contrary to the laws of nature.  So the question of the preacher is triumphantly put:  How do you know that there are not “higher” laws of nature than your chemical and physical laws, and that these higher laws may not intervene and “wreck” the latter?

The plain answer to this question is, Why should anybody be called upon to say how he knows that which he does not know?  You are assuming that laws are agents—­efficient causes of that which happens—­and that one law can interfere with another.  To us, that assumption is as nonsensical 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.