conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstration, argument, or reasoning, a priori.”  This or the like applies to most of the recorded miracles.  Huxley was extremely careful not to assert that they were incredible merely because they might involve conditions outside our existing experience.  It is a vulgar mistake, for which science certainly gives no warrant, to assert that things are impossible because they contradict our experience.  In such a sense many of the most common modern conveniences of life would have seemed impossible a century ago.  To travel with safety sixty miles an hour, to talk through the telephone with a friend an hundred miles away, to receive intelligible messages across the Atlantic by a cable, and, still more, to communicate by wireless telegraphy would have seemed impossible until recently.  At the present time, the conversion of a baser metal into gold would be called impossible by everyone with a little knowledge of elementary chemistry.  This last example leads admirably to a right understanding of the scientific view of impossibility.  The older alchemists, partly from ignorance and partly from credulity, believed absolutely in the possibility of transmuting the metals.  The advance of chemical science led to definite conceptions of the differences between compounds and elementary bodies, and of the independence of these elements.  The methods and reasoning of the alchemists became absurd, and no one would attempt seriously to transmute the metals on their lines.  These advances, however, do not give us the right to assume that the elements are absolutely independent, and that transmutation is therefore impossible.  Some of the most recent progress in chemistry has opened up the suggestion that the elements themselves are different combinations of a common substance.  Huxley applied this particular argument to the miracle at the marriage of Cana.

“You are quite mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny that water may be turned into wine.  Many very competent judges are inclined to think that the bodies which we have hitherto regarded as elementary are really composite arrangements of the particles of a uniform primitive matter.  Supposing that view to be correct, there would be no more theoretical difficulty about turning water into alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this present moment, any practical difficulty in working other such miracles; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid, glycerine, and succinic acid; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes rarer than musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple.”

Unless we make the unscientific and preposterous assumption that our present knowledge of nature and of natural forces is absolute and complete, it is unscientific and illogical to declare at once that any supposed events could not have happened merely because they seem to have contradicted so-called natural laws.