The gentleman allows it to be reasonable in many cases to act upon the testimony and credit of others; but he thinks this should be confined to such cases, where the thing testified is probable, possible, and according to the usual course of nature.  The Gentleman does not, I suppose, pretend to know the extent of all natural possibilities, much less will he suppose them to be generally known; and therefore his meaning must be, that the testimony of witnesses is to be received only in cases which appear to us to be possible.  In any other sense we can have no dispute; for mere impossibilities, which can never exist, can never be proved.  Taking the observation therefore in this sense, the proposition is this:  That the testimony of others ought not to be admitted, but in such matters as appear probable, or at least possible to our conceptions.  For instance:  A man who lives in a warm climate, and never saw ice, ought upon no evidence to believe, that rivers freeze, and grow hard, in cold countries; for this is improbable, contrary to the usual course of nature, and impossible according to his notion of things.  And yet we all know, that this is a plain manifest case discernible by the senses of men; of which therefore they are qualified to be good witnesses.  An hundred such instances might be named; but ’tis needless:  for surely nothing is more apparently absurd than to make one man’s ability in discerning and his veracity in reporting plain facts, depend upon the skill or ignorance of the hearer.  And what has the Gentleman said upon this occasion against the resurrection, more than any man who never saw ice might say against an hundred honest witnesses, who assert that water turns to ice in cold climates?

Yet it is very true, that men do not so easily believe, upon testimony of others, things which to them seem improbable or impossible; but the reason is not, because the thing itself admits no evidence, but because the hearer’s preconceived opinion outweighs the credit of the reporter and makes his veracity to be called in question.  For instance it is natural for a stone to roll down hill, it is unnatural for it to roll up hill:  but a stone moving uphill is as much the object of sense as a stone moving downhill; and all men in their senses are as capable of seeing and judging and reporting the fact in one case, as in the other.  Should a man then tell you, that he saw a stone go uphill of its own accord, you might question his veracity; but you could not say the thing admitted no evidence, because it was contrary to the law and usual course of nature; for the law of nature formed to yourself from your own experience and reasoning is quite independent of the matter of fact which the man testifies:  and whenever you see facts yourself, which contradict your notions of the law of nature, you admit the facts, because you believe yourself; when you do not admit like facts upon the evidence of others, it is because you do not believe them, and not because the facts in their own nature exclude all evidence.