T.H.  Huxley.

In addition to the directly controversial articles in the early part of the year, two other articles on controversial subjects belong to 1891.  “Hasisadra’s Adventure,” published in the “Nineteenth Century” for June, completed his long-contemplated examination of the Flood myth.  In this he first discussed the Babylonian form of the legend recorded upon the clay tablets of Assurbanipal—­a simpler and less exaggerated form as befits an earlier version, and in its physical details keeping much nearer to the bounds of probability.

The greater part of the article, however, is devoted to a wider question—­How far does geological and geographical evidence bear witness to the consequences which must have ensued from a universal flood, or even from one limited to the countries of Mesopotamia?  And he comes to the conclusion that these very countries have been singularly free from any great changes of the kind for long geological periods.

The sarcastic references in this article to those singular reasoners who take the possibility of an occurrence to be the same as scientific testimony to the fact of its occurrence, lead up, more or less, to the subject of an essay, “Possibilities and Impossibilities,” which appeared in the “Agnostic Annual” for 1892, actually published in October 1891, and to be found in “Collected Essays”, 5 192.

This was a restatement of the fundamental principles of the agnostic position, arising out of the controversies of the last two years upon the demonology of the New Testament.  The miraculous is not to be denied as impossible; as Hume said, “Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstrative argument or abstract reasoning a priori,” and these combinations of phenomena are perfectly conceivable.  Moreover, in the progress of knowledge, the miracles of to-day may be the science of to-morrow.  Improbable they are, certainly, by all experience, and therefore they require specially strong evidence.  But this is precisely what they lack; the evidence for them, when examined, turns out to be of doubtful value.]

I am anxious [he says] to bring about a clear understanding of the difference between “impossibilities” and “improbabilities,” because mistakes on this point lay us open to the attacks of ecclesiastical apologists of the type of the late Cardinal Newman.

When it is rightly stated, the Agnostic view of “miracles” is, in my judgment, unassailable.  We are not justified in the a priori assertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to us, cannot change.  In arguing about the miraculous, the assumption is illegitimate, because it involves the whole point in dispute.  Furthermore, it is an assumption which takes us beyond the range of our faculties.  Obviously, no amount of past experience can warrant us in anything more than a correspondingly strong