Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1889-90, Vol. 6: Containing Parts XV-XVII
Let me first state brie?y why the decisive considerations cannot be estimated with any exactness. In considering whether the evidence for a marvellous fact is to be taken as true and adequate we have necessarily to compare opposing improbabilities it is improbable that the marvel should have really happened, and it is improbable that the testimony to its happening should be false - otherwise the testimony would not be what we call evidence at all.
N ow these opposing improbabilities are quite diverse, and we have no intellectual scales in which we can weigh them accurately one against the other. Some of our opponents Offer us, by way of such scales, Hume's summary argument against miracles It is contrary to experi ence that miracles should be true, and not contrary to experience that testimony should be false. But in saying that a marvel is contrary to experience we can mean no more than that it is unlike previous experience - or rather that it is unlike that portion Of experience which has been collected, handed down, and systematised by competent persons. But this only means that it is entirely novel and strange and in the course Of the life Of the human race, during the period in which it has handed down and communicated experiences, different portions Of mankind have been continually coming across things that were at first entirely novel and strange, though further acquaintance has rendered them familiar.
Let us take the strangest of the marvels that we are investigating, the physical phenomena of Spiritualism: and let us grant - for the sake Of argument - that they are as strange to human experience as they certainly are to modern science. N 0 one will maintain that it is impossible that the human race should ever come across anything so entirely novel in the course Of its accumulation Of experiences they can only say that it is highly improbable. What is impossible is to estimate this improbability with anything like exactness since to make such an estimate we should require to ascertain the proportion that what we do know about the universe bears to what we do not know about it and that proportion is certainly one of the things that we do not know.
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