The passage is worth comparing with Hume: "Hence we see what little credit ought to be paid to facts said to be done out of the ordinary course of nature. These miracles [cutting the whetstone, etc., related by Cicero, De Div. i, c. xvii] are well attested. They were recorded in the annals of a great people, believed by many learned and otherwise sagacious persons, and received as religious truths by the populace; but the testimonies of ancient records, the credulity of some learned men, and the implicit faith of the vulgar, can never prove that to have been, which is impossible in the nature of things ever to be." M. Tullius Cicero Of the Nature of the Gods ... with Notes, London, 1741, p. 85. It does not appear to have been noted that in regard to this as to another of his best-known theses, Hume develops a proposition laid down before him. What Hume did was to elaborate the skeptical argument with a power and fullness which forced attention once for all, alike in England and on the Continent. It is not to be supposed, however, that Hume's philosophy, insofar as it was strictly skeptical--that is, suspensory--drew away deists from their former attitude of confidence to one of absolute doubt. Nor did Hume ever aim at such a result. What he did was to countermine the mines of Berkeley and others, who, finding their supra-rational dogmas set aside by rationalism, deistic or atheistic, sought to discredit at once deistic and atheistic philosophies based on study of the external world, and to establish their creed anew on the basis of their subjective consciousness. As against that method, Hume showed the futility of all apriorism alike, destroying the sham skepticism of the Christian theists by forcing their method to its conclusions. If the universe was to be reduced to a mere contingent of consciousness, he calmly showed, consciousness itself was as easily reducible, on the same principles, to a mere series of states. Idealistic skepticism, having disposed of the universe, must make short work of the hypostatized process of perception. Hume, knowing that strict skepticism is practically null in life, counted on leaving the ground cleared for experiential rationalism. And he did, insofar as he was read. His essay, Of Miracles (with the rest of the Inquiries of 1748-1751, which recast his early Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), posits a principle valid against all supernaturalism whatever; while his Natural History of Religion (1757), though affirming deism, rejected the theory of a primordial monotheism, and laid the basis of the science of Comparative Hierology. [816] Finally, his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) admit, though indirectly, the untenableness of deism, and fall back decisively upon the atheistic or agnostic position. [817] Like Descartes, he lacked the heroic fibre; but like him he recast