But to leave the experience argument in exactly the state in which it was left by Hume and La Place, would be doing no real justice to our subject. It is in that state quite sufficient to establish the fact, that there can be no real escape from belief in _acts of creation_ never witnessed by man, to _processes of development_ never witnessed by man; seeing that a presumed _law_ beyond the cognizance of experience must be as certainly rejected, on the principle of the argument, as a presumed _miracle_ beyond that cognizance. It places the presumed _law_ and the presumed _miracle_ on exactly the same level. But there is a palpable flaw in the anti-miracle argument. It does not prove that miracles _may not have taken place_, but that miracles, whether they have taken place or no, are _not to be credited_, and this simply because they _are_ miracles, _i. e._ violations of the established laws of nature. And if it be possible for events to take place which man, on certain principles, is imperatively required not to credit, these principles must of course serve merely to establish a discrepancy between the actual _state_ of things, and what is to be _believed_ regarding it. And thus, instead of serving purposes of truth, they are made to subserve purposes of error; for the existence of truth in the mind is neither more nor less than the existence of certain conceptions and beliefs, adequately representative of what actually _is_, or what really _has taken place_. I cannot better illustrate this direct tendency of the anti-miracle argument to destroy truth in the mind, by bringing the mental beliefs into a state of nonconformity with the possible and actual, than by a quotation from La Place himself: “We would not,” he says, “give credit to a man who would affirm that he saw a hundred dice thrown into the air, and that they all fell on the same faces. If we had ourselves been spectators of such an event, we would not believe our own eyes till we had scrupulously examined all the circumstances, and assured ourselves that there was no trick or deception. After such an examination, we would not hesitate to admit it, notwithstanding its great improbability; and no one would have recourse to an inversion of the laws of vision in order to account for it.” Now, here is the principle broadly laid down, that it is impossible to communicate by the evidence of testimony, belief in an event which _might_ happen, and which, if it happened, _ought_ on certain conditions to be credited. No one knew better than La Place himself, that the _possibility_ of the event which he instanced could be represented with the utmost exactitude by figures. The probability, in throwing a single die, that the ace will be presented on its upper face, is as one in six,—six being the entire number of sides which the cube can possibly present, and the side with the ace being one of these;—the probability that in throwing a _pair_ of dice the aces of both will be at once