and were wounded, they may safely testify; and probably they no less firmly believe what they were told respecting the cause in which they fought: it would have been a high breach of discipline to doubt it; and they, I conceive, are men better skilled in handling a musket than in sifting evidence and detecting imposture. But I defy any one of them to come forward and declare, on his own knowledge, what was the cause in which he fought, under whose commands the opposed generals acted, and whether the person who issued those commands did really perform the mighty achievements we are told of.
Let those, then, who pretend to philosophical freedom of inquiry, who scorn to rest their opinions on popular belief, and to shelter themselves under the example of the unthinking multitude, consider carefully, each one for himself, what is the evidence, proposed to himself in particular, for the existence of such a person as Napoleon Buonaparte: I do not mean, whether there ever was a person bearing that name, for that is a question of no consequence; but whether any such person ever performed all the wonderful things attributed to him; let him, then, weigh well the objections to that evidence (of which I have given but a hasty and imperfect sketch), and if he then finds it amount to anything more than a probability, I have only to congratulate him on his easy faith.
But the same testimony which would have great weight in establishing a thing intrinsically probable, will lose part of this weight in proportion as the matter attested is improbable; and if adduced in support of anything that is at variance with uniform experience,[1] will be rejected at once by all sound reason
- ↑ "That testimony itself derives all its force from experience, seems very certain. . . . . The first author, we believe, who stated fairly the connection between the evidence of testimony and the evidence of experience, was Hume, in his Essay on Miracles; a work. . . . . abounding in maxims of great use in the conduct of life." Edin. Review, Sept. 1814, p. 828.
