It is Folly to measure Truth and Error by our own Capacity

It is a peculiar arrogance of the learned, and perhaps especially of those who are newly learned, to suppose that whatever they cannot explain cannot be. I have met men who dismissed the accounts of travelers — of marvels seen in distant countries, of creatures no European naturalist had yet catalogued, of customs that seemed to violate all reason — with a confidence that rested entirely on the fact that these things were not to be found in their books. As though the books were the world, and not merely a small, imperfect record of what a handful of men had thought to write down.

The history of human knowledge is, in considerable part, a history of the impossible becoming commonplace. Things that would have struck the wisest man of one century as self-evident absurdities — the shape of the earth, the motion of the planets, the invisible creatures that live in every drop of water — have become, with time and effort, mere facts, known to schoolchildren. What this history teaches, or ought to teach, is that the borders of the possible are not fixed, and that we are very poorly placed to say where they lie.

“Let us confess our ignorance more readily than our knowledge. We know so little, and that little with such imperfect instruments, that humility is not merely a virtue but a form of accuracy — the truest description of our actual condition.”

There is, I think, an intellectual courage that consists not in the bold assertion of certainties but in the willingness to say: I do not know, and the matter may be beyond what I can know. This is not the same as credulity — I am not recommending that we believe everything. It is rather a kind of discipline of the imagination, a refusal to mistake the absence of an explanation for the absence of a fact. The world is large; our skulls are of a fixed and rather modest size.

I have read the accounts of miracles, of prophecies, of events that contradict everything our natural philosophy would predict, and I do not know what to make of them. Some are surely false. Some, perhaps, are not. What I am certain of is that my certainty is the least reliable guide available to me. A man who says “this cannot be because I cannot imagine how it could be” has confused his imagination with the structure of reality, and that is a confusion that the world, in my experience, takes particular pleasure in correcting.