In such a case, I could, of course, entertain no doubt of
the good faith of the witness; it would be only his competency, which
unfortunately has very little to do with good faith or intensity of
conviction, which I should presume to call in question.
Indeed, I hardly know what testimony would satisfy me of the existence
of a live centaur. To put an extreme case, suppose the late Johannes
Mueller, of Berlin, the greatest anatomist and physiologist among my
contemporaries, had barely affirmed he had seen a live centaur, I should
certainly have been staggered by the weight of an assertion coming from
such an authority. But I could have got no further than a suspension of
judgment. For, on the whole, it would have been more probable that even
he had fallen into some error of interpretation of the facts which came
under his observation, than that such an animal as a centaur really
existed. And nothing short of a careful monograph, by a highly competent
investigator, accompanied by figures and measurements of all the most
important parts of a centaur, put forth under circumstances which could
leave no doubt that falsification or misinterpretation would meet with
immediate exposure, could possibly enable a man of science to feel that
he acted conscientiously, in expressing his belief in the existence of a
centaur on the evidence of testimony.
This hesitation about admitting the existence of such an animal as a
centaur, be it observed, does not deserve reproach, as scepticism, but
moderate praise, as mere scientific good faith.
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