The advantage of an elementary philosophic habit is that it permits a man, for instance, to understand a statement like this, “Whether there can or can not be exceptions to a process depends on the nature of that process.” The disadvantage of not having it is that a man will turn impatiently even from so simple a truism; and call it metaphysical gibberish.  He will then go off and say: “One can’t have such things in the twentieth century”; which really is gibberish.  Yet the former statement could surely be explained to him in sufficiently simple terms.  If a man sees a river run downhill day after day and year after year, he is justified in reckoning, we might say in betting, that it will do so till he dies.  But he is not justified in saying that it cannot run uphill, until he really knows why it runs downhill.  To say it does so by gravitation answers the physical but not the philosophical question.  It only repeats that there is a repetition; it does not touch the deeper question of whether that repetition could be altered by anything outside it.  And that depends on whether there is anything outside it.  For instance, suppose that a man had only seen the river in a dream.  He might have seen it in a hundred dreams, always repeating itself and always running downhill.  But that would not prevent the hundredth dream being different and the river climbing the mountain; because the dream is a dream, and there is something outside it.  Mere repetition does not prove reality or inevitability.  We must know the nature of the thing and the cause of the repetition.  If the nature of the thing is a Creation, and the cause of the thing a Creator, in other words if the repetition itself is only the repetition of something willed by a person, then it is not impossible for the same person to will a different thing.  If a man is a fool for believing in a Creator, then he is a fool for believing in a miracle; but not otherwise.  Otherwise, he is simply a philosopher who is consistent in his philosophy.

A modern man is quite free to choose either philosophy.  But what is actually the matter with the modern man is that he does not know even his own philosophy; but only his own phraseology.  He can only answer the next spiritual message produced by a spiritualist, or the next cure attested by doctors at Lourdes, by repeating what are generally nothing but phrases; or are, at their best, prejudices.

-The Common Man (1950)