"It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence"
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Arnold is skewering a very specific habit of mind: our eagerness to treat the spectacular as proof. The line turns on a sly doubleness. We do not merely accept miracles as evidence; we hunt them down as evidence. That second clause is the tell. It’s an indictment of motivated reasoning before the term existed, a portrait of people who don’t follow facts to conclusions but recruit “signs” to ratify what they already want to believe.
The phrase “almost impossible to exaggerate” does quiet rhetorical work. Arnold isn’t claiming the mind is occasionally credulous; he’s suggesting credulity is so reliable it borders on a law of nature. As a poet, he understands the seductions of wonder, but as a Victorian public intellectual he’s warning how easily wonder becomes a shortcut around judgment. “Miracles” here are less about theology than about any exceptional event elevated into certainty: the coincidence, the charismatic leader’s anecdote, the sudden “breakthrough” that spares us the slow grind of explanation.
Context matters. Arnold writes from a 19th-century Britain rattled by biblical criticism, Darwin, industrial modernity, and the shrinking authority of inherited belief. In that atmosphere, the appetite for miracles can look like a defensive maneuver: when old structures wobble, we crave the dramatic stamp of reassurance. The subtext is almost moral: a culture that fetishizes the extraordinary will neglect the ordinary disciplines that actually sustain truth - patience, skepticism, and the willingness to live with ambiguity. Arnold’s bite is that the miracle isn’t just a claim; it’s a psychological demand.
The phrase “almost impossible to exaggerate” does quiet rhetorical work. Arnold isn’t claiming the mind is occasionally credulous; he’s suggesting credulity is so reliable it borders on a law of nature. As a poet, he understands the seductions of wonder, but as a Victorian public intellectual he’s warning how easily wonder becomes a shortcut around judgment. “Miracles” here are less about theology than about any exceptional event elevated into certainty: the coincidence, the charismatic leader’s anecdote, the sudden “breakthrough” that spares us the slow grind of explanation.
Context matters. Arnold writes from a 19th-century Britain rattled by biblical criticism, Darwin, industrial modernity, and the shrinking authority of inherited belief. In that atmosphere, the appetite for miracles can look like a defensive maneuver: when old structures wobble, we crave the dramatic stamp of reassurance. The subtext is almost moral: a culture that fetishizes the extraordinary will neglect the ordinary disciplines that actually sustain truth - patience, skepticism, and the willingness to live with ambiguity. Arnold’s bite is that the miracle isn’t just a claim; it’s a psychological demand.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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