Method: may a historian exclude miracle in advance, or is that a dogma disguised as a rule?

Ernest Renan, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

A historian works with what can be examined. No miracle has ever taken place under conditions that would allow verification, and to admit one is to abandon the discipline, not to extend it.1234

Sources

  1. In our days have we not seen almost all respectable people dupes of the grossest frauds or of puerile illusions? Marvellous facts, attested by the whole population of small towns, have, thanks to a severer scrutiny, been exploded.
    The Life of Jesus
  2. They were written between the year 50 and the year 140 of the Hegira. When the history of the Jewish schools in the ages which immediately preceded and followed the birth of Christianity shall be written, no one will make any scruple of attributing to Hillel, Shammai, Gamaliel the maxims ascribed to them by the Mishnah and the Gemara, although these great compilations were written many hundreds of years after…
    The Life of Jesus
  3. M. Littre's inexorable phrase, "Despite all the researches which have been made, no miracle has ever taken place where it could be observed and put upon record" is a stumbling-block which cannot be moved out of the path.
    Recollections of My Youth
  4. To debar criticism from similar interpretations would be as unreasonable as to limit the astronomer to the visible state of the heavens. Does not astronomy, on the contrary, involve an allowance for the parallax caused by the position of the observer, and construe from apparent deceptive appearances the real condition of the starry skies?
    The Apostles

Where the argument is made

  • Vie de Jésus (1863), the Introduction and the preface to the thirteenth edition
  • Les Apôtres (1866), introduction
  • L'Avenir de la science (written 1848, published 1890)

How the argument was received

The premise of the whole authorship and the point at which its critics have always attacked.