Arnauld

If the strangeness of the fact could not be undone, at least the evidence for it could be reinforced so that it was turned into a stubborn fact; this was how, Arnauld argued, we could be confident in the miracles reported by St Augustine, for, strange as they might be, who could doubt his veracity?

As Arnauld recognized, the question of where to draw the line between facts that were too strange to be credible and facts that were strange but stubborn was far from straightforward.

However, if you mistakenly assume that the key problem lay in distinguishing clues from testimony, then you might conclude that it was only in The Logic of Port-Royal that Arnauld finally differentiated the two, for we are told that he drew a distinction between ‘internal evidence’ and ‘external evidence’.

Except, of course, Arnauld didn’t use the word ‘evidence’, as he was writing French, not English.

Arnauld is not copying Quintilian, but he is reworking him in order to go beyond him.