But when people say, “But that can’t have happened because we know that that sort of thing doesn’t actually happen,” they are appealing to a would-be scientific principle of history, namely, the principle of analogy. The problem with analogy is that it never quite gets you far enough. History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial. In any case, if someone declares that certain kinds of events “don’t normally happen,” that merely invites the retort, “Who says?”
