Part 17

Predictions have sometimes been condemned as false ones, which, when scrutinize may scarcely be deemed to have failed: they may have been accomplished, and they may again revolve on us. In 1749, Dr. Hartley published his “Observations on Man;” and predicted the fall of the existing governments and hierarchies, in two simple propositions; among others—

Prop. 81. It is probable that all the civil governments will be overturned.

Prop. 82. It is probable that the present forms of Church government will be dissolved.

Many indeed were terribly alarmed at these predicted falls of Church and State. Lady Charlotte Wentworth asked Hartley when these terrible things would happen? The answer of the predictor was not less awful: “I am an old man, and shall not live to see them.” In the subsequent revolutions of America and France, and perhaps latterly that of Spain, it can hardly be denied that these predictions have failed.

The philosophical predictor, in foretelling some important crisis, from the appearances of things, will not rashly assign the period of time; for the crisis he anticipates is calculated on by that inevitable march of events which generate each other in human affairs; but the period is always dubious, being either retarded or accelerated by circumstances of a nature incapable of entering into his moral arithmetic. There is, however, a spirit of political vaccination which presumes to pass beyond the boundaries of human prescience, which, by enthusiasts, has often been ascribed to the highest source of inspiration; but since “the language of prophecy” has ceased, such pretensions are not less impious than they are unphilosophical. No one possessed a more extraordinary portion of this awful prophetic confidence than Knox the reformer: he appears to have predicted several remarkable events, and the fates of some persons. We are informed that when condemned to a galley in Rochelle, he predicted that “within two or three years, he should preach the Gospel at St. Giles’s, in Edinburgh,” an improbable event, which nevertheless happened as he had foretold. Of Mary and Darnley, he pronounced that, “as the King, for the Queen’s pleasure, had gone to mass, the Lord, in his justice, would make her the instrument of his overthrow.” Other striking predictions of the deaths of Thomas Maitland, and of Kirkaldly of Grange, and the warning he solemnly gave to the Regent Murray, not to go to Linlithgow, where he was assassinated, occasioned a barbarous people to imagine that the prophet Knox had received an immediate communication from heaven.

An Almanack-maker, a Spanish friar, predicted, in clear and precise words, the death of Henry the Fourth of France; and Pierese, though he had no faith in the vain science of Astrology, yet, alarmed at whatever menaced the life of a beloved Sovereign, consulted with some of the King’s friends, and had the Spanish almanack before his Majesty, who courteously thanked them for their solicitude, but utterly slighted the prediction: the event occurred, and in the following year the Spanish friar spread his own fame in a new almanack. This prediction of the Spanish friar was the result either of his being acquainted with the plot, or from his being made an instrument for the purposes of those who were. It appears that Henry’s assassination was rife in Spain and Italy before the event occurred.

Separating human prediction from inspired prophecy, we can only ascribe to the faculties of man that acquired prescience which we have demonstrated, that some great minds have unquestionably exercised. Its principles have been discovered in the necessary dependance of effects on general causes, and we have shewn that, impelled by the same motives, and circumscribed by the same passions, all human affairs revolve in a circle; and we have opened the true source of this yet imperfect science of moral and political prediction, in an intimate, but a discriminative, knowledge of the past. Authority is sacred when experience affords parallels and analogies. If much which may overwhelm, when it shall happen, can be foreseen, the prescient Statesman and Moralist may provide defensive measures to break the waters, whose streams they cannot always direct; and the venerable Hooker has profoundly observed, that “the best things have been overthrown, not so much by puissance and might of adversaries, as through defect of council in those that should have upheld and defended the same.”

“The philosophy of history,” observes a late writer and excellent observer, “blends the past with the present, and combines the present with the future; each is but a portion of the other. The actual state of a thing is necessarily determined by its antecedent, and thus progressively through the chain of human existence, while, as Leibnitz has happily expressed the idea, the present is always full of the future. A new and beautiful light is thus thrown over the annals of mankind, by the analogies and the parallels of different ages in succession. How the seventeenth century has influenced the eighteenth, and the results of the nineteenth, as they shall appear in the twentieth, might open a source of PREDICTIONS, to which, however difficult it might be to affix their dates, there would be none in exploring into causes, and tracing their inevitable effects. The multitude live only among the shadows of things in the appearance of the PRESENT; the learned, busied with the PAST, can only trace whence, and how, all comes; but he who is one of the people and one of the learned, the true philosopher, views the natural tendency and terminations which are preparing for the FUTURE.”

FATALISM, OR PREDESTINATION.

Under the name of materialism things very different from those generally understood are designated: it is the same with respect to fatalism. If it be maintained that every thing in the world, and the world itself, are necessary; that all that takes place is the effect of chance or of blind necessity, and that no supreme intelligence is mixed with, nor in fact mixes with existing objects; this doctrine is a kind of fatalism, differing very little from atheism. But this fatalism has nothing in common with the doctrine which establishes the innateness of the faculties of the soul and mind, and their independence upon organization. We cannot, then, under the first consideration, be accused of fatalism.

Another species of fatalism is that which teaches that in truth there exists a Supreme Being, creator of the universe, as well as of all the laws and properties connected with it; but that he has fixed those laws in so immutable a manner, that every thing that happens could not happen otherwise. In this system, man is necessarily carried away by the causes that compel him to act, without any participation whatever of the will. His actions are always a necessary result, without voluntary choice or moral liberty; they are neither punishable or meritorious, and the hope of future rewards vanishes, as well as the fear of future punishment.

This is the fatalism with which superstitious ignorance accuse the physiology of the brain, that is the doctrine relative to the functions of the most noble organization in the world. “I have effectually proved,” says Dr. Gall, “that all our moral and intellectual dispositions are innate; that none of our propensities or talents, not even the understanding and will, can manifest themselves independent of this organization. To which also may be added, that it does not depend upon man to be gifted with organs peculiar to his species, consequently with such or such propensities or faculties. Must it now be inferred that man is not the master of his actions, that there exists no free will, consequently neither a meritorious nor an unworthy act?”

Before this conclusion is refuted, let us examine with the frankness worthy of true philosophy, how far man is submitted to the immutable laws of his Creator, how far we ought to acknowledge an inevitable necessity, a destiny, or fatalism. To unravel confused ideas, is the best method of placing truth in its clearest point of view.

Man is obliged to acknowledge the most powerful and determined influence of a multitude of things relative to his happiness or misery, and even over his whole conduct, without of himself being able either to add to, or subtract from that influence. No one can call himself to life; no one can choose the time, the climate, or the nation in which he shall be born; no one can fix the manners, laws, customs, form of government, religious prejudices, or the superstitions with which he shall be surrounded from the moment of his birth; no one can say, I will be master or servant, the eldest son or the youngest son; I will have a robust or a debilitated state of health; I will be a man or a woman; I will have such or such a constitution: I will be a fool, an idiot, a simpleton, a man of understanding, or a man of genius, passionate or calm, of a mild or cross nature, modest or proud, stupid or circumspect, cowardly or prone to voluptuousness, humble or independent: no one can determine the degree of prudence or the foolishness of his superiors, the noxious or useful example he shall meet with, the result of his connexions, the fortuitous events, the influence of external things over him, the condition of his father and mother, or his own, or the source of irritation that his desires or passions will experience. The relations of the five senses with external things, and the number and functions of the viscera and members, have been fixed in the same invariable manner; so nature is the source of our propensities, sentiments, and faculties. Their reciprocal influence, and their relations with external objects, have been irrevocably determined by the laws of our organization.

As it does not depend upon ourselves to have or see when objects strikes our ears or our eyes, in the same manner our judgments are necessarily the results of the laws of thought. “Judgment, very rightly,” says Mr. Tracy, “in this sense is independent of the will; it is not under our controul, when we perceive a real relation betwixt two of our perceptions, not to feel it as it actually is, that is, such as should appear to every being organized as ourselves, if they were precisely in the same situation. It is this necessity which constitutes the certainty and reality of every thing we are acquainted with. For if it only depended upon our fancy to be affected with a great thing as if it were a small one, with a good as if it were a bad one, with one that is true as if it were false, there would no longer exist any thing real in the world, at least for us. There would neither be greatness nor smallness, good nor evil, falsehood nor truth; our fancy alone would be every thing. Such an order of things cannot even be conceived; it implies contradiction.

Since primitive organization, sex, age, constitution, education, climate, form of government, religion, prejudices, superstitions, &c. exercise the most decided influence over our sensations and ideas, our judgments and the determination of our will, the nature and force of our propensities and talents, consequently over the first motives of our actions, it must be confessed that man, in several of the most important moments of his life, is under the empire of a destiny, which sometimes fixes him like the inert shell against a rock; at others, it carries him away in a whirlwind, like the dust.

It is not then surprising that the sages of Greece, of the Indies, China and Japan, the Christians of the east and west, and the Mahomedans, have worked up this species of fatalism with their different doctrines. In all times our moral and intellectual faculties have been made to take their origin from God; and in all times it has been taught that all the gifts of men came from heaven; that God has, from all eternity, chosen the elect; that man of himself is incapable of any good thought; that every difference between men, relative to their faculties, comes from God; that there are only those to whom it has been given by a superior power who are capable of certain actions; that every one acts after his own innate character, the same as the fig tree does not bear grapes, nor the vine figs, and the same that a salt spring does not run in fresh water; lastly, that all cannot dive into the mysteries of nature, nor the decrees of Providence.

It is this same kind of fatalism, this same inevitable influence of superior powers, that has been taught by the fathers of the church. St. Augustine wished this very same doctrine to be preached, to profess loudly in the belief of the infallibility of Providence, and our entire dependence upon God. “In the same manner, he says, no one can give himself life, no one can give himself understanding.” If some are unacquainted with the truth, it is, according to his doctrine, because they have not received the necessary capacity to know it. He refutes the objections that might be urged against the justice of God: he remarks that neither has the grace of God distributed equally to every one the temporal goods, such as address, strength, health, beauty, wit, and the disposition for the arts and sciences, riches, honors, &c. St. Cyprian at that time had already said, that we ought not to be proud of our qualities, for we possess nothing from ourselves.

If people had not always been convinced of the influence of external and internal conditions relative to the determination of our will, upon our actions, why, in all times and among every people, have civil and religious laws been made to subdue and direct the desires of men? There is no religion that has not ordained abstinence from certain meats and drinks, fasting and mortification of the body. From the time of Solomon the wise down to our own time, we know of no observer of human nature that has not acknowledged that the physical and moral man is entirely dependant on the laws of the creation.

DIVINATION,

Is the art or act of foretelling future events, and is divided by the ancients into artificial and natural.

ARTIFICIAL DIVINATION,

Is that which proceeds by reasoning upon certain external signs, considered as indications of futurity.

Natural Divination,

Is that which presages things from a mere internal sense, and persuasion of the mind, without any assistance of signs; and is of two kinds, the one from nature, and the other by influx. The first is the supposition that the soul, collected within itself, and not diffused, or divided among the organs of the body, has, from its own nature and essence, some foreknowledge of future things: witness what is seen in dreams, ecstasies, the confines of death, &c. The second supposes that the soul, after the manner of a minor, receives some secondary illumination from the presence of God and other spirits.

Artificial divination is also of two kinds; the one argues from natural causes; e. g. the predictions of physicians about the event of diseases, from the pulse, tongue, urine, &c. Such also are those of the politician, O venalem urbem, et mox peuturam, si emptorem inveneris! The second proceeds from experiments and observations arbitrarily instituted, and is mostly superstitious.

The systems of divination reducible under this head, are almost incalculable, e. g. by birds, the entrails of birds, lines of the hand, points marked at random, numbers, names, the motion of a sieve, the air, fire, the Sortes Prænestinæ, Virgilianæ, and Homericæ; with numerous others, the principal species and names of which are as follows:—

AXINOMANCY,