In a curious treatise on "Divination," or the knowledge of future events,
Cicero has preserved a complete account of the state-contrivances which
were practised by the Roman government to instil among the people those
hopes and fears by which they regulated public opinion. The pagan creed,
now become obsolete and ridiculous, has occasioned this treatise to be
rarely consulted; it remains, however, as a chapter in the history of
man!
To these two books of Cicero on "Divination," perhaps a third might be
added, on POLITICAL and MORAL PREDICTION. The principles which may even
raise it into a science are self-evident; they are drawn from the heart
of man, and they depend on the nature and connexion of human events! We
presume we shall demonstrate the positive existence of such a faculty;
a faculty which Lord Bacon describes of "making things FUTURE and REMOTE
AS PRESENT." The aruspex, the augur, and the astrologer have vanished
with their own superstitions; but the moral and the political predictor,
proceeding on principles authorised by nature and experience, has become
more skilful in his observations on the phenomena of human history; and
it has often happened that a tolerable philosopher has not made an
indifferent prophet.
No great political or moral revolution has occurred which has not been
accompanied by its _prognostic_; and men of a philosophic cast of mind
in their retirement, freed from the delusions of parties and of sects,
at once intelligent in the _quicquid agunt homines_, while they are
withdrawn from their conflicting interests, have rarely been confounded
by the astonishment which overwhelms those who, absorbed in active life,
are the mere creatures of sensation, agitated by the shadows of truth,
the unsubstantial appearances of things! Intellectual nations are
advancing in an eternal circle of events and passions which succeed each
other, and the last is necessarily connected with its antecedent; the
solitary force of some fortuitous incident only can interrupt this
concatenated progress of human affairs.
That every great event has been accompanied by a presage or prognostic,
has been observed by Lord Bacon. "The shepherds of the people should
understand the _prognostics of state tempests_; hollow blasts of wind
seemingly at a distance, and secret swellings of the sea, often precede
a storm." Such were the prognostics discerned by the politic Bishop
Williams in Charles the First's time, who clearly foresaw and predicted
the final success of the Puritanic party in our country: attentive to
his own security, he abandoned the government and sided with the rising
opposition, at the moment when such a change in public affairs was by no
means apparent.[179]
In this spirit of foresight our contemplative antiquary Dugdale must
have anticipated the scene which was approaching in 1641, in the
destruction of our ancient monuments in cathedral churches. He hurried
on his itinerant labours of taking draughts and transcribing
inscriptions, as he says, "to preserve them for future and better
times." Posterity owes to the prescient spirit of Dugdale the ancient
Monuments of England, which bear the marks of the haste, as well as the
zeal, which have perpetuated them.
Continental writers formerly employed a fortunate expression, when they
wished to have an _Historia Reformationis ante Reformationem_: this
history of the Reformation would have commenced at least a century
before the Reformation itself! A letter from Cardinal Julian to Pope
Eugenius the Fourth, written a century before Luther appeared, clearly
predicts the Reformation and its consequences. He observed that the
minds of men were ripe for something tragical; he felt the axe striking
at the root, and the tree beginning to bend, and that his party, instead
of propping it, were hastening its fall.[180] In England, Sir Thomas
More was not less prescient in his views; for when his son Roper was
observing to him that the Catholic religion, under "the Defender of the
Faith," was in a most flourishing state, the answer of More was an
evidence of political foresight--"Truth, it is, son Roper! and yet I
pray God that we may not live to see the day that we would gladly be at
league and composition with heretics, to let them have their churches
quietly to themselves, so that they would be contented to let us have
ours quietly to ourselves." Whether our great chancellor predicted from
a more intimate knowledge of the king's character, or from some private
circumstances which may not have been recorded for our information, of
which I have an obscure suspicion, remains to be ascertained. The minds
of men of great political sagacity were unquestionably at that moment
full of obscure indications of the approaching change; Erasmus, when at
Canterbury before the tomb of Becket, observing it loaded with a vast
profusion of jewels, wished that those had been distributed among the
poor, and that the shrine had been only adorned with boughs and flowers;
"For," said he, "those who have heaped up all this mass of treasure will
one day be plundered, and fall a prey to those who are in power;"--a
prediction literally fulfilled about twenty years after it was made. The
unknown author of the Visions of Piers Ploughman, who wrote in the reign
of Edward the Third,[181] surprised the world by a famous prediction of
_the fall of the religious houses from the hand of a king_.[182] The
event was realised, two hundred years afterwards, by our Henry the
Eighth. The protestant writers have not scrupled to declare that in this
instance he was _divino numine afflatus_. But moral and political
prediction is not inspiration; the one may be wrought out by man, the
other descends from God. The same principle which led Erasmus to predict
that those who were "in power" would destroy the rich shrines, because
no other class of men in society could mate with so mighty a body as the
monks, conducted the author of Piers Ploughman to the same conclusion;
and since power only could accomplish that great purpose, he fixed on
the highest as the most likely; and thus the wise prediction was, so
long after, literally accomplished!
Sir Walter Rawleigh foresaw the future consequences of the separatists
and the sectaries in the national church, and the very scene his
imagination raised in 1530 has been exhibited, to the letter of his
description, two centuries after the prediction! His memorable words
are--"Time will even bring it to pass, if it were not resisted, that God
would be _turned out of churches_ into _barns_, and from thence again
into the _fields_ and _mountains_, and under _hedges_--all order of
discipline and church government left to _newness of opinion_ and men's
fancies, and _as many kinds of religion_ spring up as there are parish
churches within England." We are struck by the profound genius of
Tacitus, who clearly foresaw the calamities which so long ravaged Europe
on the fall of the Roman Empire, in a work written five hundred years
before the event! In that sublime anticipation of the future, he
observed--"When the Romans shall be hunted out from those countries
which they have conquered, what will then happen? The revolted people,
freed from their master oppressor, will not be able to subsist without
destroying their neighbours, and the most cruel wars will exist among
all these nations."
We are told that Solon at Athens, contemplating on the port and citadel
of Munychia, suddenly exclaimed, "How blind is man to futurity! Could
the Athenians foresee what mischief this will do their city, they would
even eat it with their own teeth to get rid of it!"--a prediction
verified more than two hundred years afterwards! Thales desired to be
buried in an obscure quarter of Milesia, observing that that very spot
would in time be the forum. Charlemagne, in his old age, observing from
the window of a castle a Norman descent on his coast, tears started in
the eyes of the aged monarch. He predicted that since they dared to
threaten his dominions while he was yet living, what would they do when
he should be no more!--a melancholy prediction, says De Foix, of their
subsequent incursions, and of the protracted calamities of the French
nation during a whole century!
There seems to be something in minds which take in extensive views of
human nature which serves them as a kind of divination, and the
consciousness of this faculty has even been asserted by some. Cicero
appeals to Atticus how he had always judged of the affairs of the
republic as a good diviner; and that its overthrow had happened as he
had foreseen fourteen years before.[183] Cicero had not only predicted
what happened in his own times, but also what occurred long after,
according to the testimony of Cornelius Nepos. The philosopher, indeed,
affects no secret revelation, nor visionary second-sight; he honestly
tells us that this art had been acquired merely by study and the
administration of public affairs, while he reminds his friend of several
remarkable instances of his successful predictions. "I do not divine
human events by the arts practised by the augurs, but I use other
signs." Cicero then expresses himself with the guarded obscurity of a
philosopher who could not openly ridicule the prevailing superstitions;
but we perfectly comprehend the nature of his "signs" when, in the great
pending event of the rival conflicts of Pompey and of Caesar, he shows
the means he used for his purpose. "On one side I consider the humour
and genius of Caesar, and on the other the condition and the manner of
civil wars."[184] In a word, the political diviner foretold events by
their dependence on general causes, while the moral diviner, by his
experience of the personal character, anticipated the actions of the
individual. Others, too, have asserted the possession of this faculty.
Du Vair, a famous chancellor of France, imagined the faculty was
intuitive with him: by his own experience he had observed the results of
this curious and obscure faculty, and at a time when the history of the
human mind was so imperfectly comprehended, it is easy to account for
the apparent egotism of this grave and dignified character. "Born," says
he, "with constitutional infirmity, a mind and body but ill adapted to
be laborious, with a most treacherous memory, enjoying no gift of
nature, yet able at all times to exercise a sagacity so great that I do
not know, since I have reached manhood, that anything of importance has
happened to the state, to the public, or to myself in particular, which
I had not foreseen."[185] This faculty seems to be described by a
remarkable expression employed by Thucydides in his character of
Themistocles, of which the following is given as a close translation:
"By a species of sagacity peculiarly his own, for which he was in no
degree indebted either to early education or after study, he was
supereminently happy in forming a prompt judgment in matters that
admitted but little time for deliberation; at the same time that he far
surpassed all in his _deductions of the future from the_ PAST, or was
the best _guesser of the future_ from the past."[186] Should this
faculty of moral and political prediction be ever considered as a
science, we can even furnish it with a denomination; for the writer of
the Life of Sir Thomas Browne prefixed to his works, in claiming the
honour of it for that philosopher, calls it "the Stochastic," a term
derived from the Greek and from archery, meaning "to shoot at a mark."
This eminent genius, it seems, often "hit the white." Our biographer
declares, that "though he were no prophet, yet in that faculty which
comes nearest to it, he excelled, _i.e._, _the Stochastic_, wherein he
was seldom mistaken as to _future events_, as well public as private."
We are not, indeed, inculcating the fanciful elements of an occult art.
We know whence its principles may be drawn; and we may observe how it
was practised by the wisest among the ancients. Aristotle, who collected
all the curious knowledge of his times, has preserved some remarkable
opinions on the art of _divination_. In detailing the various
subterfuges practised by the pretended diviners of his day, he reveals
the _secret principle_ by which one of them regulated his predictions.
He frankly declared that the FUTURE being always very obscure, while the
PAST was easy to know, _his predictions had never the future in view_;
for he decided from the PAST as it appeared in human affairs, which,
however, lie concealed from the multitude.[187] Such is the true
principle by which a philosophical historian may become a skilful
diviner.
Human affairs make themselves; they grow out of one another, with slight
variations; and thus it is that they usually happen as they have
happened. The necessary dependence of effects on causes, and the
similarity of human interests and human passions, are confirmed by
comparative parallels with the past. The philosophic sage of holy writ
truly deduced the important principle, that "the thing that hath been is
that which shall be." The vital facts of history, deadened by the touch
of chronological antiquarianism, are restored to animation when we
comprehend the principles which necessarily terminate in certain
results, and discover the characters among mankind who are the usual
actors in these scenes. The heart of man beats on the same eternal
springs; and whether he advances or retrogrades, he cannot escape out of
the march of human thought. Hence, in the most extraordinary revolutions
we discover that the time and the place only have changed; for even when
events are not strictly parallel, we detect the same conducting
principles. Scipio Ammirato, one of the great Italian historians, in his
curious discourses on Tacitus, intermingles ancient examples with the
modern; that, he says, all may see how the truth of things is not
altered by the changes and diversities of time. Machiavel drew his
illustrations of modern history from the ancient.
When the French Revolution recalled our attention to a similar eventful
period in our own history, the neglected volumes which preserved the
public and private history of our Charles the First and Cromwell were
collected with eager curiosity. Often the scene existing before us, even
the very personages themselves, opened on us in these forgotten pages.
But as the annals of human nature did not commence with those of Charles
the First, we took a still more retrograde step, and it was discovered
in this wider range, that in the various governments of Greece and Rome,
the events of those times had been only reproduced. Among them the same
principles had terminated in the same results, and the same personages
had figured in the same drama. This strikingly appeared in a little
curious volume, entitled, "Essai sur l'Histoire de la Revolution
Francoise, par une Societe d'Auteurs Latins," published at Paris in
1801. This "Society of Latin Authors," who have written so inimitably
the history of the _French_ Revolution, consist of the _Roman
historians_ themselves! By extracts ingeniously applied, the events of
that melancholy period are so appositely described, indeed so minutely
narrated, that they will not fail to surprise those who are not
accustomed to detect the perpetual parallels which we meet with in
philosophical history.
Many of these crises in history are close resemblances of each other.
Compare the history of "The League" in France with that of our own civil
wars. We are struck by the similar occurrences performed by the same
political characters who played their part on both those great theatres
of human action. A satirical royalist of those times has commemorated
the motives, the incidents, and the personages in the "Satire Menippee
de la Vertu du Catholicon d'Espagne;" and this famous "Satire Menippee"
is a perfect Hudibras in prose! The writer discovers all the bitter
ridicule of Butler in his ludicrous and severe exhibition of the "Etats
de Paris," while the artist who designed the satirical prints becomes no
contemptible Hogarth. So much are these public events alike in their
general spirit and termination, that they have afforded the subject of a
printed but unpublished volume, entitled "Essai sur les
Revolutions."[188] The whole work was modelled on this principle. "It
would be possible," says the eloquent writer, "to frame a table or chart
in which all the given imaginable events of the history of a people
would be reduced to a mathematical exactness." The conception is
fanciful, but its foundation lies deep in truth.
A remarkable illustration of the secret principle divulged by Aristotle,
and described by Thucydides, appears in the recent confession of a man
of genius among ourselves. When Mr. Coleridge was a political writer in
the _Morning Post_ and _Courier_, at a period of darkness and utter
confusion, that writer was then conducted by a tract of light, not
revealed to ordinary journalists, on the Napoleonic empire. "Of that
despotism in masquerade" he decided by "the state of Rome under the
first Caesars;" and of the Spanish American Revolution, by taking the war
of the United Provinces with Philip the Second as the groundwork of the
comparison. "On every great occurrence," he says, "I endeavoured to
discover, in PAST HISTORY the event that most nearly resembled it. I
procured the contemporary historians, memorialists, and pamphleteers.
Then fairly subtracting the points of _difference_ from those of
_likeness_, as the balance favoured the former or the latter, I
conjectured that the result would be the same or different. In the
essays 'On the Probable Final Restoration of the Bourbons,' I feel
myself authorised to affirm, by the effect produced on many intelligent
men, that were the dates wanting, it might have been suspected that the
essays had been written within the last twelve months."[189]
In moral predictions on individuals, many have discovered the future
character. The revolutionary character of Cardinal de Retz, even in his
youth, was detected by the sagacity of Mazarin. He then wrote the
history of the conspiracy of Fiesco, with such vehement admiration of
his hero, that the Italian politician, after its perusal, predicted that
the young author would be one of the most turbulent spirits of the age!
The father of Marshal Biron, even amid the glory of his son, discovered
the cloud which, invisible to others, was to obscure it. The father,
indeed, well knew the fiery passions of his son. "Biron," said the
domestic seer, "I advise thee, when peace takes place, to go and plant
cabbages in thy garden, otherwise I warn thee, thou wilt lose thy head
on the scaffold!" Lorenzo de' Medici had studied the temper of his son
Piero; for Guicciardini informs us that he had often complained to his
most intimate friends that "he foresaw the imprudence and arrogance of
his son would occasion the ruin of his family." There is a remarkable
prediction of James the First of the evils likely to ensue from Laud's
violence, in a conversation given by Hacket, which the king held with
Archbishop Williams. When the king was hard pressed to promote Laud, he
gave his reasons why he intended to "keep Laud back from all place of
rule and authority, because I find he hath a restless spirit, and cannot
see when matters are well, but loves to toss and change, and to bring
things to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain, which
endangers the steadfastness of that which is in a good pass. I speak not
at random; he hath made himself known to me to be such an one." James
then gives the circumstances to which he alludes; and at length, when,
still pursued by the archbishop, then the organ of Buckingham, as usual,
this king's good nature too easily yielded; he did not, however, without
closing with this prediction: "Then take him to you!--but, on my soul,
you will repent it!" The future character of Cromwell was apparent to
two of our great politicians. "This coarse unpromising man," said Lord
Falkland, pointing to Cromwell, "will be the first person in the
kingdom, if the nation comes to blows!" And Archbishop Williams told
Charles the First confidentially, "There was _that_ in Cromwell which
foreboded something dangerous, and wished his majesty would either win
him over to him, or get him taken off." The Marquis of Wellesley's
incomparable character of Bonaparte predicted his fall when highest in
his glory; that great statesman then poured forth the sublime language
of philosophical prophecy. "His eagerness of power is so inordinate; his
jealousy of independence so fierce; his keenness of appetite so feverish
in all that touches his ambition, even in the most trifling things, that
he must plunge into dreadful difficulties. He is one of an order of
minds that by nature make for themselves great reverses."
Lord Mansfield was once asked, after the commencement of the French
Revolution, when it would end? His lordship replied, "It is an event
_without precedent_, and therefore _without prognostic_." The truth,
however, is, that it had both. Our own history had furnished a precedent
in the times of Charles the First. And the prognostics were so
redundant, that a volume might be collected of passages from various
writers who had predicted it. However ingenious might be a history of
the Reformation before it occurred, the evidence could not be more
authentic and positive than that of the great moral and political
revolution which we have witnessed in our own days.
A prediction which Bishop Butler threw out in a sermon before the House
of Lords, in 1741, does honour to his political sagacity, as well as to
his knowledge of human nature; he calculated that the irreligious spirit
would produce, some time or other, political disorders similar to those
which, in the seventeenth century, had arisen from religious fanaticism.
"Is there no danger," he observed, "that all this may raise somewhat
like _that levelling spirit_, upon atheistical principles, which in the
last age prevailed upon enthusiastic ones? Not to speak of the
possibility that _different sorts of people_ may _unite_ in it upon
these _contrary principles_!" All this literally has been accomplished!
Leibnitz, indeed, foresaw the results of those selfish, and at length
demoralizing, opinions, which began to prevail through Europe in his
day. These disorganizing principles, conducted by a political sect, who
tried "to be worse than they could be," as old Montaigne expresses it; a
sort of men who have been audaciously congratulated as "having a _taste_
for evil;" exhibited to the astonished world the dismal catastrophe the
philosopher predicted. I shall give this remarkable passage. "I find
that certain opinions approaching those of Epicurus and Spinoza, are,
little by little, insinuating themselves into the minds of the great
rulers of public affairs, who serve as the guides of others, and on whom
all matters depend; besides, these opinions are also sliding into
fashionable books, and thus _they are preparing all things to that_
GENERAL REVOLUTION _which menaces Europe_; destroying those generous
sentiments of the ancients, Greek and Roman, which preferred the love of
country and public good, and the cares of posterity, to fortune and even
to life. Our _public spirits_,[190] as the English call them,
excessively diminish, and are no more in fashion, and will be still less
while the least vicious of these men preserve only one principle, which
they call _honour_; a principle which only keeps them from not doing
what they deem a low action, while they openly laugh at the love of
country--ridicule those who are zealous for public ends--and when a
well-intentioned man asks what will become of their posterity, they
reply 'Then, as now!' _But it may happen to these persons themselves to
have to endure those evils which they believe are reserved for others._
If this epidemical and intellectual disorder could be corrected, _whose
bad effects are already visible_, those evils might still be prevented;
but if it proceeds in its growth, _Providence will correct man by the
very revolution which must spring from it_. Whatever may happen indeed,
all must turn out as usual for the best in general, at the end of the
account, although _this cannot happen without the punishment of those
who contribute even to general good by their evil actions_." The most
superficial reader will hardly require a commentary on this very
remarkable passage; he must instantly perceive how Leibnitz, in the
seventeenth century, foresaw what has occurred in the eighteenth; and
the prediction has been verified in the history of the actors in the
late revolution, while the result, which we have not perhaps yet had,
according to Leibnitz's own exhilarating system of optimism, is an
eduction of good from evil.
A great genius, who was oppressed by malignant rivals in his own times,
has been noticed by Madame de Stael, as having left behind him an actual
prophecy of the French Revolution: this was Guibert, who, in his
Commentary on Folard's Polybius, published in 1727, declared that "a
conspiracy is actually forming in Europe, by means at once so subtle and
efficacious, that I am sorry not to have come into the world _thirty
years later_ to witness its result. It must be confessed that the
sovereigns of Europe wear very bad spectacles. The proofs of it are
mathematical, if such proofs ever were, of a conspiracy." Guibert
unquestionably foresaw the anti-monarchical spirit gathering up its
mighty wings, and rising over the universe! but could not judge of the
nature of the impulse which he predicted; prophesying from the ideas in
his luminous intellect, he seems to have been far more curious about,
than certain of, the consequences. Rousseau even circumstantially
predicted the convulsions of modern Europe. He stood on the crisis of
the French Revolution, which he vividly foresaw, for he seriously
advised the higher classes of society to have their children taught some
useful trade; a notion highly ridiculed on the first appearance of the
Emile: but at its hour the awful truth struck! He, too, foresaw the
horrors of that revolution; for he announced that Emile designed to
emigrate, because, from the moral state of the people, a virtuous
revolution had become impossible.[191] The eloquence of Burke was often
oracular; and a speech of Pitt, in 1800, painted the state of Europe as
it was only realised fifteen years afterwards.
But many remarkable predictions have turned out to be false. Whenever
the facts on which the prediction is raised are altered in their
situation, what was relatively true ceases to operate as a general
principle. For instance, to that striking anticipation which Rousseau
formed of the French revolution, he added, by way of note, as remarkable
a prediction on MONARCHY. _Je tiens pour impossible que les grandes
monarchies de l'Europe aient encore long tems a durer; toutes ont brille
et tout etat qui brille est sur son declin._ The predominant
anti-monarchical spirit among our rising generation seems to hasten on
the accomplishment of the prophecy; but if an important alteration has
occurred in the nature of things, we may question the result. If by
looking into the past, Rousseau found facts which sufficiently proved
that nations in the height of their splendour and corruption had closed
their career by falling an easy conquest to barbarous invaders, who
annihilated the most polished people at a single blow; we now find that
no such power any longer exists in the great family of Europe: the state
of the question is therefore changed. It is _now_ how corrupt nations
will act against corrupt nations equally enlightened? But if the citizen
of Geneva drew his prediction of the extinction of monarchy in Europe
from that predilection for democracy which assumes that a republic must
necessarily produce more happiness to the people than a monarchy, then
we say that the fatal experiment was again repeated since the
prediction, and the fact proved not true! The excess of democracy
inevitably terminates in a monarchical state; and were all the
monarchies in Europe at present republics, a philosopher might safely
predict the restoration of monarchy!
If a prediction be raised on facts which our own prejudices induce us to
infer will exist, it must be chimerical. We have an Universal Chronicle
of the Monk Carion, printed in 1532, in which he announces that the
world was about ending,[192] as well as his chronicle of it; that the
Turkish empire would not last many years; that after the death of
Charles the Fifth the empire of Germany would be torn to pieces by the
Germans themselves. This monk will no longer pass for a prophet; he
belongs to that class of historians who write to humour their own
prejudices, like a certain lady-prophetess, who, in 1811, predicted that
grass was to grow in Cheapside about this time![193] The monk Carion,
like others of greater name, had miscalculated the weeks of Daniel, and
wished more ill to the Mahometans than suit the Christian cabinets of
Europe to inflict on them; and, lastly, the monastic historian had no
notion that it would please Providence to prosper the heresy of Luther!
Sir James Mackintosh once observed, "I am sensible that in the field of
_political prediction_ veteran sagacity has often been deceived." Sir
James alluded to the memorable example of Harrington, who published a
demonstration of the impossibility of re-establishing monarchy in
England six months before the restoration of Charles the Second! But the
author of the Oceana was a political fanatic, who ventured to predict an
event, not by other similar events, but by a theoretical principle which
he had formed, that "the balance of power depends on that of property."
Harrington, in his contracted view of human nature, had dropped out of
his calculation all the stirring passions of ambition and party, and the
vacillations of the multitude. A similar error of a great genius occurs
in De Foe. "Child," says Mr. George Chalmers, "foreseeing from
experience that men's _conduct_ must finally be decided by their
_principles_, FORETOLD _the colonial revolt_. De Foe, allowing his
prejudices to obscure his sagacity, reprobated that suggestion, because
he deemed _interest_ a more strenuous prompter than _enthusiasm_." The
predictions of Harrington and De Foe are precisely such as we might
expect from a petty calculator, a political economist, who can see
nothing farther than immediate results; but the true philosophical
predictor was Child, who had read the _past_. It is probable that the
American emancipation from the mother country of England was foreseen
twenty or thirty years before it occurred, though not perhaps by the
administration. Lord Orford, writing in 1754, under the ministry of the
Duke of Newcastle, blames "The instructions to the governor of New York,
which seemed better calculated for the latitude of Mexico, and for a
Spanish tribunal, than for a free British settlement, and in such
opulence and such haughtiness, that _suspicions had long been conceived
of their meditating to throw off the dependence on their
mother-country_." If this was written at the time, as the author
asserts, it is a very remarkable passage, observes the noble editor of
his memoirs. The prognostics or presages of this revolution it may now
be difficult to recover; but it is evident that Child, before the time
when Lord Orford wrote this passage, predicted the separation on true
and philosophical principles.
Even when the event does not always justify the prediction, the
predictor may not have been the less correct in his principles of
divination. The catastrophe of human life, and the turn of great events,
often prove accidental. Marshal Biron, whom we have noticed, might have
ascended the throne instead of the scaffold; Cromwell and De Retz might
have become only the favourite general or the minister of their
sovereigns. Fortuitous events are not comprehended in the reach of human
prescience; such must be consigned to those vulgar superstitions which
presume to discover the issue of human events, without pretending to any
human knowledge. There is nothing supernatural in the prescience of the
philosopher.
Sometimes predictions have been condemned as false ones, which, when
scrutinised, we can scarcely deem 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 were 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; but you are a young woman, and
probably will see them." In the subsequent revolutions of America and of
France, and perhaps now of Spain, we can hardly deny that these
predictions had failed. A fortuitous event has once more thrown back
Europe into its old corners: but we still revolve in a circle, and what
is now dark and remote may again come round, when time has performed its
great cycle. There was a prophetical passage in Hooker's Ecclesiastical
Polity regarding the church which long occupied the speculations of its
expounders. Hooker indeed seemed to have done what no predictor of
events should do; he fixed on the period of its accomplishment. In 1597
he declared that it would "peradventure fall out to be threescore and
ten years, or if strength do awe, into fourscore." Those who had
outlived the revolution in 1641, when the long parliament pulled down
the ecclesiastical establishment, and sold the church-lands--a
circumstance which Hooker had contemplated--and were afterwards returned
to their places on the Restoration, imagined that the prediction had not
yet been completed, and were looking with great anxiety towards the year
1677, for the close of this extraordinary prediction! When Bishop
Barlow, in 1675, was consulted on it, he endeavoured to dissipate the
panic, by referring to an old historian, who had reproached our nation
for their proneness to prophecies![194] The prediction of the venerable
Hooker in truth had been fully accomplished, and the event had occurred
without Bishop Barlow having recurred to it; so easy it seems to forget
what we dislike to remember! The period of time was too literally taken,
and seems to have been only the figurative expression of man's age in
scriptural language which Hooker had employed; but no one will now deny
that this prescient sage had profoundly foreseen the results of that
rising party, whose designs on church and state were clearly depicted in
his own luminous view.
The philosophical predictor, in foretelling a crisis from the appearance
of things, will not rashly assign the period of time; for the crisis
which 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 this moral arithmetic. It is probable
that a revolution similar to that of France would have occurred in this
country, had it not been counteracted by the genius of Pitt. In 1618 it
was easy to foretell by the political prognostic that a mighty war
throughout Europe must necessarily occur. At that moment, observes
Bayle, the house of Austria aimed at a universal monarchy; the
consequent domineering spirit of the ministers of the Emperor and the
King of Spain, combined with their determination to exterminate the new
religion, excited a reaction to this imperial despotism; public opinion
had been suppressed, till every people grew impatient; while their
sovereigns, influenced by national feeling, were combining against
Austria. But Austria was a vast military power, and her generals were
the first of their class. The efforts of Europe would then be often
repulsed! This state of affairs prognosticated a long war!--and when at
length it broke out it lasted thirty years! The approach and the
duration of the war might have been predicted; but the period of its
termination could not have been foreseen.
There is, however, a spirit of political vaticination which presumes to
pass beyond the boundaries of human prescience; it has been often
ascribed to the highest source of inspiration by enthusiasts; but since
"the language of prophecy" has ceased, such pretensions are not less
impious than they are unphilosophical. Knox the reformer possessed an
extraordinary portion of this awful prophetic confidence: he appears to
have predicted several remarkable events, and the fates of some persons.
We are told that, condemned to a galley at Rochelle, he predicted that
"within two or three years he should preach the gospel at Saint Giles's
in Edinburgh;" an improbable event, which happened. 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 Kirkaldy 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. A Spanish friar and
almanac-maker predicted, in clear and precise words, the death of Henry
the Fourth of France; and Pieresc, though he had no faith in the vain
science of astrology, yet, alarmed at whatever menaced the life of a
beloved monarch, consulted with some of the king's friends, and had the
Spanish almanac laid before his majesty. That high-spirited monarch
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 almanac. I have been occasionally struck at the
Jeremiads of honest George Withers, the vaticinating poet of our civil
wars: some of his works afford many solemn predictions. We may account
for many predictions of this class without the intervention of any
supernatural agency. Among the busy spirits of a revolutionary age, the
heads of a party, such as Knox, have frequently secret communications
with spies or with friends. In a constant source of concealed
information, a shrewd, confident, and enthusiastic temper will find
ample matter for mysterious prescience. Knox exercised that deep
sagacity which took in the most enlarged views of the future, as appears
by his Machiavelian foresight on the barbarous destruction of the
monasteries and the cathedrals--"The best way to keep the _rooks_ from
returning, is to pull down their _nests_." In the case of the prediction
of the death of Henry the Fourth, by the Spanish friar, it resulted
either from his being acquainted with the plot, or from his being made
an instrument for their purpose by those who were. It appears that
rumours of Henry's assassination were rife in Spain and Italy before the
event occurred. Such vaticinators as George Withers will always rise in
those disturbed times which his own prosaic metre has forcibly
depicted:--
It may be on that darkness, which they find
Within their hearts, a sudden light hath shin'd,
Making reflections of SOME THINGS TO COME,
Which leave within them musings troublesome
To their weak spirits; or too intricate
For them to put in order, and relate.
They act as men in ecstasies have done--
Striving their cloudy visions to declare--
And I, perhaps, among these may be one
That was let loose for service to be done:
I blunder out what worldly-prudent men
Count madnesse.--P. 7.[195]
Separating human prediction from inspired prophecy, we only ascribe to
the faculties of man that acquired prescience which we have demonstrated
that some great minds have unquestionably exercised. We have discovered
its principles in the necessary dependence of effects on general causes,
and we have shown 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."[196]
The philosophy of history 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 "the
present is always full of the future," as Leibnitz has happily expressed
the idea.
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 appearances
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!