misadventures, Zadig withdrew from the turmoil of Babylon to a secluded
retreat on the banks of the Euphrates, where he beguiled his solitude
by the study of nature. The manifold wonders of the world of life
had a particular attraction for the lonely student; incessant and
patient observation of the plants and animals about him sharpened
his naturally good powers of observation and of reasoning; until, at
length, he acquired a sagacity which enabled him to perceive endless
minute differences among objects which, to the untutored eye, appeared
absolutely alike.
It might have been expected that this enlargement of the powers of the
mind and of its store of natural knowledge could tend to nothing but
the increase of a man’s own welfare and the good of his fellow-men.
But Zadig was fated to experience the vanity of such expectations.
One day, walking near a little wood, he saw, hastening
that way, one of the Queen’s chief eunuchs, followed by
a troop of officials, who appeared to be in the greatest
anxiety, running hither and thither like men distraught,
in search of some lost treasure.
“Young man,” cried the eunuch, “have you seen the Queen’s
dog?” Zadig answered modestly, “A bitch, I think, not
a dog.” “Quite right,” replied the eunuch; and Zadig
continued, “A very small spaniel who has lately had
puppies; she limps with the left foreleg, and has very
long ears.” “Ah! you have seen her then,” said the
breathless eunuch. “No,” answered Zadig, “I have not seen
her; and I really was not aware that the Queen possessed
a spaniel.”
By an odd coincidence, at the very same time, the
handsomest horse in the King’s stables broke away from
his groom in the Babylonian plains. The grand huntsman
and all his staff were seeking the horse with as much
anxiety as the eunuch and his people the spaniel; and the
grand huntsman asked Zadig if he had not seen the King’s
horse go that way.
“A first-rate galloper, small-hoofed, five feet high;
tail three feet and a half long; cheek pieces of the bit
of twenty-three carat gold; shoes silver?” said Zadig.
“Which way did he go? Where is he?” cried the grand
huntsman.
“I have not seen anything of the horse, and I never heard
of him before,” replied Zadig.
The grand huntsman and the chief eunuch made sure that
Zadig had stolen both the King’s horse and the Queen’s
spaniel, so they haled him before the High Court of
Desterham, which at once condemned him to the knout, and
transportation for life to Siberia. But the sentence was
hardly pronounced when the lost horse and spaniel were
found. So the judges were under the painful necessity of
reconsidering their decision: but they fined Zadig four
hundred ounces of gold for saying he had seen that which
he had not seen.
The first thing was to pay the fine; afterwards Zadig was
permitted to open his defence to the court, which he did
in the following terms:
“Stars of justice, abysses of knowledge, mirrors
of truth, whose gravity is as that of lead, whose
inflexibility is as that of iron, who rival the diamond
in clearness, and possess no little affinity with gold;
since I am permitted to address your august assembly, I
swear by Ormuzd that I have never seen the respectable
lady dog of the queen, nor beheld the sacrosanct horse of
the King of Kings.
“This is what happened. I was taking a walk towards the
little wood near which I subsequently had the honour to
meet the venerable chief eunuch and the most illustrious
grand huntsman. I noticed the track of an animal in the
sand, and it was easy to see that it was that of a small
dog. Long faint streaks upon the little elevations of
sand between the footmarks convinced me that it was a
she dog with pendent dugs, showing that she must have
had puppies not many days since. Other scrapings of
the sand, which always lay close to the marks of the
forepaws, indicated that she had very long ears; and, as
the imprint of one foot was always fainter than those of
the other three, I judged that the lady dog of our august
Queen was, if I may venture to say so, a little lame.
“With respect to the horse of the King of Kings, permit
me to observe that, wandering through the paths which
traverse the wood, I noticed the marks of horse-shoes.
They were all equidistant. ‘Ah!’ said I, ‘this is a
famous galloper.’ In a narrow alley, only seven feet
wide, the dust upon the trunks of the trees was a little
disturbed at three feet and a half from the middle of
the path. ‘This horse,’ said I to myself, ‘had a tail
three feet and a half long, and, lashing it from one side
to the other, he has swept away the dust.’ Branches of
the trees met overhead at the height of five feet, and
under them I saw newly fallen leaves; so I knew that the
horse had brushed some of the branches, and was therefore
five feet high. As to his bit, it must have been made of
twenty-three carat gold, for he had rubbed it against
a stone, which turned out to be a touchstone, with the
properties of which I am familiar by experiment. Lastly,
by the marks which his shoes left upon pebbles of another
kind, I was led to think that his shoes were of fine
silver.”
All the judges admired Zadig’s profound and subtle
discernment; and the fame of it reached even the King and
the Queen. From the ante-rooms to the presence-chamber,
Zadig’s name was in everybody’s mouth; and, although many
of the magi were of opinion that he ought to be burnt
as a sorcerer, the King commanded that the four hundred
ounces of gold which he had been fined should be restored
to him. So the officers of the court went in state with
the four hundred ounces; only they retained three hundred
and ninety-eight for legal expenses, and their servants
expected fees.
Those who are interested in learning more of the fateful history of
Zadig must turn to the original; we are dealing with him only as a
philosopher, and this brief excerpt suffices for the exemplification of
the nature of his conclusions and of the method by which he arrived at
them.
These conclusions may be said to be of the nature of retrospective
prophecies; though it is perhaps a little hazardous to employ
phraseology which perilously suggests a contradiction in terms—the
word “prophecy” being so constantly in ordinary use restricted to
“foretelling.” Strictly, however, the term prophecy as much applies to
outspeaking as to foretelling; and, even in the restricted sense of
“divination,” it is obvious that the essence of the prophetic operation
does not lie in its backward or forward relation to the course of time,
but in the fact that it is the apprehension of that which lies out of
the sphere of immediate knowledge; the seeing of that which to the
natural sense of the seer is invisible.
The foreteller asserts that, at some future time, a properly situated
observer will witness certain events; the clairvoyant declares that,
at this present time, certain things are to be witnessed a thousand
miles away; the retrospective prophet (would that there were such a
word as “backteller!”) affirms that so many hours or years ago, such
and such things were to be seen. In all these cases, it is only the
relation to time which alters—the process of divination beyond the
limits of possible direct knowledge remains the same.
No doubt it was their instinctive recognition of the analogy between
Zadig’s results and those obtained by authorised inspiration which
inspired the Babylonian magi with the desire to burn the philosopher.
Zadig admitted that he had never either seen or heard of the horse of
the king or of the spaniel of the queen; and yet he ventured to assert
in the most positive manner that animals answering to their description
did actually exist, and ran about the plains of Babylon. If his method
was good for the divination of the course of events ten hours old, why
should it not be good for those of ten years or ten centuries past;
nay, might it not extend to ten thousand years and justify the impious
in meddling with the traditions of Oannes and the fish, and all the
sacred foundations of Babylonian cosmogony?
But this was not the worst. There was another consideration which
obviously dictated to the more thoughtful of the magi the propriety
of burning Zadig out of hand. His defence was worse than his offence.
It showed that his mode of divination was fraught with danger to
magianism in general. Swollen with the pride of human reason, he had
ignored the established canons of magian lore; and, trusting to what
after all was mere carnal common sense, he professed to lead men to
a deeper insight into nature than magian wisdom, with all its lofty
antagonism to everything common, had ever reached. What, in fact, lay
at the foundation of all Zadig’s arguments but the coarse commonplace
assumption, upon which every act of our daily lives is based, that we
may conclude from an effect to the pre-existence of a cause competent
to produce that effect?
The tracks were exactly like those which dogs and horses leave;
therefore they were the effects of such animals as causes. The marks
at the sides of the fore prints of the dog track were exactly such
as would be produced by long trailing ears; therefore the dog’s long
ears were the causes of these marks—and so on. Nothing can be more
hopelessly vulgar, more unlike the majestic development of a system
of grandly unintelligible conclusions from sublimely inconceivable
premisses, such as delights the magian heart. In fact, Zadig’s method
was nothing but the method of all mankind. Retrospective prophecies,
far more astonishing for their minute accuracy than those of Zadig, are
familiar to those who have watched the daily life of nomadic people.
From freshly broken twigs, crushed leaves, disturbed pebbles, and
imprints hardly discernible by the untrained eye, such graduates in
the University of Nature will divine, not only the fact that a party
has passed that way, but its strength, its composition, the course
it took, and the number of hours or days which have elapsed since it
passed. But they are able to do this because, like Zadig, they perceive
endless minute differences where untrained eyes discern nothing; and
because the unconscious logic of common sense compels them to account
for these effects by the causes which they know to be competent to
produce them.
And such mere methodised savagery was to discover the hidden things
of nature better than _à priori_ deductions from the nature of
Ormuzd—perhaps to give a history of the past, in which Oannes would be
altogether ignored! Decidedly it were better to burn this man at once.
If instinct, or an unwonted use of reason, led Moabdar’s magi to
this conclusion two or three thousand years ago, all that can be
said is that subsequent history has fully justified them. For the
rigorous application of Zadig’s logic to the results of accurate and
long-continued observation has founded all those sciences which
have been termed historical or palætiological, because they are
retrospectively prophetic and strive towards the reconstruction in
human imagination of events which have vanished and ceased to be.
History, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, is based upon the
interpretation of documentary evidence; and documents would have no
evidential value unless historians were justified in their assumption
that they have come into existence by the operation of causes similar
to those of which documents are, in our present experience, the
effects. If a written history can be produced otherwise than by human
agency, or if the man who wrote a given document was actuated by other
than ordinary human motives, such documents are of no more evidential
value than so many arabesques.
Archæology, which takes up the thread of history beyond the point at
which documentary evidence fails us, could have no existence, except
for our well-grounded confidence that monuments and works of art or
artifice, have never been produced by causes different in kind from
those to which they now owe their origin. And geology, which traces
back the course of history beyond the limits of archæology, could tell
us nothing except for the assumption that, millions of years ago,
water, heat, gravitation, friction, animal and vegetable life, caused
effects of the same kind as they do now. Nay, even physical astronomy,
in so far as it takes us back to the uttermost point of time which
palætiological science can reach, is founded upon the same assumption.
If the law of gravitation ever failed to be true, even to the smallest
extent, for that period, the calculations of the astronomer have no
application.
The power of prediction, of prospective prophecy, is that which is
commonly regarded as the great prerogative of physical science. And
truly it is a wonderful fact that one can go into a shop and buy for
small price a book, the “Nautical Almanac,” which will foretell the
exact position to be occupied by one of Jupiter’s moons six months
hence; nay more, that, if it were worth while, the Astronomer Royal
could furnish us with as infallible a prediction applicable to 1980 or
2980.
But astronomy is not less remarkable for its power of retrospective
prophecy.
Thales, oldest of Greek philosophers, the dates of whose birth and
death are uncertain, but who flourished about 600 B.C., is said to have
foretold an eclipse of the sun which took place in his time during a
battle between the Medes and the Lydians. Sir George Airy has written a
very learned and interesting memoir[29] in which he proves that such an
eclipse was visible in Lydia on the afternoon of the 28th of May in the
year 585 B.C.
No one doubts that, on the day and at the hour mentioned by the
Astronomer Royal, the people of Asia Minor saw the face of the sun
totally obscured. But, though we implicitly believe this retrospective
prophecy, it is incapable of verification. In the total absence of
historical records, it is impossible even to conceive any means of
ascertaining directly whether the eclipse of Thales happened or not.
All that can be said is, that the prospective prophecies of the
astronomer are always verified; and that, inasmuch as his retrospective
prophecies are the result of following backwards, the very same method
as that which invariably leads to verified results, when it is worked
forwards, there is as much reason for placing full confidence in the
one as in the other. Retrospective prophecy is therefore a legitimate
function of astronomical science; and if it is legitimate for one
science it is legitimate for all; the fundamental axiom on which
it rests, the constancy of the order of nature, being the common
foundation of all scientific thought. Indeed, if there can be grades
in legitimacy, certain branches of science have the advantage over
astronomy, in so far as their retrospective prophecies are not only
susceptible of verification, but are sometimes strikingly verified.
Such a science exists in that application of the principles of biology
to the interpretation of the animal and vegetable remains imbedded
in the rocks which compose the surface of the globe, which is called
Palæontology.
At no very distant time, the question whether these so-called “fossils”
were really the remains of animals and plants was hotly disputed. Very
learned persons maintained that they were nothing of the kind, but a
sort of concretion, or crystallisation, which had taken place within
the stone in which they are found; and which simulated the forms of
animal and vegetable life, just as frost on a window-pane imitates
vegetation. At the present day, it would probably be impossible
to find any sane advocate of this opinion; and the fact is rather
surprising, that among the people from whom the circle-squarers,
perpetual-motioners, flat-earth men and the like, are recruited, to say
nothing of table-turners and spirit-rappers, somebody has not perceived
the easy avenue to nonsensical notoriety open to any one who will take
up the good old doctrine, that fossils are all _lusus naturæ_.
The position would be impregnable, inasmuch as it is quite impossible
to prove the contrary. If a man choose to maintain that a fossil
oyster shell, in spite of its correspondence, down to every minutest
particular, with that of an oyster fresh taken out of the sea, was
never tenanted by a living oyster, but is a mineral concretion, there
is no demonstrating his error. All that can be done is to show him
that, by a parity of reasoning, he is bound to admit that a heap of
oyster shells outside a fishmonger’s door may also be “sports of
nature,” and that a mutton bone in a dust-bin may have had the like
origin. And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that
they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.
The whole fabric of palæontology, in fact, falls to the ground unless
we admit the validity of Zadig’s great principle, that like effects
imply like causes; and that the process of reasoning from a shell, or
a tooth, or a bone, to the nature of the animal to which it belonged,
rests absolutely on the assumption that the likeness of this shell,
or tooth, or bone, to that of some animal with which we are already
acquainted, is such that we are justified in inferring a corresponding
degree of likeness in the rest of the two organisms. It is on this
very simple principle, and not upon imaginary laws of physiological
correlation, about which, in most cases, we know nothing whatever, that
the so-called restorations of the palæontologist are based.
Abundant illustrations of this truth will occur to every one who is
familiar with palæontology; none is more suitable than the case of the
so-called _Belemnites_. In the early days of the study of fossils,
this name was given to certain elongated stony bodies, ending at one
extremity in a conical point, and truncated at the other, which were
commonly reputed to be thunderbolts, and as such to have descended
from the sky. They are common enough in some parts of England; and, in
the condition in which they are ordinarily found, it might be difficult
to give satisfactory reasons for denying them to be merely mineral
bodies.
They appear, in fact, to consist of nothing but concentric layers
of carbonate of lime, disposed in subcrystalline fibres, or prisms,
perpendicular to the layers. Among a great number of specimens of these
Belemnites, however, it was soon observed that some showed a conical
cavity at the blunt end; and, in still better preserved specimens, this
cavity appeared to be divided into chambers by delicate saucer-shaped
partitions, situated at regular intervals one above the other. Now
there is no mineral body which presents any structure comparable to
this, and the conclusion suggested itself that the Belemnites must be
the effects of causes other than those which are at work in inorganic
nature. On close examination, the saucer-shaped partitions were proved
to be all perforated at one point, and the perforations being situated
exactly in the same line, the chambers were seen to be traversed by
a canal, or _siphuncle_, which thus connected the smallest or apical
chamber with the largest. There is nothing like this in the vegetable
world; but an exactly corresponding structure is met with in the
shells of two kinds of existing animals, the pearly _Nautilus_ and
the _Spirula_, and only in them. These animals belong to the same
division—the _Cephalopoda_—as the cuttle-fish, the squid, and the
octopus. But they are the only existing members of the group which
possess chambered, siphunculated shells; and it is utterly impossible
to trace any physiological connection between the very peculiar
structural characters of a cephalopod and the presence of a chambered
shell. In fact, the squid has, instead of any such shell, a horny
“pen,” the cuttle-fish has the so-called “cuttle-bone,” and the octopus
has no shell, or, at most, a mere rudiment of one.
Nevertheless, seeing that there is nothing in nature at all like the
chambered shell of the Belemnite, except the shells of the _Nautilus_
and of the _Spirula_, it was legitimate to prophesy that the animal
from which the fossil proceeded must have belonged to the group of the
_Cephalopoda_. _Nautilus_ and _Spirula_ are both very rare animals,
but the progress of investigation brought to light the singular fact,
that, though each has the characteristic cephalopodous organisation, it
is very different from the other. The shell of _Nautilus_ is external,
that of _Spirula_ internal; _Nautilus_ has four gills, _Spirula_
two; _Nautilus_ has multitudinous tentacles, _Spirula_ has only ten
arms beset with horny rimmed suckers; _Spirula_, like the squids and
cuttle-fishes, which it closely resembles, has a bag of ink which it
squirts out to cover its retreat when alarmed; _Nautilus_ has none.
No amount of physiological reasoning could enable any one to say
whether the animal which fabricated the Belemnite was more like
_Nautilus_, or more like _Spirula_. But the accidental discovery of
Belemnites in due connection with black elongated masses which were
certainly fossilised ink-bags, inasmuch as the ink could be ground up
and used for painting as well as if it were recent sepia, settled the
question; and it became perfectly safe to prophesy that the creature
which fabricated the Belemnite was a two-gilled cephalopod with suckers
on its arms, and with all the other essential features of our living
squids, cuttle-fishes, and _Spirulæ_. The palæontologist was, by this
time, able to speak as confidently about the animal of the Belemnite,
as Zadig was respecting the queen’s spaniel. He could give a very fair
description of its external appearance, and even enter pretty fully
into the details of its internal organisation, and yet could declare
that neither he, nor any one else, had ever seen one. And as the
queen’s spaniel was found, so happily has the animal of the Belemnite;
a few exceptionally preserved specimens having been discovered, which
completely verify the retrospective prophecy of those who interpreted
the facts of the case by due application of the method of Zadig.
These Belemnites flourished in prodigious abundance in the seas of the
mesozoic or secondary age of the world’s geological history; but no
trace of them has been found in any of the tertiary deposits, and they
appear to have died out towards the close of the mesozoic epoch. The
method of Zadig, therefore, applies in full force to the events of a
period which is immeasurably remote, which long preceded the origin
of the most conspicuous mountain masses of the present world, and
the deposition, at the bottom of the ocean, of the rocks which form
the greater part of the soil of our present continents. The Euphrates
itself, at the mouth of which Oannes landed, is a thing of yesterday
compared with a Belemnite; and even the liberal chronology of Magian
cosmogony fixes the beginning of the world only at a time when other
applications of Zadig’s method afford convincing evidence that, could
we have been there to see, things would have looked very much as they
do now. Truly the magi were wise in their generation; they foresaw
rightly that this pestilent application of the principles of common
sense, inaugurated by Zadig, would be their ruin.
But it may be said that the method of Zadig, which is simple reasoning
from analogy, does not account for the most striking feats of modern
palæontology—the reconstruction of entire animals from a tooth or
perhaps a fragment of a bone; and it may be justly urged that Cuvier,
the great master of this kind of investigation, gave a very different
account of the process which yielded such remarkable results.
Cuvier is not the first man of ability who has failed to make his
own mental processes clear to himself, and he will not be the last.
The matter can be easily tested. Search the eight volumes of the
“Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles” from cover to cover, and
nothing but the application of the method of Zadig will be found in
the arguments by which a fragment of a skeleton is made to reveal the
characters of the animal to which it belonged.