Nothing can suggest to us a more striking and stupendous idea of the
faculties of the human mind, than the consideration of the various
arts by which men have endeavoured to penetrate into the future, and
to command the events of the future, in ways that in sobriety and
truth are entirely out of our competence. We spurn impatiently against
the narrow limits which the constitution of things has fixed to our
aspirings, and endeavour by a multiplicity of ways to accomplish that
which it is totally beyond the power of man to effect.