Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 — Prediction, part 1

PREDICTION.

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freed from the delusions of parties and of sects, at once intelligent in the _quicquid agunt homines_, while they are withdrawn from their conflicting interests, have rarely been confounded by the astonishment which overwhelms those who, absorbed in active life, are the mere creatures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."

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