Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 — Prediction, part 2

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!

FOOTNOTES:

[179] See Rushworth, vol. i.

p. 420. His language was decisive.

[180] This letter is in the works of AEneas Sylvius; a copious extract is given by Bossuet, in his "Variations."

See also Mosheim, Cent.

xiii.

part ii.

chap.

2, note _m_.

[181] Though it cannot be positively asserted it is generally believed that the author was Robert Longlande, a monk of Malvern.

See introduction to Wright's edition of "The Vision."

The latter part of the year 1362 is believed to be the time of its composition.

[182] The passage is so remarkable as to be worth giving here, for the immediate reference of such readers as may not have ready access to the original.

We modernize the spelling from Mr. Wright's edition:-- But there shall come a king, And confess you religious, And award you as the Bible telleth For breaking of your rule.

* * * * * And then shall the Abbot of Abingdon And all his issue for ever, Have a knock of a king, And incurable the wound.

[183] Ep.

ad Att.

Lib.

x.

Ep.

4. [184] Ep.

ad Att.

Lib.

vi.

Ep.

6. [185] This remarkable confession I find in Menage's "Observations sur la Langue Francoise," Part II.

p. 110. [186] [Greek: Okeia gar xunesei, kai oute promathon es auten ouden, out epimathon ton te parachrema di elachistes boules kratistos gnomon, kai ton mellonton epipleiston tou genesomenou aristos eikastes].

--Thucydides, lib.

i.

[187] Arist.

Rhet.

lib.

vii.

c.

5. [188] This work was printed in London as a _first_ volume, but remained unpublished.

This singularly curious production was suppressed, but reprinted at Paris.

It has suffered the most cruel mutilations.

I read with surprise and instruction the single copy which I was assured was the only one saved from the havoc of the entire edition.

The writer was the celebrated Chateaubriand.

[189] "Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions."

By S. T.

Coleridge, Esq.

1807. Vol. i.

p. 214. [190] _Public spirit_, and _public spirits_, were about the year 1700 household words with us.

Leibnitz was struck by their significance, but it might now puzzle us to find synonyms, or even to explain the very terms themselves.

[191] This extraordinary passage is at the close of the third book of _Emile_, to which I must refer the reader.

It is curious, however, to observe, that in 1760 Rousseau poured forth the following awful predictions, which were considered quite absurd:--"Vous vous fiez a l'ordre actuel de la societe, sans songer que cet ordre est sujet a des _revolutions inevitables_--le grand devient petit, le riche devient pauvre, le monarque devient sujet--_nous approchons l'etat de crise et du siecle des revolutions_.

Que fera donc dans la bassesse ce satrape que vous n'aurez eleve que pour la grandeur?

Que fera dans la pauvrete, ce publicain qui ne scait vivre que d'or?

Que fera, depourvu de tout, ce fastueux imbecille qui ne sait point user de lui-meme?"

&c. &c. [192] This prediction of the end of the world is one of the most popular hallucinations, warmly received by many whenever it is promulgated.

It had the most marked effect when the cycle of a thousand years after the birth of Christ was approaching completion;

and the world was assured that was the limit of its present state.

Numerous acts of piety were performed.

Churches were built, religious houses founded, and asceticism became the order of the day, until the dreaded year was completed without the accompaniment of the supernatural horrors so generally feared; the world soon relapsed into forgetfulness, and went on as before.

Very many prophecies have since been promulgated; and in defiance of such repeated failures are still occasionally indulged in by persons from whom better things might be expected.

Richard Brothers, in the last century, and more than one reverend gentleman in the present one, have been bold enough to fix an exact time for the event: but it has passed as quietly as the thousandth anniversary noted above.

[193] One of the most effective prophecies against London, and which frightened for the time a very large number of its inhabitants, was that given out in the spring of 1750, after a slight shock of an earthquake was felt in London, and it was prophesied that another should occur which would destroy the town and all its inhabitants.

All the roads were thronged with persons flying to the country a day or two before the threatened event; and they were all unmercifully ridiculed when the day passed over quietly.

Walpole in one of his amusing letters speaks of a party who went "to an inn ten miles out of town, where they are to play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back--I suppose, to look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish!"

Jokers who were out late amused themselves by bawling in the watchmen's voice, "Past four o'clock, and a dreadful earthquake!"

A pamphlet purporting to be "a full and true account" of this earthquake which never happened, was "printed for Tim Tremor, in Fleet-street, 1750," and made the vehicle for much personal satire.

Thus it is stated that the "Commissioners of Westminster-bridge have ordered this calamity to be entered in their books, as a glorious excuse for the next sinking pier;" and that the town received some comfort upon hearing that "the Inns of Court were all sunk, and several orders were given that no one should assist in bringing any one lawyer above ground."

[194] An eye-witness of the great fire of London has noted the difficulty of obtaining effective assistance in endeavouring to stay its progress, owing to the superstition which seized many persons, because a prophecy of Mother Shipton's was quoted to show that London was doomed to hopeless and entire destruction.

[195] "A Dark Lantherne, offering a dim Discovery, intermixed with Remembrances, Predictions, &c. 1652." [196] Hooker wrote this about 1560, and he wrote before the _Siecle des Revolutions_ had begun, even among ourselves!

He penetrated into this important principle merely by the force of his own meditation.

_At this moment_, after more practical experience in political revolutions, a very intelligent French writer, in a pamphlet, entitled "M. da Villele," says, "Experience proclaims a great truth--namely, that revolutions themselves cannot succeed, except when they are favoured by a portion of the GOVERNMENT."

He illustrates the axiom by the different revolutions which have occurred in his nation within these thirty years.

It is the same truth, traced to its source by another road.