h emotion. Thus astrology became a
religion[1625]--it was adopted by learned and unlearned, its ethical and
spiritual quality being determined by the character and thought of the
various groups that professed it. For some centuries it was a religious
power in the world; as a religious system it gave way gradually to more
definite constructions, but it survived as a science long after it had
ceased to be believed in as a life-giving faith.

The persistence of faith in it as a science is an additional
illustration of men's demand for visible signs of the intervention of
the deity in human affairs;[1626] as often as certain supposed
embodiments of the supernatural are discarded, others are taken up. The
earlier philosophical views of the relation of the heavenly bodies to
human life are now generally abandoned, and such belief in this relation
as now exists has no scientific basis, but is founded on vague desire.

In savage and in civilized times eclipses, comets, the appearance of a
new star, and earthquakes have been regarded as indications of the
attitude of the deity--sometimes favorable, sometimes unfavorable.

+916+. The words and actions of men and their normal peculiarities of
bodily form have furnished comparatively few divinatory signs, the
reason being, probably, that in early times animals and other nonhuman
things arrested the attention of observers more forcibly, while in later
times such acts and forms were more readily explained from natural
conditions and laws. The palpitation of the eye, which seems sometimes
to uneducated man to be produced by an external force, has been taken as
a presage of misfortune. A burning sensation in the ear is still
believed by some persons to be a sign that one is being talked about; in
early stages of culture the sensation was regarded as a warning sent by
the guardian spirit or some other superhuman being. Sneezing was once
looked on as a happy omen: when Telemachus gave a resounding sneeze
Penelope interpreted it as a sign that news of his father was at
hand.[1627] An act performed without ulterior purpose may be taken to
symbolize some sort of fortune. When the Calif Omar sent an embassy to
the Persian King Yezdegird summoning him to embrace Islam, the angry
king commanded that a clod of earth should be brought and that the
ambassadors should bear it out of the city, which they accordingly did;
and this act was taken both by Arabs and by Persians as a presage of
Moslem