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