DIVINATION, or the art of forecasting the future and discovering the unknown, has been re sorted to by all nations, under all degrees of reli gious gift and civilisation, with remarkable per tinacity. The curiosity of mankind has devised numberless methods of accomplishing the art. By a perversion and exaggeration of the sublime faith which sees God everywhere, men have laid every thing, with greater or less ingenuity, under contri bution, as means of eliciting a divine answer to every question of their insatiable curiosity ; the portents of sky, and sea, and earth (Plu tarch, de Superst. ; Homer and Virgil, passim) ; the mysteries of the grave (vExpoitavre(a and 0" KI0— r eta) ; the wonders of sleep and dreams (emana tions as they were thought to be from the gods) (comp. Iliad, i. 63 ' • Hecuba, 70; rEneia', v. 838 ; Homer, Hymn. in Meivur. 14, etc.) ; the pheno mena of victims sacrificed (in which the deities were supposed to be specially interested and near at hand ; comp. the facts of the !coo/ham-eta in Potter's Gr. Antiqq. ii. 54) ; the motions and appearances of the animal creation (such as the flight of birds—a copious source of superstition in the oppaoci-Korla of the Greeks and the Augurium of the Latins—and the aspect of beasts) ; and the prodigies of inanimate nature (such as the ivaia aiitipoNa, omens of the way, upon which whole books are said to have been written ; the av 56pes, ominous voices ; and the long list of magic arts, which the reader may find in Hoffmann 's Lexicon, ii. 87 ; Potter, ii. 18, and Occult Sciences in Encycl. Metropol. Part v., which contains some thirty names compounded of yarrcia, all branches of the magic art). Nor have these expe dients of superstition been confined to one age or a single nation. The meteoric portents, for in stance, which were used to excite the surprise and fear of the old Greeks and Romans, are still em ployed among the barbarians of Africa (comp. the Muansa of the Wanika ; Dr. Krapf's 11-1Kcsionaiy Travels in E. Africa, p. 165, etc.) ; and if the ancients read fearful signs in the faces of animals : Obsccenique canes, importunxque volucres Sigma dabant ; Georgic, i. 469, 47o.
the savage Bakwains indicate the presence of the terrible alligator with their bole, ki bo (` there is sin '), as if the sight of it would give their eyes some physical evil (see Dr. Livingstone's Mission ary Travels in S. Africa, p. 255). The manifold processes of the divining art were summed up by the logical Greeks and Romans into two great classes, one of which they called ZirExpos, aiSaK TOS, naturalis; i.e., unartificial, as not being at tained by any rules or observations, but inspired into the diviner or bccipra by a power external to himself; the other species was TEXVOCM or artificial; because it was not obtained by immediate inspira tion, but was the effect of observation and saga city, or depended chiefly on human art (Potter, ii. 7 ; Bacon, De Augment. &lent. iv. 3—Ellis and Spedding, iv. 399). This division is Plato's, who is followed in it by Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch. Cicero, in his definition, consistently embraces both kinds of Divination, calling it a presaging and knowledge of things to happen '—pravensio et scientia rerun: fietzirarum (De Divinatione, i. ; in the De Nat. Peorum,.ii. 65, he employs the word prodictio). Plato's definition as griarAu77 bey art:456*(4v, ' the science which is presignificant of any event, but without the demonstration of reason,' seems to exclude the whole of the TEXPLK4I or artificial kind of divination.
There were many reasons why men of higher and purer intellects, like Plato, should look only to the divine side of the predictive art ; its human side was miserably disfigured with the most grovel ling artifice and superstition. Cicero labours to clear away the evils with which this grand and wholesome subject—magnifica guidon res et salts taris,' was overlaid, and refers the entire power and origin of divination, even in its technical aspect, to the gods ; he expresses his own belief in it, thus purified of its dross (` hoc non dubitans dixerim . . . esse certe divinationem,' De Divin. i. 55), and asserts for it a universal reception among men ; It is derived,' he says, from the age of heroes, and is not only entertained by the Romans, but confirmed by the consent of all nations.'* Elevated, however, as were the great Roman's views of divination, his field of vision was too circumscribed for him to exclude from it the very functions which led to all the evils he deplored : Est profecto divinatio, gum multis locis, rebus, temporibus apparet . . . . multa enim aruspices, multa augures provident, multa oraculis providentur, multa vaticinatimibus, multa somniis, multa portentis ' (De Nat. Deor. ii. 65). In this respect how remarkable is the contrast afforded in the inspired words of the Hebrew law giver ! There shall not be found among you any one . . . . that useth divination, or an ob server of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer ; for all that do these things are an abomination to the LORD' (Deut. xviii. to-12). Not that the desire to know the future, so natural to man, was wrong in itself ; rather it was an instinct to he satisfied. Only the satisfaction was to be prescribed by God himself : The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me ; unto him ye shall hearken' (Ibid. v. 15). Here is the impassable limit between human capacity and Divine gift. The unerring solution of the future was never put within the attainment of man's unaided intellect ; God re served it as his own prerogative. Cicero stated the problem clearly enough—' Si unum aliquid ha sit priedictum pnesensumque, ut quum evenerit, ita cadat ut prssdictum, neque in eo quidquam casu et fortuito factum esse appareat ' (De Divin. i. 65) ; but he failed to discover anywhere a trust worthy solution, because it was not given him to search within the precincts of inspiration. With heavy heart he ends his still beautiful treatise with these striking words : vere loquamur, super stitio fusa per gentes oppressit omnium fere ani mos, atque hominum imbecillitatem occupavit. The truth must be confessed, the superstition which has spread through the nations has well nigh oppressed the minds of all, and has laid firm hold on the feebleness of mankind' (De sub finem). Lord Bacon well explains the radical defect of divination in his Essay on Superstition (xviith. Whateley, p. 154), where he describes it as the taking an aim at Divine matters by human, which cannot but breed mixture of imaginations.' The history of divination presents a uniform result everywhere. The human mind revelling in super stitious imaginations loses the ballast of purity, probity, and piety.