There appears 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 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. (_Ep. ad Att._ lib. 10, ep. 4.) Cicero had not only predicted what had happened in his own times, but also what occurred long after, according to Cornelius Nepos. The philosopher, indeed, affects no secret revelation, nor visionary second-sight;—he honestly tells us, that that 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,” says Cicero, “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, although the nature of his “signs” are perfectly comprehensible, when in the great pending events of the rival conflicts of Pompey and Cæsar, he shewed the means he used for his purpose: “On one side I consider the humour and genius of Cæsar, and on the other, the condition and manner of civil wars.” (_Ep. ad. Att._ lib. 6, ep. 6.) In a word, the political diviner, by his experience of the personal character, anticipated the actions of the individual. Others, too, have asserted the possession of this faculty. Du Vard, an eminent chancellor of France, imagined the faculty to be intuitive with him; from observations made by his own experience. “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 any thing of importance has happened to the state, to the public, or to myself in particular, which I had not foreseen[32].” The same faculty appears to be described by a remarkable expression employed by Thucidides, in his character of Themistocles, of which the following is 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 his _deductions of the future from the_ PAST; or was the best guesser of the future from the past.”