Separating human prediction from inspired prophecy, we can only ascribe to the faculties of man that acquired prescience which we have demonstrated, that some great minds have unquestionably exercised. Its principles have been discovered in the necessary dependance of effects on general causes, and we have shewn 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[33].” “The philosophy of history,” observes a late writer and excellent observer, “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, as Leibnitz has happily expressed the idea, the present is always full of the future. 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 appearance 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.” FATALISM, OR PREDESTINATION.