Divination, as freed from the ordinary limits of our perceptions, appears either as clairvoyance, when things are seen which are beyond the range of natural vision, or as prophecy, when the boundary lines of time are overstepped. The latter appears again in its weakest form as a mere anticipation of things to come, or rises to perfection in the actual foretelling of future events. It is sad enough to learn from the experience of all nations that the occurrences thus foreseen are almost invariably great misfortunes, yet our surprise will cease if we remember that the tragic in life exercises by far the greatest influence on our mind, and excites it far beyond all other events. Nor must we overlook the marvelous unanimity with which such magic powers are admitted to exist in Man by all nations on earth. The explanation, also, is invariably the same, namely, that Man possessed originally the command over space and time as well as God himself, but that when sin came into the world and affected his earth-born body, this power was lost, and preserved only to appear in exceptional and invariably most painful cases. So thought the ancients even long before revelation had spoken. They believed that Man had had a previous god-like existence before appearing upon earth, where he was condemned to expiate the sins of his former life, while his immortal and divine soul was chained to a perishing earthy body. Plato, Plutarch, and Pythagoras, Cicero (in his book _De Divinatione_), and even Porphyrius, all admit without hesitation the power of divination, and speak of its special vigor in the moments preceding death. Melanchthon ascribed warning dreams to the prophetic power of the human soul. Brierre de Boismont also is forced to admit that not all cases of clairvoyance and prophesying are the results of hallucination by diseased persons; he speaks, on the contrary, and in spite of his bitter skepticism, of instances in which the increased powers of perception are the effect of "supernatural intuition."