Under these circumstances, it would seem judicious neither to deny altogether the practicability of prescience, because prognostications thus imperfectly derived are sometimes liable to be fallacious; nor, on the other hand, to admit that all events, whatever, are open to previous inquiry; as if such inquiry could in all cases be securely conducted without having recourse to mere inference, and as if it were not limited by the narrow extent of mere human abilities. The art of navigation, for instance, is not rejected, although it is in many points incomplete; therefore the bare fact that predictions are frequently imperfect cannot authorise the rejection of the art of prescience: the magnitude of its scope, and the faint resemblance that it bears to a divine attribute, should rather demand grateful commendations, and receive the utmost regard and attention. And, since no weakness is imputed to a physician, because he inquires into the individual habit of his patient, as well as into the nature of the disease, no imputation can justly attach to the professor of prognostication, because he combines the consideration of species, nurture, education and country, with that of the motion of the heavens: for as the physician acts but reasonably, in thus considering the proper constitution of the sick person as well as his disease; so, in forming predictions, it must surely be justifiably allowable to comprehend in that consideration every other thing connected with the subject in addition to the motion of the heavens, and to collect and compare with that motion all other co-operating circumstances arising elsewhere. CHAPTER III THAT PRESCIENCE IS USEFUL It appears, then, that prescience by astronomy is possible under certain adaptation; and that alone it will afford premonition, as far as symptoms in the Ambient enable it to do so, of all such events as happen to men by the influence of the Ambient. These events are, from their commencement, always in conformity with the spiritual and corporeal faculties, and their occasional affections; as well as with the shorter or longer duration of those affections. They are also conformable with other things which, although not actually in man’s immediate person, are still absolutely and naturally connected with him: in connection with his body they are applicable to his estate, and his conjugal cohabitations; in connection with his spirit, they relate to his offspring[24] and his rank; and they are also connected with all fortuitous circumstances which may occasionally befall him. [24] The Greek word for this, γοναι, though found in the Elzevir edition from which this translation is made, does not appear in other copies; the Basle edition of 1553 says merely, η τε τιμη και το αξιωμα, “_honour and rank_,” which is the sense also given in the Latin translation of Perugio, 1646, without any mention of “_offspring_.”