No, the prophet is the sensible man, he who follows the rational part of his soul in the road where it leads him with probability. Divination, like a scroll with no writing or method, in itself [Sidenote: D] indeterminate, but capable of receiving fancies and presentiments by the feelings, gets touch with the future, yet not by inference, when it passes most completely outside the present. It passes out through such a temperament and disposition of the body as produce a change called by us inspiration. Often the body attains this disposition of itself; but the earth sends up many streams of many potencies, some which bring trances, diseases, or death, others beneficial, mild, and serviceable, as is proved on those who chance upon them. Of all the currents the stream, or breath, of prophecy is most divine and holy, [Sidenote: E] whether it be drawn from the air direct, or come mingled with the moisture of a spring; for when absorbed into the body it produces in souls a temperament unfamiliar and strange, the special quality of which it is hard to state in clear words, though reason suggests many conjectures. Probably, by heat and dispersion, it opens certain passages to admit imaginings of the future, just as the fumes of wine bring many other stirrings, and unveil words and thoughts which were stored away and unheeded, [Sidenote: F] _For in the wine-god’s votary’s mood, As in the madman’s, lies much prophecy_, says Euripides;[187] when the soul, warmed and set on fire, rejects the caution which human prudence brings, to avert inspiration, as it so often does, and to quench it. XLI. ‘After all, it might be not unreasonably asserted that a dryness introduced with the heat subtilizes the current and makes it ethereal and pure. “Best a dry soul”, says Heraclitus;[188] moisture not only dulls sight and hearing, but if it [Sidenote: 433] touch a mirror or raises[189] a mist upon it, takes away brightness and lustre. As the opposite to this, it is not impossible that, by a sort of chilling and condensation of the breath of air, the organ of prognostication is made tense and keen, like steel out of the bath. Or again, as tin when melted in with copper, itself rarefied and full of apertures, welds it together and condenses it, and yet in the result makes it brighter to the eye and purer, so there is nothing to prevent the prophetic exhalation, [Sidenote: B] wherein is something congenial and akin to souls, from filling up their rarefied places, and inserting itself, and pressing all together. For certain things are congenial and proper to certain other things; thus an infusion of the bean into the dyer’s bath seems to assist its efficacy for purple, of nitre for saffron. _Scarlet is mingled for the pearly weft_,