These are almost all the facts of any importance that are recorded in the life of Nostradamus. It now remains to us to give some account of the most remarkable of his forecasts. They may be pronounced obscure, partial, useless, or what not, according to the special views and disposition of mind in each reader. That they are very curious must be admitted by all, and that some of the things foreseen with astounding particularity are inexplicable upon any hypothesis of reasoning, other than that which admits either a direct revelation in every case, or a general anticipatory faculty, forming part of the great scheme of the mental endowment of mankind. Call it divination, second sight, clairvoyance, magnetic affinity, or what you will. Everyone may in this decide, or, if you had rather, guess for himself. I prefer the second supposition, and think that there are certain organisations, somewhat rare and peculiarly wrought, that are endowed by nature with a subtle tact and anticipatory insight denied to the majorities. I further think that such exceptional instances occur more frequently in people of ancient and unmixed race, such as the Celt, the Basque, the Chaldean, Gipsy, and most frequently of all amongst those branches of them that inhabit mountain-ranges. These I imagine to retain the instincts of the birth of man more clearly than the mixed tribes that have busied and even degraded themselves in the social pursuits of money, power, and art, and have burnt down their souls to a kind of materialistic slag in the furnace of what is called civilisation. If man is a creature born to immortality--and certainly no thought is so congenial to largeness and nobleness of heart as this is--I can see no reason why he should not have some vision given him of the minor things to happen on this theatre of the earth, which might serve as a sort of foretaste of that major light which is to clothe him as with a glorious garment when he steps forth from this his present condition of earthworm into that exalted bodily temple that he shall inhabit to all eternity. Science so-called is free to teach what it chooses: it may level man to the rank of a turnip by its insidious analysis and gradational processes. Its business is with the present, and with all its pretence of intellect it remains of the material earth, earthy. The future is out of its ken and reach. But the soul, which is the broad, many-sided reason of man in concrete, and the, so to speak, spiritually substantialised symbol of it, cannot be shut up to this. Chop logic by Aristotle’s chaff-cutter, whether handled by a Duncan, a Watts, an Aldrich, or a Whately, as you please, yet the soul, defies you with its _absoluteness_, pushes aside induction and the _contingent_ with it, and laughing at your littlenesses and your petty syllogisms, leaps at one bound into the incommensurable freedom of the future of eternity.