Omens, then, being only signs and not causes of future events, having no power in themselves, must be connected with some efficient power, or else the events prognosticated could not happen. How is that power to be understood? For a long time, probably, there is no clear conception of it: the connexion is mysterious. But there are two ways in which it may be interpreted: (_a_) Following the impersonal magical way of thinking, we are led to the idea of currents of force in which both Omen and event are borne along; and, at last, to the conception of a fatal order of the world in which all events have their necessary places. There A is always followed by B; so that, although A exerts no power over B, yet (if we know the law of the sequence) when the former appears it is an infallible portent of the latter. The power at work is Fate; and to this idea I must return; for in its full development it comes late in history. (_b_) The other and much simpler way of explaining Omens is to attribute them to the intervention of spirits who, whether they control events or not, at least foresee them, and send messages of warning to mankind. With the spread of Animism this is a matter of course. A sophisticated age may ask how a spirit should be able to see the future; and may answer that spirits, having greater knowledge than we of the present state of the world and its laws of causation, are able to calculate the outcome, just as an astronomer foretells an eclipse of the sun. A precious rationalisation! To the untutored savage there is no difficulty. To foresee the future is a very common performance: whenever we form an expectation which is fulfilled (and that happens many times a day) we accomplish this feat; and for the most part we are unconscious of the grounds upon which we formed the expectation. The savage is always in this position: he has not analysed the relation of “ground and consequence” nor examined the mental conditions that precede an inference. To him, therefore, foreknowledge, within a certain range, is not even mysterious; and, of course, spirits have the gift in a much higher degree. In Melanesia a _vui_ (spirit) knows secret things without seeing;[354] and here begins the rôle of intuition in Philosophy. Later, a high god may give warnings, not merely of what he foresees in the course of the world, but of what he of his own volition will bring to pass; or a lesser god may announce what he knows to be the will of the higher; or, later still, all spiritual warnings may sink back into helpless incidents in the course of Fate.