While proclaiming in politics the sovereignty of the people and of public opinion can we admit, as heretofore, that mankind allowed itself to be radically deceived in this only: that an absolute and gross absurdity reigned in the minds of whole nations for so many centuries without being based on anything save—on one hand human imbecility, and on the other charlatanry? How for fifty centuries and more can most men have been either dupes or knaves? ... Even though we may find it impossible to decide between and separate the realities of Astrology from the elements of invention and empty dreaming in it, ... let us, nevertheless, repeat with Bossuet and all modern philosophers, that “nothing that has been dominant could be absolutely false.” Is it not true, at all events, that there is a physical reaction on one another among the planets? Is it not again true, that the planets have an influence on the atmosphere, and consequently at any rate a mediate action on vegetation and animals? Has not modern science demonstrated now these two points beyond any doubt?... Is it any less true that human liberty of action is not absolute: that all is bound, that all weighs, planets as the rest, on each individual will; that Providence [_or Karma_] acts on us and directs men through those relations that it has established between them and the visible objects and the whole universe?... Astrolatry, in its essence, is nothing but that; we are bound to recognise that an instinct superior to the age they lived in guided the efforts of the ancient Magi. As to the materialism and annihilation of human moral freedom with which Bailly charges their theory (Astrology), the reprobate has no sense whatever. All the great astrologers admitted, without one single exception, that man could react against the influence of the stars. This principle is established in the Ptolemœian _Tetrabiblos_, the true astrological Scriptures, in chapters ii. and iii. of book i.(623) Thomas Aquinas had corroborated Lebas in anticipation; he says: The celestial bodies are _the cause of all that happens in this sublunary world_, they act indirectly on human actions; but not all the effects produced by them are unavoidable.(624)