His religious notions and morals do him great credit, but his metaphysics are so obscure as not to be intelligible which, however, may partly be owing to the nature of the language. In his writings appears a strong predilection for a kind of fortune-telling, or predicting events by the mystical lines of _Fo-shee_. By the help of these lines, and the prevailing element at the commencement of the reign of a prince, he pretended to foretel the events that would take place and the length of its continuance; but, at the same time, he was cautious enough to wrap them up in such ambiguous and mysterious expressions that, like most prophecies of the kind, they might admit of a variety of interpretations. This manner of expounding the lines of Fo-shee by Confucius, the supposed system of binary arithmetic by Leibnitz, laid the foundation of consulting future destiny, at this day universally sought after by the Chinese[43]. [43] The government even grants licences to certain persons, under the abused name of astronomers, who pretend to predict events, and cast out evil spirits by a charm, consisting of some character written by them, according to the supposed prevailing planet. The national almanack, not less minute in its predictions than those of Francis Moore or Vincent Wing, or even Partridge, points out the changes of the weather in every month, with the lucky and unlucky days for undertaking most of the important concerns of life. And that the fallacy of these is not detected, may afford less matter for surprize, on recollection that, in the wise and enlightened countries of Europe, and among very intelligent people, the state of the weather is pretended to be predicted by the phases of the moon, that is to say, they will prognosticate a change of weather to happen at the new moon, or the first quarter, or the full, or the last quarter, or, at all events, three days before, or three days after one or other of these periods; so that the predictor has, at the least, eight and twenty days out of a lunar revolution, in favour of his prediction being right, and the whole lunation is only twenty-nine and a half. He has also another great advantage: the accidental coincidence of one single prophecy with the event, establishes his fame for ever, whilst his blunders are either overlooked, or considered only as those of the person, and not the defect of the science.