Rochelle, he predicted that "within two or three years, he should preach the Gospel at St. Giles's, in Edinburgh," an improbable event, which nevertheless happened as he had foretold. Of Mary and Darnley, he pronounced that," as the King, for the Queen's pleasure, had gone to mass, the Lord, in his justice, would make her the instrument of his overthrow.” Other striking predictions of the deaths of Thomas Maitland, and of Kirkaldly of Grange, and the warning he solemnly gave to the Regent Murray, not to go to Linlithgow, where he was assassinated, occasioned a barbarous people to imagine that the prophet Knox bad received an immediate communication from heaven.

An Almanack-maker, a Spanish friar, predicted, in clear and precise words, the death of Henry the Fourth of France; and Pierese, though he had no faith in the vain science of Astrology, yet, alarmed at whatever menaced the life of a beloved Sovereign, consulted with some of the King's friends, and had the Spanish almanack before his Majesty, who courteously thanked them for their solicitude, but utterly slighted the prediction: the event occurred, and in the following year the Spanish friar spread his own fame in a new almanack. This prediction of the Spanish friar was the result either of his being acquainted with the plot, or from his being made an instrument for the purposes of those who were. It appears that Henry's assassination was rife in Spain and Italy before the event occurred.

Separating human prediction from inspired prophecy, we can only ascribe to the faculties of

man that acquired prescience which we have demonstrated, that some great minds have unquestionably exercised. Its principles have been discovered in the necessary dependance of effects on general causes, and we have shewn that, impelled by the same motives, and circumscribed by the same passions, all human affairs revolve in a circle; and we have opened the true source of this yet imperfect science of moral and political prediction, in an intimate, but a discriminative, knowledge of the past. Authority is sacred when experience affords parallels and analogies. If much which may overwhelm, when it shall happen, can be foreseen, the prescient Statesman and Moralist may provide defensive measures to break the waters, whose streams they cannot always direct; and the venerable Hooker has profoundly observed, that "the best things have been overthrown, not so much by puissance and might of adversaries, as through defect of council in those that should have upheld and defended the same *."

"The philosophy of history," observes a late writer and excellent observer, " blends the past with the present, and combines the present with the future; each is but a portion of the other. The actual state of a thing is necessarily determined by its antecedent, and thus progressively through the chain of human existence, while, as Leibnitz has happily expressed the idea, the present is always full of the future. A new and beau

*This was written in 1560, and before the era of revolutions had commenced even among ourselves. He penetrated into the important principle merely by the force of his own meditation.

tiful light is thus thrown over the annals of mankind, by the analogies and the parallels of different ages in succession. How the seventeenth century has influenced the eighteenth, and the results of the nineteenth, as they shall appear in the twentieth, might open a source of PREDICTIONS, to which, however difficult it might be to affix their dates, there would be none in exploring into causes, and tracing their inevitable effects. The multitude live only among the shadows of things in the appearance of the PRESENT; the learned, busied with the PAST, can only trace whence, and how, all comes; but he who is one of the people and one of the learned, the true philosopher, views the natural tendency and terminations which are preparing for the FUTURE.”

FATALISM, OR PREDESTINATION. UNDER the name of materialism things very different from those generally understood are designated : it is the same with respect to fatalism. If it be maintained that every thing in the world, and the world itself, are necessary; that all that takes place is the effect of chance or of blind necessity, and that no supreme intelligence is mixed with, nor in fact mixes with existing objects; this doctrine is a kind of fatalism, differing very little from atheism. But this fatalism has nothing in common with the doctrine which establishes the innateness of the faculties of the soul and mind, and their independence upon organization. We cannot, then, under the first consideration, be accused of fatalism.

Another species of fatalism is that which teaches that in truth there exists a Supreme Being, creator of the universe, as well as of all the laws and properties connected with it; but that he has fixed those laws in so immutable a manner, that every thing that happens could not happen otherwise. In this system, man is necessarily carried away by the causes that compel him to act, without any participation whatever of the will. His actions are always a necessary result, without voluntary choice or moral liberty; they are neither punishable or meritorious, and the hope of future rewards vanishes, as well as the fear of future punishment.

This is the fatalism with which superstitious ignorance accuse the physiology of the brain*, that is the doctrine relative to the functions of the most noble organization in the world. "I have effectually proved," says Dr. Gall, "that all our moral and intellectual dispositions are innate; that none of our propensities or talents, not even the understanding and will, can manifest themselves independent of this organization. To which also may be added, that it does not depend upon man to be gifted with organs peculiar to his species, consequently with such or such propensities or faculties. Must it now be inferred that man is not the master of his actions, that there exists no free will, consequently neither a meritorious nor an unworthy act?"

Before this conclusion is refuted, let us examine with the frankness worthy of true philosophy, how

* Vide Lectures on Phrenology, by Drs. Gall and Spurtzheim,

far man is submitted to the immutable laws of his Creator, how far we ought to acknowledge an inevitable necessity, a destiny, or fatalism. To unravel confused ideas, is the best method of placing truth in its clearest point of view.

Man is obliged to acknowledge the most pow erful and determined influence of a multitude of things relative to his happiness or misery, and even over his whole conduct, without of himself being able either to add to, or subtract from that influence. No one can call himself to life; no one can choose the time, the climate, or the nation in which he shall be born; no one can fix the manners, laws, customs, form of government, religious prejudices, or the superstitions with which he shall be surrounded from the moment of his birth; no one can say, I will be master or servant, the eldest son or the youngest son ; I will have a robust or a debilitated state of health; I will be a man or a woman; I will have such or such a constitution: I will be a fool, an idiot, a simpleton, a man of understanding, or a man of genius, passionate or calm, of a mild or cross nature, modest or proud, stupid or circumspect, cowardly or prone to voluptuousness, humble or independent: no one can determine the degree of prudence or the foolishness of his superiors, the noxious or useful example he shall meet with, the result of his connexions, the fortuitous events, the influence of external things over him, the condition of his father and mother, or his own, or the source of irritation that his desires or passions will expe. rience. The relations of the five senses with ex