that, except in
these instances, ignorance shall be our lot for ever. It is happy for man
that he does not know what the morrow is to bring forth; but, unaware of
this great blessing, he has, in all ages of the world, presumptuously
endeavoured to trace the events of unborn centuries, and anticipate the
march of time. He has reduced this presumption into a study. He has
divided it into sciences and systems without number, employing his whole
life in the vain pursuit. Upon no subject has it been so easy to deceive
the world as upon this. In every breast the curiosity exists in a greater
or less degree, and can only be conquered by a long course of
self-examination, and a firm reliance that the future would not be hidden
from our sight, if it were right that we should be acquainted with it.

An undue opinion of our own importance in the scale of creation is at the
bottom of all our unwarrantable notions in this respect. How flattering to
the pride of man to think that the stars in their courses watch over him,
and typify, by their movements and aspects, the joys or the sorrows that
await him! He, less in proportion to the universe than the all-but
invisible insects that feed in myriads on a summer's leaf are to this
great globe itself, fondly imagines that eternal worlds were chiefly
created to prognosticate his fate. How we should pity the arrogance of the
worm that crawls at our feet, if we knew that it also desired to know the
secrets of futurity, and imagined that meteors shot athwart the sky to
warn it that a tom-tit was hovering near to gobble it up; that storms and
earthquakes, the revolutions of empires, or the fall of mighty monarchs,
only happened to predict its birth, its progress, and its decay! Not a
whit less presuming has man shewn himself; not a whit less arrogant are
the sciences, so called, of astrology, augury, necromancy, geomancy,
palmistry, and divination of every kind.

Leaving out of view the oracles of pagan antiquity and religious
predictions in general, and confining ourselves solely to the persons who,
in modern times, have made themselves most conspicuous in foretelling the
future, we shall find that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
the golden age of these impostors. Many of them have been already
mentioned in their character of alchymists. The union of the two
pretensions is not at all surprising. It was to be expected that those who
assumed a power so preposterous as that of pro