298 HUMANISM 



XVI 



order to control the future. Naturally enough, his intelli 

 gence has been adjusted to and moulded upon this vital 

 necessity. And not only his intelligence, but his whole 

 nature. He has grown a strong intellectual and emotional 

 bias towards any idea that helps him to achieve his 

 purpose. He is willing and eager to hail it as true. 

 Hence there has arisen a desire for prediction, a passion for 

 certainty, which in some selected spirits (philosophers to 

 wit) may be over-developed and rise to quite unreasonable 

 and self-defeating heights. 



But how was this desire to foretell, and so to control, 

 the future, to find its satisfaction ? Well, mankind did 

 not know ; but mankind was willing to try. It tried in 

 all sorts of ways, and very queer and superstitious most 

 of them now seem to us. What oracle have human faith 

 and human craving left unconsulted, what mode of divina 

 tion have they failed to think of, from what mode of 

 propitiation have they shrunk, to what mode of magic 

 have they scrupled to immolate their dearest and their 

 best ? A potent array of institutions and observances, a 

 long list of pseudo-sciences, an astounding record of 

 irrational absurdities and atrocities, attest the reality and 

 persistence of the human desire to lift the veil of the 

 future. For this purpose the noblest of the ancients did 

 not disdain, as augurs to watch the flight of birds, as 

 haruspices to inspect the sacrificial entrails ; they were 

 proud to keep the Sybil s prophetic books or to trick the 

 fates and to pamper the prescience of the sacred chickens 

 with cunningly diluted gruel. No sooner had man looked 

 at the stars than the thought at once occurred to him 

 that these wonders of the sky must be fraught with signi 

 ficance for his terrestrial fortunes. And so he proceeded 

 to conceive the marvels of their rhythmic motions as 

 instruments of calculation, until the wisest of the ancients 

 did not deem it a waste of time to observe the con 

 junctions of planets that determined the fates of men, or 

 the portents of flimsy comets that were supposed to take 

 a keen interest in the fortunes of the solar system. Modern 

 astronomy is as much indebted to astrology for its birth 



