VL] ON THE METHOD OF ZADIG. 135 



course it took, and the number of hours or days which 

 have elapsed since it passed. But they are able to do 

 this because, like Zadig, they perceive endless minute 

 differences where untrained eyes discern nothing ; and 

 because the unconscious logic of common sense com- 

 pels them to account for these effects by the causes 

 which they know to be competent to produce them. 



And such mere methodised savagery was to dis- 

 cover the hidden things of nature better than d priori 

 deductions from the nature of Ormuzd perhaps to 

 give a history of the past, in which Oannes would be 

 altogether ignored ! Decidedly it were better to burn 

 this man at once. 



If instinct, or an unwonted use of reason, led 

 Moabdar's magi to this conclusion two or three thousand 

 years ago, all that can be said is that subsequent history 

 has fully justified them. For the rigorous application 

 of Zadig's logic to the results of accurate and long- 

 continued observation has founded all those sciences 

 which have been termed historical or palsetiological, 

 because they are retrospectively prophetic and strive 

 towards the reconstruction in human imagination of 

 events which have vanished and ceased to be. 



History, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, is 

 based upon the interpretation of documentary evidence; 

 and documents would have no evidential value unless 

 historians were justified in their assumption that they 

 have come into existence by the operation of causes 

 similar to those of which documents are, in our present 

 experience, the effects. If a written history can be pro- 

 duced otherwise than by human agency, or if the man 



