142 ON THE METHOD OF ZADIG. 



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 compels 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 discover 

 the hidden things of nature better than d priori de- 

 ductions from the nature of Ormuzd perhaps to give 

 a history of the past, in which Cannes would be alto- 

 gether ignored ! Decidedly it were better to burn this 

 man at once. 



If instinct, or an unwonted use of reason, led Moab- 

 dar'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-con- 

 tinued 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 simi- 

 lar to those of which documents are, in our present 



