Thus the belief of the ancients in their astrologers,
soothsayers and prophets might have been warranted by the verification
of many of their most important predictions, without these
prognostications of future events implying of necessity anything very
miraculous. The soothsayers and augurs having occupied in days of the
old civilizations the very same position now occupied by our historians,
astronomers and meteorologists, there was nothing more wonderful in the
fact of the former predicting the downfall of an empire or the loss of a
battle, than in the latter predicting the return of a comet, a change of
temperature, or perhaps the final conquest of Afghanistan. Both studied
exact sciences; for, if the astronomer of today draws his observations
from mathematical calculations, the astrologer of old also based his
prognostication upon no less acute and mathematically correct
observations of the ever-recurring cycles. And, because the secret of
this ancient science is now being lost, does that give any warrant for
saying that it never existed, or that to believe in it, one must be
ready to swallow "magic," "miracles" and the like? "If, in view of the
eminence to which modern science has reached, the claim to prophesy
future events must be regarded as either child's play or a deliberate
deception," says a writer in the Novoye Vremja, "then we can point at
science which, in its turn, has now taken up and placed on record the
question, whether there is or is not in the constant repetition of
events a certain periodicity; in other words, whether these events
recur after a fixed and determined period of years with every nation;
and if a periodicity there be, whether this periodicity is due to blind
chance, or depends on the same natural laws which govern the phenomena
of human life.
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