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The Hebrew prophets whose utterances have been preserved, from Amos onward, are men of insight, essentially critics of the national life, and moral watchmen; but features of the old conception of divinatory power continue for some time to attach to them.
Psychology has collected numerous examples of this mode of knowing in the instinctive and divinatory faculties of animals; in the spontaneous talent of certain men born mathematicians and artists, independent of all education; finally, in most of the primitive human institutions and monuments, products of unconscious genius independent of theories.
When awake, they imagined themselves always attended by the gods in person, and ascribed every thought, and resolved every appearance or accident, which deviated from the common course of nature, to the immediate influence of a superintending deity. It was under such impressions that so many nations originally rested their belief in divinatory dreams.
An element of magic, however, may have entered into this conviction; the bit of soil was supposed, perhaps, to carry with it the whole land. A chance word has often been seized on as an indication of the future, or a proper name taken as a presage. +917+. The belief in the sacredness or divinity of the human body has led to the search for divinatory signs in its parts.
If all these preparations were unavailing, the officiants of the temple had still means in reserve, by which the credulous should be thrown into that bodily state which was indispensable to the divinatory sleep: of these, succeeding instances will be hereafter produced.
Yes, affliction is like the divinatory wand, whose touch discovers deep-buried springs the existence of which was previously unknown. called on me to-day, and talked a good deal of . I endeavoured to excite sympathy for the unhappy person, but failed in the attempt.
Finally, the kind's cortege comprised, in the last place, the court magicians and the instrumentalists. The sorcerers, the "mganngas," are the doctors of the country. These savages attach an absolute faith to divinatory services, to incantations, to the fetiches, clay figures stained with white and red, representing fantastic animals or figures of men and women cut out of whole wood.
The liberal, intellectual tendencies of the Reformation were not yet fettered in England with the new dogmatic strait waistcoat of a narrow-minded, melancholy sect. And Shakspere's views, which he has embodied in 'Hamlet, were not in divinatory advance of his age; they were easily comprehensible to the best of his time.
"The prognostics which the Chaldeans claimed to draw from monstrous births in man and the animals are worthy of forming a class by themselves, insomuch the more as it is the part of their divinatory science with which, up to the present time, we are best acquainted.
+909+. Divinatory signs may be grouped in various classes according as they belong to the outer world or to men's inward experiences, and according as they present themselves without or with preparation by man. Outward signs in ordinary occurrences which, so far as human initiative is concerned, are accidental may be called, for convenience, "omens."