Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/808

742 exclaimed, as he was being led to the stake, &quot; Courage let them see how a philosopher can die,&quot; has in his works crushed Aristotle by the help of Averroes, and Averroes and Cardan by the help of good sense. And yet the good- humoured satirist, who suffered for his free speech by having his tongue cut out, and being then burnt at the stake, was, notwithstanding, the disciple of Averroes, and the admirer of Cardan. So true is it that reason in its early stages of civilisation is the good genius of the pri vileged few, who, imlike many moderns, have more sense than they give themselves credit for, a privilege which they dearly purchased by persecution, or, worse still, by neglect. Under Albumazar (776-885), astrology, returning to Persian and Gneco-Egyptian ideas, appears as the legislator of action and religion. The Caliph Al-Mamun embraced the theory of his favourite astrologer, which fixed the duration of the Mahometan religion at 544, and that of Christianity at 1460 years. Is not this fact in itself sufficient to explode the generally received notion of Mussulman intolerance ] Cardan developed this thesis. In one plan he makes Christianity born under Jupiter and Mercury (authority and cunning) ; and, according to this horoscope, it was destined to be short-lived. For once Vanini is found quoting Cardan with ill-concealed satisfaction. But afterwards, to curry favour with the Papacy, he recants, and says that Christianity was born under the most favourable conjunction of the planets Jupiter and the sun (authority and justice). Thereupon Vanini attacks Cardan under the assumed mask of a Dutch atheist. This example will suffice to show us how astro logical symbols were employed by the sceptics, and what interpretation we must put upon their astrological phraseology. We may now describe the ordinary proceedings of an astrologer. The zodiac was first arranged in much the same fashion as the cards in the game of Tarots. The four ages of man had each three houses in the zodiac. Each of this triple series was composed of a cardinal, a succeeding, and a declining or cadent house. Disastrous signs predominated over auspicious. For kings and nobles these signs were modified, but they took care to preserve a copy of the horoscope to be modified as circumstances required. Pascal remarks, &quot; They say that eclipses portend misfortunes, because misfortunes are common, so that, as some ill chance often happens, they are often right, whereas if they said that they portended good fortune, they would be generally wrong. They only assign good fortune to rare conjunctions of the stars, and this is how their predictions rarely fail.&quot; Those ages during which astrologers were dominant by the terror they inspired, and sometimes by the martyrdom they endured when their predictions were either too true or too false, were in truth the saddest in the world s history. Faith, to borrow their own language, was banished to Virgo, and rarely shed her influence on men. Cardan, for instance, hated Luther, and so changed his birthday in order to give him an un favourable horoscope. In Cardan s times, as in those of Augustus, it was a common practice for men to conceal the day and hour of their birth, till, like Augustus, they found a complaisant astrologer. But, as a general rule, astrolo gers did not give themselves the trouble of reading the stars, they contented themselves with telling fortunes by faces. They practised chiromancy, and relied on after wards drawing a horoscope to suit. As physiognomists their talent was undoubted, and we may again call Vanini as a witness that there is no need to mount to the house top to cast a nativity. &quot; Yes,&quot; he says, &quot; I can read his face ; by his hair and his forehead it is easy to guess that the sun at his birth was in the sign of Libra and near Venus. Nay, his complexion shows that Venus touches Libra. By the rules of astrology he could not lie.&quot; No doubt, by the rules of chiromancy, a calm forehead, clustering locks, a clear and sanguine complexion, are signs of sincerity. If we combine Apollo and Venus, i.e., manli ness and tenderness, the product is sincerity. If we wish to see this type of character to perfection, we have only to look at a good portrait of Spinoza. In conclusion, we shall give a few salient facts concern ing the astrologers and their predictions, remarkable either for their fulfilment, or for the ruin and confusion they brought upon their authors. We may begin with one taken from Bacon s Essay of Prophecies : &quot; When I was in France, I heard from one Dr Pena, that the queen mother, who was given to curious arts, caused the king her hus band s nativitie to be calculated, under a false name ; and the astrologer gave a judgment, that he should be killed in a duell; at which the queene laughed, thinking her hus band to be above challenges and duels ; but he was slaine, upon a course at tilt, the splinters of the staffe of Mon- gomery going in at his bever.&quot; A favourite topic of the- astrologers of all countries has been the immediate end of the world. As early as 1186 the earth had escaped one- threatened cataclysm of the astrologers. This did not pre vent Stoffler from predicting a universal deluge for the year 1524 a year, as it turned out, distinguished for drought. His aspect of the heavens told him that in that year three planets would meet in the aqueous sign of Pisces. The prediction was believed far and wide, and president Aurial, at Toulouse, built himself a Noah s ark a curious realisation, in fact, of Chaucer s merry invention in the Miller s Tale. In China any false prediction of the astrologers was punished with death. But, as Juvenal remarks in his Sixth Satire, the astrologers chief power depends on their persecution. M. Hofer cannot persuade himself that the Chinese possessed any extensive astrono mical knowledge which they afterwards forgot. Still, the position of the astrologists, that is, the astronomers, in China sufficiently explains this relapse in astronomy. They preferred to trust to chance, and live in honour with credulous emperors, at the risk of being hanged by these they failed to please. Inordinate rewards and inordinate punishments made them indifferent to all pure love of science, and life with Orientals has always been reckoned a small stake in the game. Not only was Tycho Brahe from his fifteenth year devoted to astrology, but adjoining his observatory at Uranienburg, the astronomer royal of Den mark had a laboratory built in order to study alchemy, and it was only a few years before his death that he finally abandoned astrology. We may here notice one very remarkable prediction of the master of Kepler. That he had carefully studied the comet of 1577 as an astronomer, we may gather from his adducing the very small parallax of this comet as disproving the assertion of the Aristotelians that a solid sphere enveloped the heavens. But besides this, we find him in his character of astrologer drawing a singular prediction from the appearance of this comet. It announced, he tells us, that in the north, in Finland, there should be born a prince who should lay waste Germany and vanish in ] 632. Gustavus Adolphus, it is well known, was born in Finland, overran Germany, and died in 1632. The fulfilment of the details of this prophecy was, of course, nothing but a lucky hit, but we may convince ourselves that Tycho Brahe had some basis of reason for his prediction. He was no dupe of vulgar astrology, but gifted rather with a happy inspiration like that of Paracel sus, who saw in himself the forerunner and prototype of the scientific ascendency of Germany. Born in Denmark of a noble Swedish family, a politician, as were all his contemporaries of distinction, Tycho, though no conjuror, 