therefore five feet high. As to his
  bit, it must have been made of twenty-three carat gold, for he
  had rubbed it against a stone, which turned out to be a
  touchstone, with the properties of which I am familiar by
  experiment. Lastly, by the marks which his shoes left upon
  pebbles of another kind, I was led to think that his shoes were
  of fine silver.'

  "All the judges admired Zadig's profound and subtle discernment;
  and the fame of it reached even the King and the Queen. From the
  ante-rooms to the presence-chamber, Zadig's name was in
  everybody's mouth; and, although many of the magi were of
  opinion that he ought to be burnt as a sorcerer, the King
  commanded that the four hundred ounces of gold which he had been
  fined should be restored to him. So the officers of the court
  went in state with the four hundred ounces; only they retained
  three hundred and ninety-eight for legal expenses, and their
  servants expected fees."

  Those who are interested in learning more of the fateful history
  of Zadig must turn to the original; we are dealing with him only
  as a philosopher, and this brief excerpt suffices for the
  exemplification of the nature of his conclusions and of the
  methods by which he arrived at them.

These conclusions may be said to be of the nature of retrospective prophecies; though it is perhaps a little hazardous to employ phraseology which perilously suggests a contradiction in terms—the word "prophecy" being so constantly, in ordinary use, restricted to "foretelling." Strictly, however, the term prophecy applies as much to outspeaking as to foretelling; and, even in the restricted sense of "divination," it is obvious that the essence of the prophetic operation does not lie in its backward or forward relation to the course of time, but in the fact that it is the apprehension of that which lies out of the sphere of immediate knowledge; the seeing of that which, to the natural sense of the seer, is invisible.

The foreteller asserts that, at some future time, a properly situated observer will witness certain events; the clairvoyant declares that, at this present time, certain things are to be witnessed a thousand miles away; the retrospective prophet (would that there were such a word as "backteller!") affirms that, so many hours or years ago, such and such things were to be seen. In all these cases, it is only the relation to time which alters—the process of divination beyond the limits of possible direct knowledge remains the same.

No doubt it was their instinctive recognition of the analogy between Zadig's results and those obtained by authorised inspiration which inspired the Babylonian magi with the desire to burn the philosopher. Zadig admitted that he had never either seen or heard of the horse of the king or of the spaniel of the queen; and yet he ventured to assert in the most positive manner that animals answering to their description did actually exist and ran about the plains of Babylon. If his method was good for the divination of the course of events ten hours old, why should it not be good for those of ten years or ten centuries past; nay, might it not extend ten thousand years and justify the impious in meddling with the traditions of Oannes and the fish, and all the sacred foundations of Babylonian cosmogony?

But this was not the worst. There was another consideration which obviously dictated to the more thoughtful of the magi the propriety of burning Zadig out of hand. His defence was worse than his offence. It showed that his mode of divination was fraught with danger to magianism in general. Swollen with the pride of human reason, he had ignored the established canons of magian lore; and, trusting to what after all was mere carnal common sense, he professed to lead men to a deeper insight into nature than magian wisdom, with all its lofty antagonism to everything common, had ever reached. What, in fact, lay at