The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

THEOLOGY AND RELIGION 231
divination was nothing more nor less than his acknow
ledgment (half unconscious, of course) of the existence
of the supersensuous and supernatural his mode of
expressing the fact that Revelation there is, and that
the Supreme is the source of it. 1 He reasoned that,
if God is, He must reveal Himself to man ; while, on
the other hand,
tion, God is.
if there is found to be truth in divina
It is a deep thought that Balbus expressed
when he said (Cicero, De Nat. Deor. ii.
66) : "There
never was a great man without some divine inspiration
(sine aliquo adflatu divino}"
At the same time, the
Stoic drew a clear distinction between the different
kinds of divination, as we see from the first book of
Cicero s De Dimnatione. Some kinds, he said, are
technical or artificial ;
others are natural. To the
technical group belong astrology, prodigies,
all the
art of the augur and the haruspex i.e., of the pro
fessional soothsayers and the ground of foreknow
;
ledge and prediction here lies in practised sagacity and
in the lengthened and accumulated observation of many
generations of men in other words, in general, if not
absolutely uncontradicted, experience. The diviner s
forecasts, indeed, may sometimes be wrong ;
but that
is
owing to one of two causes either to ignorance of
some particular sign, or to the circumstance that there
is
an unobserved or purposely concealed fact among the
facts observed or disclosed.
All this is strictly
in accordance with the true
scientific method of induction namely,
trained obser
vation and accumulation of instances ;
and its value,
if any, must depend upon the number and amount
1
See Seneca, Naturales Qucestiones,
ii.