The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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232 THE STOIC CREED
of proved coincidences, and upon the possibility of
eliminating the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
But it is different with the second group of cases,
with instances of natural divination. Under this class
come dreams, frenzy, vaticinations. The personal
character of the instrument or agent of revelation now
plays the important part. He must be a man of clear
and unclouded intellect unclouded because free from
the grosser habits and passions of the body (such as
are produced by gluttony and drunkenness), and a man
of purity of life : "for true divination belongs rather to
a sound mind than to a sick body" (Cicero, De Div.
i.
38). This is
simply saying, in a far off way
and in
a dim light, what is said in the full blaze of spiritual
insight and supreme wisdom in the New Testament,
"Blessed are the pure in heart: for they
God."
shall see
When, therefore, it was urged against prophetic
dreams, as by Aristotle, in his little treatise On Prophecy
in Sleep) that such dreams cannot come from God
because they are not given to the wisest and the best
men, we can easily imagine the Stoic answer vis., The
dreamer must be good, before we can trust his vision ;
and the better he is, the more rational our trust in his
prevision.
We are not, then, to dismiss the Stoical doctrine as
pure superstition ;
we are rather to see in it in the
principle of it, though not in all the details the
adumbration of a great truth. Bearing testimony as
it does to the supernatural,
it has only to be purified
and expanded on the lines of this
"natural
to eventuate in the conception of true prophecy ;
divination
where
the religious man, delivering a heaven-sent message,