Herein lies the theory of palmistry.  Does not Society imitate God?  At the sight of a soldier we can predict that he will fight; of a lawyer, that he will talk; of a shoemaker, that he shall make shoes or boots; of a worker of the soil, that he shall dig the ground and dung it; and is it a more wonderful thing that such an one with the “seer’s” gift should foretell the events of a man’s life from his hand?

To take a striking example.  Genius is so visible in a man that a great artist cannot walk about the streets of Paris but the most ignorant people are conscious of his passing.  He is a sun, as it were, in the mental world, shedding light that colors everything in its path.  And who does not know an idiot at once by an impression the exact opposite of the sensation of the presence of genius?  Most observers of human nature in general, and Parisian nature in particular, can guess the profession or calling of the man in the street.

The mysteries of the witches’ Sabbath, so wonderfully painted in the sixteenth century, are no mysteries for us.  The Egyptian ancestors of that mysterious people of Indian origin, the gypsies of the present day, simply used to drug their clients with hashish, a practice that fully accounts for broomstick rides and flights up the chimney, the real-seeming visions, so to speak, of old crones transformed into young damsels, the frantic dances, the exquisite music, and all the fantastic tales of devil-worship.

So many proven facts have been first discovered by occult science, that some day we shall have professors of occult science, as we already have professors of chemistry and astronomy.  It is even singular that here in Paris, where we are founding chairs of Mantchu and Slave and literatures so little professable (to coin a word) as the literatures of the North (which, so far from providing lessons, stand very badly in need of them); when the curriculum is full of the everlasting lectures on Shakespeare and the sixteenth century,—­it is strange that some one has not restored the teaching of the occult philosophies, once the glory of the University of Paris, under the title of anthropology.  Germany, so childlike and so great, has outstripped France in this particular; in Germany they have professors of a science of far more use than a knowledge of the heterogeneous philosophies, which all come to the same thing at bottom.

Once admit that certain beings have the power of discerning the future in its germ-form of the Cause, as the great inventor sees a glimpse of the industry latent in his invention, or a science in something that happens every day unnoticed by ordinary eyes—­once allow this, and there is nothing to cause an outcry in such phenomena, no violent exception to nature’s laws, but the operation of a recognized faculty; possibly a kind of mental somnambulism, as it were.  If, therefore, the hypothesis upon which the various ways of divining the future are based seem absurd, the facts remain.  Remark that it is not really more wonderful that the seer should foretell the chief events of the future than that he should read the past.  Past and future, on the sceptic’s system, equally lie beyond the limits of knowledge.  If the past has left traces behind it, it is not improbable that future events have, as it were, their roots in the present.