[13]
"But I observed, Quintus, that you prudently
withdrew divination from conjectures based upon
skill and experience in public affairs, from those
drawn from the use of the senses and from those
made by persons in their own callings.1 I observed,
also, that you defined divination to be 'the foreknowledge and foretelling of things which happen
by chance.'2 In the first place, that is a contradiction of what you have admitted. For the foreknowledge possessed by a physician, a pilot, and a
general is of 'things which happen by chance.'
Then can any soothsayer, augur, prophet, or dreamer
conjecture better than a physician, a pilot, or a
general that an invalid will come safely out of his
sickness, or that a ship will escape from danger, or
that an army will avoid an ambuscade?
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
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