Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
So Thomas Carlyle wrote in an essay, “Signs of the Times” in 1829. He counseled against vaticination (which is a word I had never previously come across which means “prophecy” or “prediction”) and says that:
Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them…
But man’s “large discourse of reason” will look “before and after”; and, impatient of the “ignorant present time,” will indulge in anticipation far more than profits him. Seldom can the unhappy be persuaded that the evil of the day is sufficient for it; and the ambitious will not be content with present splendour, but paints yet more glorious triumphs, on the cloud-curtain of the future.
The case, however, is still worse with nations. For here the prophets are not one, but many; and each incites and confirms the other; so that the fatidical fury spreads wider and wider, till at last even Saul must join in it. For there is still a real magic in the action and reaction of minds on one another. The casual deliration of a few becomes, by this mysterious reverberation, the frenzy of many; men lose the use, not only of their understandings, but of their bodily senses; while the most obdurate unbelieving hearts melt, like the rest, in the furnace where all are cast as victims and as fuel.
[Picture by DigiDragon licensed under Creative Commons.]