Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

REASONING AND DEDUCTIVE EVIDENCE. 475
same prejudice is observable on a scale still greater, many of
them having supposed, that at the end of the annus magnus, or
Platonic year, a repetition would commence of all the transactions that have occurred on the theatre of the world. According to this doctrine, the predictions in Virgil's Pollio will,
sooner or later, be literally accomplished:" Alter erit turn Typhis, et altera qum vehat Argo
Delectos Heroas; erunt etiam altera bella;
Atque iterum ad Trojam magnus mittetur Achilles."*
[" And other Argos bear the chosen powers;
New wars the bleeding nations shall destroy,
And great Achilles find a second Troy."]
The astronomical cycles which the Greeks borrowed from the
Egyptians and Chaldeans, when combined with that natural
bias of the mind which I have just remarked, account sufficiently for this extension to the moral world, of ideas suggested
by the order of physical phenomena.
Use made by the fatalists of this conjecture. - Nor is this
hypothesis of a moral cycle, extravagant as it unquestionably
is, without its partizans among modern theorists. The train of
thought, indeed, by which they have been led to adopt it, is
essentially different; but it probably received no small degree
of countenance in their opinion, from the same bias which influenced the speculations of the ancients. It has been demonstrated by one of the most profound mathematicians of the
* "Turn efficitur," says Cicero, speaking of this period, "cum solis et
lunx, et quinque errantium ad eandem inter se, comparationem confectis
omnium spatiis, est facta conversio. Qua3 qu'am longa sit, magna quustio est; esse vero certainm et definitam necesse est." [It is then effected,
when the revolutions of the sun and moon and five planets being completed, they have come round to the same relative place with each other
as before. How long this period may be, is a great question; but it must
necessarily be a fixed and definite period.] -De Nat. Deorum, lib. ii. 74.
aHoc intervallo," Clavius observes, " quidam volunt, omnia qumcunque
in mundo sunt, eodem ordine esse reditura, quo nunc cernuntur." [After
this interval, some maintain, all things in the world will come round into
the same order in which they are now.] - Clav. Coinmnentar. in SphErami.