Machiavelli (Prophecies and Forecasts V)
Human mind is said to be used only minimally and if it were in its totality, it would reveal unexpected abilities. One of these is the ability of foretelling the future. In this sense it is necessary to make a clear distinction between the ability of recognizing presages and “the divine gift” of prophecy.
In the first case it’s a quite human ability, Machiavelli’s intelligence, of sensing the meaning of the signs always preceding great events.
Even if they are considered absolutely scientific and linked to definite and measurable parameters, weather forecast and the ones of seismographs, concerning earthquakes, aren’t long-term and not always reliable.
Many people, as we have seen, assert no mathematic or computerized model can tell us what surprises climate changes may reserve us.
Human mind and particularly the one of enlightened fellows who, as Machiavelli would say, have pity on their fellow men, could understand the meaning of premonitory signs well in advance. In a strictly scientific scope a phenomenon like a natural catastrophe starts very precociously in time and before it becomes dramatically real, it might take many years; the ” intelligence” of special persons could catch the phenomenon in its most initial stage and not being urged by economic interests, but wishing to spare pains and losses, it could anticipate the future evolution.
Unfortunately, surprises on this earth are mostly unpleasant and it never happened there were epidemics of recoveries from a particular disease ( for example plague epidemics) or food got on tables spontaneously, even with knives and forks incorporated like in some of Bosch’s pictures.
Therefore some men’s foresight turns them into misfortune prophets and as such they are mostly unheard.
In spite of this some of them had and perhaps still have the ability of recognizing “presages”, that is the primitive aspects of a phenomenon that, after days, months, years from its first revealing as a presage, will show itself in all its completeness often with dreadful effects (Prophecies and Forecasts).
Nicolò Machiavelli was, as we have seen, one of the first to acknowledge the existence of premonitory signs of every great event and some men’s ability of recognizing them. As a modern man, forerunner of the scientific method, he says he can’t explain how a prediction of future events may be possible, yet just as a scientist he shows to be open to any hypothesis even to the ones those days’ science couldn’t explain. All this is possible for Machiavelli since he is a Renaissance man, a historical period where man and his mind are in the centre of every scientific method. In the Renaissance man’s thought and his intuitions had weight as much as any scientific evidence.
Not being able to do experiments with what is real, in all its aspects, wasn’t considered a limit, but urged Machiavelli and his contemporaries to face any subject concerning man and so prophetic abilities of some of them as well.
Machiavelli, even if he can’t explain how, can’t deny men and events anticipating future things exist: for a scholar of the epoch the lack of an explicative theory doesn’t entitle to deny, as anti-scientific, the evidence of the facts.
It’s undeniable for anyone that intuitions by philosophers and scientists which couldn’t be demonstrated with any scientific method of the time when they had been conceived, revealed to be true after thousands of years: we must think only of those “animalia minuta”or “bestiolae” with which Marco Terenzio Varrone Reatino had anticipated the discovery of bacteria(1) of nearly two thousand years.
At this point there is nothing to do but discover whether those intelligences Machiavelli tells about are something human or divine. The ” Prince ” author doesn’t help us in this sense because, even if he gave a “natural” explanation to the phenomenon, yet he always tells about “celestial signs” and “supernatural things”.
(1)animalia quaedam minuta, quae non possunt oculis consequi, et per aera intus in corpus per os ac per nares perveniunt, atque efficiunt difficiles morbos: tiny animals, that can’t be seen with the naked eye, enter the body through the mouth and the nostrils and cause serious diseases. Marco Terenzio Varrone Reatino Rerum rusticarum (1, 12, 2) 37
Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci
To be continued in:
6) Prophecies and Forecasts 6: Nostradamus
9) Prophecies and Forecasts: Pio XII
See also:
1) Prophecies and Forecasts First Part
4) CO 2 and Temperature Increase
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