Couclusious drawn from reasoning and generalizations from data may produce convictions so strong that men would die for them. Under their influence they may risk their lives and fortunes in the pursuit of objects which cannot be attained, if at all, until after many years. These are not presentiments, for the sum of the reasonings and experiences of the man becomes the unconscious test which he applies to everything submitted to his judgment.
But if there be genuine presentiments which foretell future events, they must have an external source, human or extrahuman. That God could produce such impressions none who admit his existence can doubt. Whether other beings, in or out of human bodies, could do so is an uuproven theory. Clairvoyance and telepathy do not apply to the subject of presentiments in the sense now under consideration. The clairvoyant theory of perception is the power to read the past, discern the present, and forecast the future; that of telepathy, a transfer of ideas and feelings spontaneously or intentionally from a living person called the agent to another called the percipient.
Most persons holding that God could at any time create a presentiment will incline to the comfortable belief that he sometimes does so, and that this is one of the means whereby he cares for those who put their trust in him. But the fact that God can produce presentiments is not in itself an evidence, nor does it even rise to the dignity of a presumption, that he will produce them. He could preserve all his servants from destruction by sea or by land; he could impart to all his people a knowledge of future events; but he does not. The righteous often die in the pestilence and in calamities at sea; the wicked may escape, while those who pray sink.
While it would be presumptuous to affirm that no
