explaining history without it. Polybius enters at length into the
whole question and explains its origin and the method of treating
it. Herodotus would have believed in Scipio's dream. Thucydides
would have ignored it entirely. Polybius explains it. He is the
culmination of the rational progression of Dialectic. 'Nothing,'
he says, 'shows a foolish mind more than the attempt to account for
any phenomena on the principle of chance or supernatural
intervention. History is a search for rational causes, and there
is nothing in the world - even those phenomena which seem to us the
most remote from law and improbable - which is not the logical and
inevitable result of certain rational antecedents.'

Some things, of course, are to be rejected A PRIORI without
entering into the subject: 'As regards such miracles,' he says,
(15) 'as that on a certain statue of Artemis rain or snow never
falls though the statue stands in the open air, or that those who
enter God's shrine in Arcadia lose their natural shadows, I cannot
really be expected to argue upon the subject. For these things are
not only utterly improbable but absolutely impossible.'

'For us to argue reasonably on an acknowledged absurdity is as vain
a task as trying to catch water in a sieve; it is really to admit
the possibility of the supernatural, which is the very point at
issue.'

What Polybius felt was that to admit the possibility of a miracle
is to annihilate the possibility of history: for just as
scientific and chemical experiments would be either impossible or
useless if exposed to the chance of continued interference on the
part of some foreign body, so the laws and principles which govern