All these words deal with a shrewd, prophetic or mystical ability to anticipate, predict or see into the future. Foreknowledge can refer to a supernatural faculty: Augustine’s treatment of God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will; a medium who claimed to have foreknowledge of the future. Prescience , the most formal of these words, can also point to such a faculty, although it is less often attributed to people than to the Deity: God’s prescience is only one aspect of his general omniscience. Both words, however, can apply without any suggestion of the mystical or supernatural. In this case, foreknowledge would refer to having information concerning something that has not yet occurred: attempts to gain the same foreknowledge of weather conditions that we now have of lunar and solar eclipses; She denied that she had any foreknowledge of the plot in which he was involved. Prescience indicates not the simple ability to anticipate but an acute and intelligent ability to see what lies in store in the future: their prescience concerning the problems that would await them in their new country; his prescience in seeing the dangers of over-population.

Foresight is an informal alternative for the last meaning of prescience . But, more simply, it can also indicate an ability to think ahead, prepare for eventualities, and take prudent precautions against any undesirable possibility: She had the foresight to lock all the windows, as well as the doors, before leaving on her holiday; the foresight to plan for the inevitable obsolescence of the motor-car as a practical means of transportation. Farsightedness can refer both to an intelligent envisioning of the future, like prescience , or a practical tendency to plan ahead, like foresight . It adds to either situation, however, the specific ability to extend one’s thinking and awareness to the distant rather than the near future: the farsightedness of those who framed the Constitution in allowing for the changing circumstances and needs of future generation. Forethought is close to foresight in meaning; but where foresight might be most aptly applied to envisioning circumstances that are independent of oneself, forethought suggests the careful planning out of something more completely within one’s own control: He could have avoided the accident by using forethought ; writers who have the forethought to plan the general outlines of their work well in advance of the actual writing.