Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/470

422 the external world are sublime and terrible, the under standing being emboldened and the imagination curbed when they are small and feeble ; 4. That the great division between European and non-European civilization turns on the fact that in Europe man is stronger than nature, and that elsewhere nature is stronger than man, the consequence of which is that in Europe alone has man subdued nature to his service; 5. That the advance of European civiliza tion is characterized by a continually diminishing influence of physical laws, and a continually increasing influence of mental laws ; 6. That the mental laws which regulate the progress of society cannot be discovered by the metaphysical method, that is, by the introspective study of the indi vidual mind, but only by such a comprehensive survey of facts as will enable us to eliminate disturbances, that is, by the method of averages ; 7. That human progress has been due, not to moral agencies, which are stationary, and which balance one another in such a manner that their influence is unfelt over any long period, but to intellectual activity, which has been constantly varying and advanc ing : &quot; The actions of individuals are greatly affected by their moral feelings and passions ; but these being antagon istic, to the passions and feelings of other individuals, are balanced by them, so that their effect is, in the great average of human affairs, nowhere to be seen, and the total actions of mankind, considered as a whole, are left to be regulated by the total knowledge of which mankind is pos sessed ; &quot; 8. That individual efforts are insignificant in the great mass of human affairs, and that great men, although they exist, and must &quot; at present &quot; be looked upon as dis turbing forces, are merely the creatures of the age to which they belong; 9. That religion, literature, and government are, at the best, the products and not the causes of civiliza tion ; 10. That the progress of civilization varies directly as &quot; scepticism,&quot; the disposition to doubt and to investigate, and inversely &quot; as credulity&quot; or &quot; the protective spirit,&quot; a disposition to maintain, without examination, established beliefs and practices. These are all the general truths which are contained in Buckle s theory of history. And obviously, however ably advocated, however solidly established they might be, they must fall short of constituting a science of history, unless that science be one of unparalleled simplicity and vagueness. But probably none of them are completely made out ; probably none of them are quite true ; while several of them seem to be nearly altogether false. Buckle either could not define, or cared not to definn, the general conceptions with which he worked, such as those denoted by the terms &quot; civilization,&quot; &quot; history,&quot; &quot; science,&quot; &quot; law,&quot; &quot; scepticism,&quot; and &quot; protective spirit ; &quot; the consequence is that his arguments are often fallacies. Whenever he treats of matters metaphysical, psychological, or theo logical, he shows plainly that his mind had been little exercised on such subjects. He assumes, without the slightest evidence, that law and free will, orderly historical development and providential government, the metaphysical method and the method of averages, obeying nature and ruling nature, are so many alternatives of which the terms contradict and exclude each other; it does not seem to have occurred to him that freedom and law, historical order and providential government, internal and external obser vation, might co-exist, or that Bacon might have had reason in writing &quot; natura non nisi parendo vincitur.&quot; The looseness of his statements and the rashness of his inferences regarding statistical averages make him, as a great authority has remarked, the enfant terrible of moral statisticians. He denies the influence of race without adequate consi deration, and so exaggerates the power of climate, soil, food, and the aspects of nature, as at times to be fairly chargeable with physical fatalism. He neglects to raise the essential question, Must not certain moral conditions be realized before the accumulation and distribution of wealth are possible 1 ? In attempting to prove the unpro- gressiveness of moral knowledge he gives us such asser tions as these : &quot; That the system of morals propounded in the New Testament contained no maxim which had not been previously enunciated, and that some of the most beautiful passages in the Apostolic writings are quotations from Pagan authors is well known to every scholar.&quot; &quot;Systematic writers on morals reached their zenith in the 13th century, fell off rapidly after that period, were, as Coleridge well says, opposed by the genius of Protestantism, and by the end of the 17th century became extinct in the most civilized countries,&quot; although the facts are, that the passages in the Apostolic writings known to be quota tions from Pagan authors are just three in number, two of which have no claims to beauty, and that there have been more systematic writers on morals in the 19th century than there were writers of all kinds during the loth. The reasoning employed to show that intellectual forces have been far more potent than moral forces in producing progress has many flaws, which have been often pointed out. What Buckle himself says of the achievements of Richelieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire, and others, and of the effects of the protective spirit in France and England, and of religious intolerance in Spain and Scotland, is irrecon cilable with his doctrines that great men, government, and religion have had almost no influence on civilization. His paradox about scepticism and credulity is partly a truism inaccurately expressed and partly its exaggeration. The larger part of Buckle s first volume, and the whole of the second, are composed of surveys of positive his tory, undertaken to prove the last of the general theses already mentioned. The rest of these theses are ignored, and some of them are even by implication contradicted, when he engages in actual historical work. Perhaps the historical work performed by him is none the worse on that account. The chief aim of the historical portion of the first volume is to trace the working of the protective spirit in its political form, and to show its civil tendencies. France, the most civilized country in which that spirit is very powerful, is chosen as the field of illustration, and the history of the intellect and policy of France is laid before us in outline, and compared and contrasted with that of England, the development of which is held to have been comparatively spontaneous and normal. The first chapter of the second volume gives a general view of the history of the Spanish mind from the 5th to the middle of the 19th century, designed to show why the protective spirit has prevailed in Spain in a religious form, and how it has isolated the Spanish nation from the rest of the world, weakened and degraded it, and hitherto frustrated all efforts at improvement. The other four chapters are designed to explain what Mr Buckle supposes to be the largest and most important fact in the history of Scotland, the combination in its people of liberality in politics with illiberality in religion. In order to accomplish the explanation it is found necessary to argue that the Scottish Reformation was the work of the nobles, animated by hostility to the Roman Catholic priesthood ; that the Pro testant clergy, owing to being despised by the governing class, united themselves with the people, advocated demo cratic principles, and, favoured by the course, of events, acquired an immense authority, the result of which was the general prevalence of extreme religious bigotry ; that the Scotch philosophy of the 18th century, although a reaction against the theological spirit of the 17th, retained the theological method ; and that, owing to its deductive character, that philosophy has been inaccessible to the average intellect of the nation, and powerless to free it 