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Rh individual acts, but their statistics engage his attention. It is not personal doings, but sums total, that he seeks. But here we will let him speak for himself: —

The doings of individual men, of families, of the inhabitants of single streets, are nothing to Mr. Buckle ; they must be divested of all personality, of all reminiscences of personality, before they are of use to him. That is to say, in his view of civilisation, he looks at men not as persons, but as machines ; and the result he contemplates is not the action of these machines, but their productions.