Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/334

322 This Mr. Buckle has attempted to do in various ways. In his first chapter he tries to prove that "the actions of men, and therefore of societies, are governed by fixed laws"; how weakly, we have shown above. We reproduce the thesis here to show that even Mr. Buckle allows that individuals are the primary elements of societies, and that the laws of society may be deduced from the laws that govern individuals. In other places, before quoted, Mr. Buckle asserts that the moral actions of men depend on particular laws, to him unknown, which laws are in their operation antagonistic to the great laws that govern society. And elsewhere he says that the laws of society are the rule for the individual, the actions of men are regular because "they are governed by the state of the society in which they occur."

Here, then, we see that there is a fundamental impossibility, because a self-contradiction, in Mr. Buckle's method and system, when applied to anything beyond the limits to which he himself is conscious it should be confined. If he would really eliminate all the moral actions of men, all the "flux and reflux" of society, all war and politics, from his speculations, and apply his theory to the "discoveries of genius" and to the progressive knowledge and subjugation of nature alone, he would escape all contradiction. But if he insists on applying his method to history, in the usual acceptation of the word, we are forced to tell him that his pretensions are untenable. These pretensions may perhaps be traced to that characteristic which Socrates holds up to such ridicule in his speech in the Apologia. Every artisan, he says, because he is expert in his own art, thinks he knows every other art. The tendency of the intellect is to complete its own circle ; whatever gaps a man finds in his knowledge are filled up by an unwarrantable stretching of the next subject which he knows. The whole system of positive philosophy is the work of under-educated, or half-educated men, adepts in physical science, but ignorant of the principles of any other, who insist that all science must have the same method as theirs, and that metaphysical realities must be