measured by "the triumph of mind over external agents." It is the conquest of nature by man. In thought, it is the gradual weaning of the mind from a superstitious veneration for, and deification of, nature; in action, it is the use of nature, the making matter and its forces obedient to our behests, and using them for our needs and convenience. It is important to settle that this is all that Mr. Buckle means by civilisation; for on this definition depends the whole logical value and consistency of his book. Among many passages that might be selected, the following, from p. 205, where he announces the plan of his future volumes, includes all that we want to show: "In a great and comprehensive view, the changes in every civilised people are in their aggregate dependent solely on three things: first, on the amount of knowledge possessed by their ablest men; secondly, on the direction which that knowledge takes, that is to say, the sort of subjects to which it refers; thirdly, and above all, on the extent to which the knowledge is diffused, and the freedom with which it pervades all classes of society." The word changes indicates that the fundamental idea in the writer's mind is that of progress. The knowledge which he requires for this progress must be either religious, moral, or scientific. He proves, with great care, that it is neither of the two former; it must, therefore, be the last. Not that he denies the power of religious and moral convictions; but he says that their action ceases with individuals, and leaves no permanent result on society. Vices and virtues, like plus and minus quantities in an equation, eliminate each other, and leave the residuum to be attributed to some other cause: they are equivalent opposing forces, neutralising each other; therefore contributing nothing to progress; therefore not to be considered in the history of civilisation, according to the terms of the definition. The following passage immediately succeeds that quoted above: "These are the three great movers of every civilised country; and although their operation is frequently disturbed by the vices or the virtues of powerful individuals, such moral feelings correct each other, and the average of long periods remains unaffected. Owing to causes of which we are ignorant, the moral qualities do, no doubt, constantly vary; so that in one man, or perhaps even in one generation, there will be an excess of good intentions, in another an excess of bad ones. But we have no reason to think that any permanent change has been effected in the proportion which those who naturally possess good intentions bear to those in whom bad ones seem to be inherent. In what may be called the innate and original Of morals of mankind, there is, so far as we are aware, no progress. the different passions with which we are born, some are more prevalent at one time, some at another; but experience teaches us that, as they are always antagonistic, they are held in balance by the force of their own opposition. The activity of one motive is corrected by the activity of another. For to every vice there is a corresponding virtue. Cruelty is counteracted by benevolence; sympathy is excited by suffering; the injustice of some provokes the charity of others; new evils are met by new remedies, and even the most enormous offences that have ever been known have left behind them no permanent impression. The desolation of countries and the slaughter of men are losses which never fail to be repaired, and at the distance of a few centuries every vestige of them is effaced. This is the ebb and flow of history, the perpetual flux to which by the laws of our nature we are subject. Above all this, there is a far higher movement; and as the tide rolls on, now advancing, now receding, there is, amid its endless fluctuations, one thing, and one alone, which endures for ever. The actions of bad men produce only temporary evil, the actions of good men only temporary good; and eventually the good and the evil together subside, are neutralised by subsequent generations, absorbed by the incessant movement of future ages. But the discoveries of great men never leave us; they are immortal, they contain those eternal truths which survive the shock of empires, outlive the struggles of rival creeds, and witness the decay of successive religions. All these have their different measures and their different standards; one set of opinions for one age, another set for another. They pass away like a dream; they are as the fabric of a vision, which leaves not a rack behind. discoveries of genius alone remain: it is to them we owe all that we now have, they are for all ages and all times; never young, and never old, they bear the seeds of their own life; they flow on in a perennial and undying stream; they are essentially cumulative, and, giving birth to the additions which they subsequently receive, they thus influence the most distant posterity, and after the lapse of centuries produce more effect than they were able to do even at the moment of their promulgation." The Let us not allow the emotions stirred up by Mr. Buckle's eloquence to blind us to the real meaning of his grand words. We must note that the "eternal truths" do not concern morality, or that "flux and reflux" of human action which neutralises itself, and forms no element of progress. They have still less to do with religion; for they "outlive the struggles of rival creeds, and witness the decay of successive religions;" but they are "the discoveries of genius "—not barren truths regarding intellect and will, and such-like metaphysical matters, which yield no fruit, but truths which teach man how to conquer and make use of nature, which tell him what he may do with water, and steam, and electricity, and wood, and coal, and iron, and gas, and skins, and horns. They are "essentially cumulative;" one man begins where the last ended, and adds improvement on improvement-not as. in morals, where all men begin afresh, and no real advance is made. Again, it is evident that individual happiness or misery forms no element in Mr. Buckle's computation; he eliminates both vice and virtue, not only because they balance one another, but because, after a century or two, no vestiges are left of the greatest crimes or most splendid acts of goodness. Mr. Buckle, therefore, does not contemplate the action, but the result; not the life or thinking of the man, but the work he has done, or the theory he has thought out. Where no trace remains of the work, nothing was done worth speaking of. Having thus made the individual soul of no account in his investigations on the history of human progress, it is clear that one only manner of looking at mankind remains; if they are not to be viewed as persons in detail, they must be considered as bodies in mass. Hence not 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 actions of individuals are greatly affected by their moral feelings and by their passions; but these being antagonistic 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 possessed. And of the way in which individual feeling and individual caprice are thus absorbed and neutralised, we find a clear illustration in the history of crime. For the amount of crime committed in a country is, year after year, reproduced with the most startling uniformity, not being in the least affected by those capricious and personal feelings to which human actions are too often referred. But if, instead of examining the history of crime year by year, we were to examine it month by month, we should find less regularity; and if we were to examine it hour by hour, we should find no regularity at all; neither would its regularity be seen, if, instead of the criminal records of a whole country, we only knew those of a single street, or of a single family. This is because the great social laws by which crime is governed, can only be perceived after observing great numbers or long periods; but in a small number, and a short period, the individual moral principle triumphs, and disturbs the operation of the larger and intellectual law. While, therefore, the moral feelings by which a man is urged to commit a crime, or to abstain from it, will produce an immense effect on the amount of his own crimes, they will produce no effect on the amount of crimes committed by the society to which he belongs; because, in the long-run, they are sure to be neutralised by opposite moral feelings, which cause in other men an opposite conduct. Just in the same way, we are all sensible that moral principles do affect nearly the whole of our actions; but we have incontrovertible proof that they produce not the least effect on mankind in the aggregate, or even on men in very large masses, provided that we take the precaution of studying social phenomena for a period sufficiently long, and on a scale sufficiently great, to enable the superior laws to come into uncontrolled operation." 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. This is all that Mr. Buckle's design includes, all that logically he has any right to pretend to discuss. Defining, as he does, civilisation to be that mass of ideas, knowledge, and production which remains over and above when you have abstracted all transitory actions, all the results of politics, war, or religion, of course his history of civilisation ought to be confined to the genesis of this product, and the rules on which he proceeds to such as are applicable only to such a history. For instance, as virtues, vices, and all transitory actions are excluded from his view, of course he has nothing to do with the question of the force on which they depend; hence he is quite right in eliminating free-will from his laws of civilisation. Man's knowledge depends not on his will, but on his intellect; now it is his will, not his intellect, that is free. man cannot refuse to see that which he does see, nor force himself to disbelieve that which is demonstratively proved. It is only when he has to decide whether he will open his eyes to see, or whether he will act on that which is proved to him, that he is free to do as he chooses. Again, it is only to men as persons that free-will belongs: look at them in masses, and they become machines; with their personality you abstract their freedom. Looking, therefore, at mankind as Mr. Buckle does, not as individual persons, but as masses of ducers, he could not allow free-will to come into his calculations. So again with Providence. Providence dealing with the world is that creative and preservative force which conducts the universe according to "a law which shall not be broken;" the expression of Providence is this law, wherein A pro no personality can be proved. But Providence dealing with persons is the action of a Personal God upon his personal creatures; warning them, teaching them, judging them. Eliminate personality from your science, and of course your science has nothing to do with the personal providence. Nothing can be clearer. But then, again, nothing can be clearer than this, that when you have cut off a part from a thing, the thing is no longer a whole. This very clear truth Mr. Buckle, with the most charming simplicity, not only forgets, but tries to make his readers forget also. Having arbitrarily settled the limits of his history; having, in so many words, recognised that things do exist outside of these limits, which, however, do not require his attention, as they do not influence the precise matter on hand; having confessed that the constant variation of moral qualities in men is "owing to causes of which we are ignorant;" that to individuals, or a small number of persons, his rules will not apply, because there "the individual moral principle triumphs, and disturbs the operation of the larger and intellectual law;" and that "we are all sensible that moral principles do affect nearly the whole of our actions,"he yet goes on to treat his science as exhaustive, as including every possible kind of human actions, and as furnishing the true key to the only real "history" of the human race. Let us see how Mr. Buckle manages to turn this wonderful intellectual somersault. We must suppose that the man who has written so remarkable a book had the whole plan of it in his mind. He knew that he was to write about men, not as indi- · viduals, but in masses. He knew that all his proofs were to be statistical, that is, winnowed from all personal detail, lumped together, averaged, and reduced to mathematical symbols. Yet for all this, he pretends to begin from persons. The fundamental question of his book is thus stated: "Are the actions of men, and therefore of societies, governed by fixed laws, or are they the result either of chance or supernatural interference ?"* He discusses these latter alternatives, not mathematically, or metaphysically, or logically, but by means of a fanciful theory, illustrated by an apologue. He imagines man to have been originally a wild and savage hunter, sometimes finding game, sometimes starving, and attributing his good or ill success only to chance; next the savage becomes agricultural, and seeing that seasons succeed regularly, and that the crop answers to the seed, the first notion of "uniform sequence" arises, and ripens into that of "law of nature" and * Page 8. |