the importance formerly attached to them, is part of the history of the French mind; and they are therefore to be estimated, not according to their intrinsic dignity, but according to the information they supply respecting a state of things which has now passed away. Events of this sort, though neglected by ordinary historians, are among the staff and staple of history. Not only do they assist in bringing before our minds the age to which they refer, but in a philosophic point of view they are highly important.'-p. 616. In these and a multitude of other instances it becomes manifest that the scheme of dispensing with human actions in the history of human beings is one which cannot be successfully put into practice even by its most ardent admirer, and we doubt not that Mr. Buckle will collect a great many facts for his future volumes, which, according to the plan announced in his Introduction, it would be his duty to pass by as utterly worthless. The monstrous defect, however, in the system of historical philosophy which it is the object of this volume to develope, is that man is considered solely in his relations to time and space. Beyond them all is dark, and it is only as an inhabitant of this earth that man's interests are considered. His pilgrimage is described as to some distant shrine of possible perfection; but the end of the journey is always upon earth, and all the intervening obstacles are to be overcome by man's own unassisted intellectual exertions. His course is discussed; but it is as a race of mental powers only, and one in which no prize is to be given to moral excellence, and in which no encouragement is held out to the training of the will or affections. He is to be a mere machine-a living and walking laboratory of certain vitalizing chemical powers-and informed by a mind incapable of exercising a free choice in the determination of his own actions. To what extent of progress the human animal may expect to attain while he continues to assimilate oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and to exhale superfluous carbon, is not precisely stated; but beyond the continuance of his mortal envelope, and after the time when that shall be resolved into its constituent gases, his existence is not contemplated. Hope, faith, and charity are ignored, and all the natural instincts of a living religion are neglected, which are truly as essential to the completeness of man's nature to make him what he actually is, as are his reason or his bodily organs. Not only are his own powers of choosing between good and evil denied, but the efficacy of prayer is derided. Praying for rain is called (p. 346) the impious contrivance of calling in the aid of the Deity to supply those deficiencies in science which are the result of our own sloth, and we are not ashamed ashamed in our public churches to prostitute the rites of religion by using them as a cloak to conceal an ignorance we ought frankly to confess.' And elsewhere (p. 531) the rainbow is called 'that singular phenomenon with which, in the eyes of the vulgar, some theological superstitions are still connected.' Now Mr. Buckle believes that all human affairs depend in an inflexible necessity on antecedents, and that they admit of tabulation, after sufficient length of observation, in the same way that the height of the thermometer, and barometer, and the fall of rain, can be noted and preserved for reference, and be employed in the prediction of future weather. There can be no such things as contingent events in his system; therefore, in casting ridicule upon praying for rain, he in effect declares all prayer to be useless and impious. Some more of Mr. Buckle's notions on the subject of religion appear in a passage in which he gives an approving account of the system of Descartes: 'Such is the dignity and supremacy of the human intellect, that even this, the highest of all matters, flows from it, as from its sole source. Hence, our religion should not be acquired by the teaching of others, but should be worked out by ourselves; it is not to be borrowed from antiquity, but it is to be discovered by each man's mind; it is not traditional, but personal. It is because this great truth has been neglected that impiety has arisen. If each man were to content himself with that idea of God which is suggested by his own mind, he would attain to a true knowledge of the Divine nature.'-p. 540. Under these conditions there could be no revealed religion, no historical religion, no teaching of religion, no profession of religion, no community of religion, no scriptures, and no church. Nothing is left but a bare abstraction, which affords no foundation for any religious system of the least practical value, either to regulate private morals or society at large. Each individual worker-out of the creature of his own thoughts would carry about with him the awful, useless, and incommunicable secret in his own bosom-hiding it, as the multitude in Vathek's Hall of Eblis did their own hearts. Such opinions as these, however, on religion, like those of the Quakers on the unlawfulness of war, can only practically be held by a few individuals, surrounded by a community who happily do not agree with them. Both owe to this circumstance the means of maintaining them, as well as their escape from the general evil and inconvenience to which the adoption of their own views must infallibly lead. In justice, however, to Mr. Buckle, it must be remarked that although he praises Voltaire as 'the greatest Frenchman of the eighteenth century'-and as probably the greatest historian Europe Europe has yet produced '-yet he does not admire his successors the Encyclopédistes. When he comes to describe that phase of the advance of scepticism in France, which carried its professors beyond the stages of Deism and Infidelity into that of absolute Atheism, he deplores the result as degrading, sad, and painful. Voltaire is his god Terminus-Voltaire, the writer of the infamous Pucelle-Voltaire, who said, 'I am tired of hearing it repeated that twelve men could found Christianity; I will show the world that one man can destroy it.' Up to him the principle of the unassisted human intellect opening the way to knowledge and improvement, independently of morals, religion, and literature, is represented as triumphant; but after him it must be supposed to break down, and Condorcet, D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, Lalande, La Place, and Mirabeau-men certainly not deficient in mental powers-are enumerated as among the higher intellects which were unable to escape the atheistical contagion of the period-a contagion for which the writings of Voltaire himself, with all their unbelief and impiety, and licentiousness, are chiefly responsible, and to which they seem to have been, in the language of Mr. Buckle's philosophy, the necessary antecedents. These writers, therefore, can have had no volition of their own in the matter. There must have been a knot of brilliant Atheists at the time in Paris to fulfil the inevitable sequence of history. Neither religion, government, literature, nor their own will, could have prevented them from being what they were; and the owners of names, some of which are so deservedly eminent in other respects, whatever condemnation they might expect elsewhere, ought hardly in this volume to have been singled out for reprobation. As we believe that very little of Mr. Buckle's philosophy is true, so we are certain that none of it is new. It was a leading feature in Spinosa's system that the mind has no free will, but is always determined by a cause, which in its turn was determined by a preceding cause, and so on for ever. He also held that the hypothesis of final causes was destroyed by the belief that all things happen by an eternal necessity. The results to which Spinosa was led by his rigid reasoning from these opinions make him rather an unsafe guide even for a disciple whose remarkable deficiency in logical power may perhaps have saved him from the worst consequences of adopting the tenets of such a teacher. Nor is it a new proposal to write the history of mankind upon principles derived from the facts to be found in registration tables and from the records of meteorological observation. The notion appears to have been entertained by Kant, and has for many years been been accessible to English readers, in consequence of its mention by Southey in his Colloquies on Society, published in 1829. A general view of Kant's argument for an universal history, to be written on a cosmo-political plan, is there given to the effect that, as deaths, births, and marriages, and the oscillations of the weather, irregular as they seem to be in themselves, are nevertheless reducible upon the great scale to certain rules, so there may be discovered, in the course of human history, a steady and continuous, though slow development, of certain great predispositions in human nature. The same idea is to be found in the 'Vestiges of Creation,' a book which made some noise a few years ago. Attention was there called to the power of predicting the weather; to the uniformity of criminal returns, and of the number of letters posted without addresses; and the same rash and hasty conclusion was drawn, that the statistical regularity of these circumstances fully established them to be under the guidance of an invariable law, proved that man in the mass was a mathematical problem, and that mental action should pass into the category of natural things. But Mr. Buckle's system derives its chief points from the 'Positive Philosophy' of Auguste Comte, which, like his, rejects all consideration of final causes, and treats all political phenomena as connected with each other in a necessary sequence under invariable natural laws, instead of being the result of the exercise of any volition whatever, either human or divine. He considers each phase of human society an invariable result of the state immediately preceding it, and the remarkable men, whose names are landmarks of history, and to whom the improvement of society has been generally ascribed, are allowed to be nothing but the special organs of a predetermined movement, which would have been carried on by other means, if their authors had not existed. Comte's system has also furnished the argument that physical laws are powerful in the earlier stages of civilization, but that they operate more feebly as the growing development of the human race introduces a state of existence when man's knowledge of nature enables him to modify them to serve his own purposes. Mr. Buckle, however, departs from his master in choosing to neglect all but mental influences, and in the inordinate value he sets upon the use of statistics, which are to him the end and consummation of all knowledge. He has attempted to establish an Utopian reign of mind, and no one who reads the book can fail to be astonished at the presumption of that narrow vision, which, to promote a particular theory, attempts to generalize upon the slenderest and most imperfect data. data. No regard seems to have been paid to some of the vastest incidents, which, however they may be interpreted, unquestionably demand the notice of the philosophic historian. Everything is treated as chaos until towards the end of the Middle Ages. With an enormous contempt for and violent dislike to everything preceding the most modern times, all the older services rendered to civilization are forgotten. The influence of such events as the conquests of Alexander, and that of the territorial acquisitions of Imperial Rome, are equally neglected. No place is allowed for the effect of the consolidation of so large a portion of the earth as was governed under the Roman Empire, nor to its functions in supplying an enduring basis for the modern jurisprudence of Europe. The institutions of Catholicism in the Middle Period are denounced as simply superstitious and benighted-those of Feudalism and Chivalry are despised as merely barbarous and unworthy. The associations connected with the names of Charlemagne, Hildebrand, and Frederick II., are not permitted to convey any signification, and the influences of the Greek Church and of Islamism are altogether passed over. With enormous omissions upon numerous points, which it would be supposed must have occurred to every educated man, there is a vast parade of miscellaneous reading; and so ostentatiously does Mr. Buckle drag in a reference upon every occasion, that when he wishes to fasten an accusation of excessive credulity on the agricultural mind, he quotes the phrase 'credulous farmers' from Sir Roderick Murchison, and refers to the page in his 'Siluria' in which the expression occurs.* Like Comte, Mr. Buckle dislikes the exact conclusions of mathematics, although they are the basis of his system. Indeed, the very slow advance of mathematics, and the vast extent of insoluble problems which still remain untouched and without present hope of conquest, is a stumbling-block in the way of any theory which claims supereminence in all things for the abstract intellect of man. No reasons of superstitious repression or state interference can be assigned to account for the very gradual progress made in mathematics by the Greeks and Indians, or for the existing difficulties in carrying them further onwards. Mathematical science remained in a condition of arrested development longer than either literature or the arts; it was the earliest to decline and the last to awaken from the comparative torpor of * The entire sentence of Sir R. Murchison in which the words occur is as follows: It is in these black and hardened schists of contact that films of anthracite have been found which have led credulous farmers to search for coal.'—Siluria, p. 61. the |